"so I'm the pill that's hard to swallow / might make a mess / but I'll do my very best I guess / I'll draw a map you'll never follow / throw you off the path / 'till I meat my match..."
The colliding iconic soul, blues, western noir classicalism of "Pleasure In the Pain", by the provocative balladic duo of Caitlin & Brent, provides buckets of glamour, double entendres, sultry flirtations and quick draws. The whole affair is QT fun and as gorgeous as a 007 set piece from yesteryear. The rich sonics, the exquisitely artful war of romantic vocal interplay between composer / songwriter Caitlin Sherman and Brent Amaker, the baritone frontman for the country & western indie rock group Brent Amaker and the Rodeo, is joyfully dreamy. Key to the magic, besides Sherman and Amaker's emotional / artful chemistry, is the wonderful production flourishes and cross generational genre blending (and bending) that feels (production-wise) like an amalgam of Spaghetti Western's Ennio Morricone, Surf splashed dead man's curved Brian Wilson / Artie Kornfeld, Amy Winehouse's Mark Ronson and Motown's legendary Holland-Dozier-Holland.
Sherman and Amaker's connections, entanglements are just not artistic.
LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):
[As their real-life relationship bloomed, the two musicians funneled their infatuation and romantic angst into songs that chronicled their feelings for each other and explored a retro style inspired by 1960s French pop. Throughout Caitlin and Brent, love is mingled with a sense of doom, but on stunning tracks like “Mirage” and the new single & video for "Pleasure In the Pain" the two artists plunge into the unknown and craft an elegant, ever-shifting blend of styles.]
The Chicken Wheel will take you to the AP Go Fund Me- and any amount is so appreciated!
https://www.instagram.com/caitlinandbrent/
https://www.facebook.com/brentamaker
https://www.facebook.com/caitlinshermanmusic
Two-thousand-and-twenty was supposed to be Caitlin Sherman’s year. The preternaturally talented composer and songwriter had spent years working towards her debut solo album, a dark, haunted meditation on lost love called Death To The Damsel. A genre cocktail showcasing Sherman’s varied talents, the album finally arrived at the dawn of the decade: February 14, 2020.
Sherman planned to spend the rest of the year on tour. She’d been working seven days a week, saving up money. “I put all of my belongings in storage, gave up my apartment, re-homed my dog,” Sherman recalls. “I was like, I’m free all of 2020!”
And then—well, you can guess what happened next. In March, Sherman was en route to perform at South by Southwest. “The whole world shut down while I was on my way there,” says the musician, whose tale of woe was later chronicled by NPR. “It was pretty gnarly.”
For months, Sherman was adrift—unable to focus on her own music because it felt too depressing, uncertain if music even mattered anymore. Her dream had collapsed. Amid this psychic upheaval, she found solace in a budding musical and romantic connection with an acquaintance in the Seattle music scene: Brent Amaker, baritone-voiced frontman for the devilishly fun country-western group Brent Amaker and the Rodeo. In time, this unlikely collaboration yielded Caitlin and Brent, a lushly alluring album that roils with the tumult and joy of finding new love in a time of turmoil. As rooted in the musical moods of 1965 as it is 2025, the record’s pleasures include not just velvety arrangements and swooning strings but also the easy chemistry between Sherman’s breathy, romantic croon and Amaker’s weathered drawl.
Such chemistry couldn’t be planned any more than the love affair that inspired these songs and vibrates through their rhythms. “It was a pandemic hook-up,” Amaker jokes, though the relationship survived and bloomed long after the stay-at-home order had expired. Both had been previously married (twice for Amaker) and both were allergic to commitment. Sherman had previously had a band with her ex-husband, then a short-lived project with a boyfriend. But Amaker had a rule: no collaborating with anyone he was dating. So they kept things casual.
After they put the relationship on pause, “she asked me if I would consider producing two songs since we weren’t dating anymore,” Amaker recalls, “and that was the beginning of Caitlin and Brent.”
Amaker obliged, and the songs, “Silver Screen” and “Pleasure in the Pain,” turned out so good that he suggested she produce two of his own. She agreed. The relationship soon resumed—“it was a sneak attack,” Amaker laughs—and they funneled their infatuation and romantic angst into writing songs together. Songs which, invariably, chronicled their feelings for each other and veered away from Amaker’s country pedigree, into the realm of orchestral pop. On “Intoxicated,” for instance, the two sing in harmony about giving in to the dizzying rush of new love, while the suave duet “Silver Screen” finds Sherman interrogating twisted ideas about love that she received from Hollywood movies—“All I ever learned of love,” she sings, “was wrapped up in a tragedy”—while imagining a big-screen adaptation of their own romance.
