I don’t know if there’s a world record for longest gap between a song’s debut in a Tiny Desk concert and its eventual release, but I suspect Caroline Rose holds it. In 2015, Rose was a 25-year-old Americana songwriter with a twang-soaked voice when they performed “Yip Yip Yow,” a gibberish-filled psychobilly joyride, behind public radio’s most revered desk. The song sounded like a blast, with a call-and-response refrain that pulls you by the collar, inducing you to join in: “Yip yow yip yow yow!/Yip yow yip yip yip yow!” But its country-stomp arrangement felt a little too… polite.
Rose soon shed their Americana trappings, publicly embraced their queerness, and revamped their musical identity. They reintroduced themself on their next record, 2018’s thrilling LONER, as a shape-shifting alt-pop weirdo, clad in bright-red jumpsuits and a devilish smirk. They’d once wanted to be a Serious Songwriter, à la Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, but “Yip Yip Yow” pointed the way to a wackier, freer mode of writing. And yet, Rose omitted “Yip Yip Yow” from LONER. “I just couldn’t quite get it to fit,” the artist recalled, “and I was so afraid that it was gonna be my most popular song that I thought was also my dumbest song.”
No score yet, be the first to add.
Fast forward eight years: Rose finally releases “Yip Yip Yow,” then makes it the lead track on their seventh album, Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall. With Gentling the Horse, Rose hasn’t just arrived at the definitive version of “Yip Yip Yow”—loud and lacerating, the result of their instructing their band to “play like a teenager who’s never picked up an instrument before”—but has finally crafted an album worthy of its nonsensical zeal. It’s the singer’s wackiest and funniest LP to date, with a violent edge and a madcap gleam coursing through its portraits of lovable fuck-ups and suburban dread.