“It touched on these movies that I grew up on and this whole idea of love that was actually so twisted,” Sherman explains. “I started to use that more as a metaphor for what was going on with us but also just questioning, what is this idea of love to people anyways?”
“The songs were coming from the heart as much or more than any I’ve ever written because it was real. It was real life,” Amaker says. They were, he adds, “love songs, songs of torment, songs of pain, and songs of happiness.”
From the beginning, the songs were intimately intertwined with the real-life relationship from which they arose. This imbued the material with a diaristic edge, but also a sense of danger: What if it all went wrong? Just before leaving for a whirlwind roadtrip with two female friends, Amaker told Sherman he loved her and wrote “Baby Goodnight.” A brooding ballad with a country-pop gleam, the song found Amaker wrestling with an inner conflict between his desire to be “a solitary man” and his feelings of falling in love.
Sherman, who was house-sitting for Amaker at the time, was caught off guard. “He drops this bombshell on me: ‘I love you! Here's this song about my feelings. Bye! I'll see you in two-and-a-half weeks!’ And then I wrote ‘Mirage’ while he was on that trip,” Sherman recalls. “I was left with an empty house, the world's falling down, and I’ve got this keyboard and a good amount of drugs.” She composed the latter tune on Amaker’s Casiotone keyboard, taking influence from the woozy time changes in Nancy & Lee’s “Some Velvet Morning”; lyrically, the song explores the feeling of being under someone else’s thumb.
Gradually, the songs kept coming. “We were just going to do two songs,” Sherman says. “But once we started, I started writing more, and then it was a four-song EP. And then it became an album.” A cover of Kavinsky’s 2010 electro earworm “Nightcall,” which Sherman had loved since its use in Drive, rounded out the seven originals. The duo retained its call-and-response hook but flipped the male-female parts and reimagined it with a ’60s baroque-pop treatment.
During that heady pandemic summer, they traveled to Portland and tracked the record at the home studio of Jeff Stuart Saltzman, a veteran producer weaned on the same vintage film scores that Sherman heard as sonic touchstones. While there, they rented tubular bells from a furloughed Portland Symphony Orchestra player, whose grand, churchbell-sounding instrument makes its presence known on the uptempo "Pleasure in the Pain” and in the cinematic expanse of “Mirage.” (Sherman did the honors: “It was pretty funny,” she says, “because here's this really expensive instrument that you have to hit really hard!”)
The pair also enlisted the services of veteran composer/orchestrator Andrew Joslyn, who provided string parts remotely, recording them in his own home studio. Joslyn (known for collaborations with Macklemore and Mark Lanegan) wrote the arrangement for “Silver Screen,” with its elaborate melodic flourishes and descending intro, while Sherman, who co-produced the album with Saltzman, arranged strings on all other songs. Each song has around 50 tracks of real strings. With the elegant, ever-shifting orchestral swells that weave through tunes like “Mirage” and “Victimless Crime,” it’s clear she did not hold back in indulging a talent for breathtaking arrangements. The latter, a winsome ballad inspired by John Barry’s scores for early James Bond films, counterbalances its lush orchestration with a Vincent Price-style monologue from Amaker.
Speaking of retro influences, they called the project Caitlin and Brent, a wink to Nancy & Lee, the dreamy 1968 pairing of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, and to the vintage sensibility they sought to capture. Both drew inspiration from 1960s French pop. And like all the quintessential LP-era duos—Sinatra and Jobim, Nancy & Lee, Simon & Garfunkel—Caitlin and Brent formed an odd couple, their backgrounds as different as oil and water. He idolized Devo and David Bowie; she could hold court on obscure John Barry scores. He was the country singer who fronted a band known for dressing in matching black cowboy outfits, a natural showman more inspired by art-rock icons than the typical country mainstays. “I always think of myself as a songwriter, a storyteller,” Amaker says.
Sherman, on the other hand, was the virtuosic composer and multi-instrumentalist who went to music school, later earned a master’s degree in film scoring, and can still write a killer song. “She’s the most competent, skilled musician and composer I’ve ever met,” Amaker raves. “I watch her walk around the room and compose a piece and she just paces back and forth. It’s incredible the stuff that comes out of her brain.”
And yet both inspired the other to push their songwriting in fresh directions. With Sherman, Amaker found that he could augment his own songs with arrangements that exceeded his musical abilities. “I would have an idea of something I wanted and I would just describe it to her or sing it to her. And then I would just watch this multi-piece orchestra come out of her head,” Amaker says. “It was just amazing.”
Sherman, too, felt challenged by Amaker’s creative perspective. For her, songwriting was always the main thing and performing was secondary. “Brent’s a very charismatic performer,” she says. “And I can think about things in a different artistic way than I was used to.”
Though the bulk of the album was recorded in 2020, Caitlin and Brent sat in the can for several years while Sherman pursued a master’s degree in film scoring at the Seattle Film Institute and Amaker toured and recorded two albums with the Rodeo. Before anything was released, “Mirage” found an unlikely audience when it was licensed for the opening credits of the 2024 Magnolia Pictures film Lousy Carter. It’s a fitting testament to the cinematic sprawl that runs through these songs.
And happily, despite the dark view of love embedded in these songs, the relationship that inspired them is still thriving today. “We're still writing our own rules,” Amaker says. “We do what we want. And we do it the way we want.”
Ultimately, the songs they compiled here are imbued with a strange mix of disillusionment and romantic aplomb—a guarded optimism, a willingness to pursue love again despite the risks. Indeed, throughout Caitlin and Brent, love is mingled with a sense of doom. On “Mirage,” Sherman sings of their relationship as a seductive vision that can’t be real: “The house you built on sand/A mirage in my mind.” Nevertheless, she ventures inside. Later, on the elegantly fatalistic “Come Out and Play,” Sherman describes love as a “dangerous game of the unknown” and imagines herself William Tell: “I place the apple on your head/Pull the trigger right before we place our bets.” Opulent strings accentuate the song’s dramatic turns.
Uncomfortable truths emerge in this music. All love stories are suffused with risk and danger. All lovers are on the run from their own pasts. Here is an album about choosing to plunge into the unknown anyway—about trying to find a kind of, well, pleasure in the pain.
[In 2020, after her debut solo album was sunk by the pandemic, composer/songwriter Caitlin Sherman found solace in a musical and romantic connection with Brent Amaker. This unlikely collaboration yielded Caitlin and Brent, a lushly alluring album that roils with the tumult and joy of finding new love in a time of turmoil. As rooted in the musical moods of 1965 as 2025, the record’s pleasures include velvety arrangements and swooning strings, as well as the chemistry between Sherman’s romantic croon and Amaker’s weathered drawl. You first heard this on their head-turning cover of Kavinsky's "Nightcall."]
[As their real-life relationship bloomed, the two musicians funneled their infatuation and romantic angst into songs that chronicled their feelings for each other and explored a retro style inspired by 1960s French pop. Throughout Caitlin and Brent, love is mingled with a sense of doom, but on stunning tracks like “Mirage” and the new single & video for "Pleasure In the Pain" the two artists plunge into the unknown and craft an elegant, ever-shifting blend of styles.]
I am enjoying the hell out of "Pleasure In the Pain" and Caitlin and Brent's self-titled debut album, aptly named 'Caitlin and Brent" drops in two days on December 12, 2025.
In the full LINER NOTES below the amazing video, you can read the mini-novel with the complete back story or their individual projects and dreams that eventually intertwined in sometimes clumsy and sometimes spirited ways. It is quite a read, funny, juicy and inspirational. (I promise).
-Robb Donker Curtius
The Chicken Wheel will take you to the AP Go Fund Me- and any amount is so appreciated!
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://www.instagram.com/caitlinandbrent/
https://www.facebook.com/brentamaker
https://www.facebook.com/caitlinshermanmusic
Two-thousand-and-twenty was supposed to be Caitlin Sherman’s year. The preternaturally talented composer and songwriter had spent years working towards her debut solo album, a dark, haunted meditation on lost love called Death To The Damsel. A genre cocktail showcasing Sherman’s varied talents, the album finally arrived at the dawn of the decade: February 14, 2020.
Sherman planned to spend the rest of the year on tour. She’d been working seven days a week, saving up money. “I put all of my belongings in storage, gave up my apartment, re-homed my dog,” Sherman recalls. “I was like, I’m free all of 2020!”
And then—well, you can guess what happened next. In March, Sherman was en route to perform at South by Southwest. “The whole world shut down while I was on my way there,” says the musician, whose tale of woe was later chronicled by NPR. “It was pretty gnarly.”
For months, Sherman was adrift—unable to focus on her own music because it felt too depressing, uncertain if music even mattered anymore. Her dream had collapsed. Amid this psychic upheaval, she found solace in a budding musical and romantic connection with an acquaintance in the Seattle music scene: Brent Amaker, baritone-voiced frontman for the devilishly fun country-western group Brent Amaker and the Rodeo. In time, this unlikely collaboration yielded Caitlin and Brent, a lushly alluring album that roils with the tumult and joy of finding new love in a time of turmoil. As rooted in the musical moods of 1965 as it is 2025, the record’s pleasures include not just velvety arrangements and swooning strings but also the easy chemistry between Sherman’s breathy, romantic croon and Amaker’s weathered drawl.
Such chemistry couldn’t be planned any more than the love affair that inspired these songs and vibrates through their rhythms. “It was a pandemic hook-up,” Amaker jokes, though the relationship survived and bloomed long after the stay-at-home order had expired. Both had been previously married (twice for Amaker) and both were allergic to commitment. Sherman had previously had a band with her ex-husband, then a short-lived project with a boyfriend. But Amaker had a rule: no collaborating with anyone he was dating. So they kept things casual.
After they put the relationship on pause, “she asked me if I would consider producing two songs since we weren’t dating anymore,” Amaker recalls, “and that was the beginning of Caitlin and Brent.”
Amaker obliged, and the songs, “Silver Screen” and “Pleasure in the Pain,” turned out so good that he suggested she produce two of his own. She agreed. The relationship soon resumed—“it was a sneak attack,” Amaker laughs—and they funneled their infatuation and romantic angst into writing songs together. Songs which, invariably, chronicled their feelings for each other and veered away from Amaker’s country pedigree, into the realm of orchestral pop. On “Intoxicated,” for instance, the two sing in harmony about giving in to the dizzying rush of new love, while the suave duet “Silver Screen” finds Sherman interrogating twisted ideas about love that she received from Hollywood movies—“All I ever learned of love,” she sings, “was wrapped up in a tragedy”—while imagining a big-screen adaptation of their own romance.
“It touched on these movies that I grew up on and this whole idea of love that was actually so twisted,” Sherman explains. “I started to use that more as a metaphor for what was going on with us but also just questioning, what is this idea of love to people anyways?”
“The songs were coming from the heart as much or more than any I’ve ever written because it was real. It was real life,” Amaker says. They were, he adds, “love songs, songs of torment, songs of pain, and songs of happiness.”
From the beginning, the songs were intimately intertwined with the real-life relationship from which they arose. This imbued the material with a diaristic edge, but also a sense of danger: What if it all went wrong? Just before leaving for a whirlwind roadtrip with two female friends, Amaker told Sherman he loved her and wrote “Baby Goodnight.” A brooding ballad with a country-pop gleam, the song found Amaker wrestling with an inner conflict between his desire to be “a solitary man” and his feelings of falling in love.
Sherman, who was house-sitting for Amaker at the time, was caught off guard. “He drops this bombshell on me: ‘I love you! Here's this song about my feelings. Bye! I'll see you in two-and-a-half weeks!’ And then I wrote ‘Mirage’ while he was on that trip,” Sherman recalls. “I was left with an empty house, the world's falling down, and I’ve got this keyboard and a good amount of drugs.” She composed the latter tune on Amaker’s Casiotone keyboard, taking influence from the woozy time changes in Nancy & Lee’s “Some Velvet Morning”; lyrically, the song explores the feeling of being under someone else’s thumb.
Gradually, the songs kept coming. “We were just going to do two songs,” Sherman says. “But once we started, I started writing more, and then it was a four-song EP. And then it became an album.” A cover of Kavinsky’s 2010 electro earworm “Nightcall,” which Sherman had loved since its use in Drive, rounded out the seven originals. The duo retained its call-and-response hook but flipped the male-female parts and reimagined it with a ’60s baroque-pop treatment.
During that heady pandemic summer, they traveled to Portland and tracked the record at the home studio of Jeff Stuart Saltzman, a veteran producer weaned on the same vintage film scores that Sherman heard as sonic touchstones. While there, they rented tubular bells from a furloughed Portland Symphony Orchestra player, whose grand, churchbell-sounding instrument makes its presence known on the uptempo "Pleasure in the Pain” and in the cinematic expanse of “Mirage.” (Sherman did the honors: “It was pretty funny,” she says, “because here's this really expensive instrument that you have to hit really hard!”)
The pair also enlisted the services of veteran composer/orchestrator Andrew Joslyn, who provided string parts remotely, recording them in his own home studio. Joslyn (known for collaborations with Macklemore and Mark Lanegan) wrote the arrangement for “Silver Screen,” with its elaborate melodic flourishes and descending intro, while Sherman, who co-produced the album with Saltzman, arranged strings on all other songs. Each song has around 50 tracks of real strings. With the elegant, ever-shifting orchestral swells that weave through tunes like “Mirage” and “Victimless Crime,” it’s clear she did not hold back in indulging a talent for breathtaking arrangements. The latter, a winsome ballad inspired by John Barry’s scores for early James Bond films, counterbalances its lush orchestration with a Vincent Price-style monologue from Amaker.
Speaking of retro influences, they called the project Caitlin and Brent, a wink to Nancy & Lee, the dreamy 1968 pairing of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, and to the vintage sensibility they sought to capture. Both drew inspiration from 1960s French pop. And like all the quintessential LP-era duos—Sinatra and Jobim, Nancy & Lee, Simon & Garfunkel—Caitlin and Brent formed an odd couple, their backgrounds as different as oil and water. He idolized Devo and David Bowie; she could hold court on obscure John Barry scores. He was the country singer who fronted a band known for dressing in matching black cowboy outfits, a natural showman more inspired by art-rock icons than the typical country mainstays. “I always think of myself as a songwriter, a storyteller,” Amaker says.
Sherman, on the other hand, was the virtuosic composer and multi-instrumentalist who went to music school, later earned a master’s degree in film scoring, and can still write a killer song. “She’s the most competent, skilled musician and composer I’ve ever met,” Amaker raves. “I watch her walk around the room and compose a piece and she just paces back and forth. It’s incredible the stuff that comes out of her brain.”
And yet both inspired the other to push their songwriting in fresh directions. With Sherman, Amaker found that he could augment his own songs with arrangements that exceeded his musical abilities. “I would have an idea of something I wanted and I would just describe it to her or sing it to her. And then I would just watch this multi-piece orchestra come out of her head,” Amaker says. “It was just amazing.”
Sherman, too, felt challenged by Amaker’s creative perspective. For her, songwriting was always the main thing and performing was secondary. “Brent’s a very charismatic performer,” she says. “And I can think about things in a different artistic way than I was used to.”
Though the bulk of the album was recorded in 2020, Caitlin and Brent sat in the can for several years while Sherman pursued a master’s degree in film scoring at the Seattle Film Institute and Amaker toured and recorded two albums with the Rodeo. Before anything was released, “Mirage” found an unlikely audience when it was licensed for the opening credits of the 2024 Magnolia Pictures film Lousy Carter. It’s a fitting testament to the cinematic sprawl that runs through these songs.
And happily, despite the dark view of love embedded in these songs, the relationship that inspired them is still thriving today. “We're still writing our own rules,” Amaker says. “We do what we want. And we do it the way we want.”
Ultimately, the songs they compiled here are imbued with a strange mix of disillusionment and romantic aplomb—a guarded optimism, a willingness to pursue love again despite the risks. Indeed, throughout Caitlin and Brent, love is mingled with a sense of doom. On “Mirage,” Sherman sings of their relationship as a seductive vision that can’t be real: “The house you built on sand/A mirage in my mind.” Nevertheless, she ventures inside. Later, on the elegantly fatalistic “Come Out and Play,” Sherman describes love as a “dangerous game of the unknown” and imagines herself William Tell: “I place the apple on your head/Pull the trigger right before we place our bets.” Opulent strings accentuate the song’s dramatic turns.
Uncomfortable truths emerge in this music. All love stories are suffused with risk and danger. All lovers are on the run from their own pasts. Here is an album about choosing to plunge into the unknown anyway—about trying to find a kind of, well, pleasure in the pain.
Caitlin & Brent, soulful Western noir, alternative pop, alt country, indie rock, blues, neo soul, folk ballads, Brent Amaker Caitlin Sherman, "Pleasure In the Pain" (Official Video), eponymous debut album,
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