ON THE RISE
Caroline Spence discusses how she used her "English major brain" to crack the code of country songwriting.
Molly MatalonAfter moving to Nashville from Ohio in 2011, Caroline Spence nannied, waited tables and wrote songs. It took her two years to come up with one she felt was good enough to play around town: “Whiskey Watered Down,” a gently savage kiss-off to a flaky musician. “You think you’re a big deal with that guitar in your hands,” she sings. “But you’ll never be Parsons, Earle, or Van Zandt.”
“I had been making myself a student [of those famous musicians],” the 29-year-old country singer says of her songwriting process. “The tagline of the verse is the same as the tagline of the chorus, and every time it lands, it means something different.” In the first verse, the song’s title refers the sub-par tunes of a wannabe singer-songwriter; by the second verse, it describes what it’s like to try to love such a person. Spence says, “It was the first time I wrote the type of song that I love.”
Spence first started thinking about becoming a songwriter as a teenager in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she grew up in a family of piano players and audio engineers. Loving music was simply part of the family routine. “Everyone could kind of play, so it didn’t feel super special,” she says. “It just felt like a thing I did.”
As a teenager, Spence idolized singer-songwriters like Patti Griffin and Lori McKenna, whose songs often would up getting recorded by others. When she first heard Faith Hill sing one of McKenna’s songs on the radio, she had a realization: “’I want to do that.’ I just didn’t know that was a job you could have.”
But the singer’s plan to remain in fully the background hasn’t quite panned out. After two self-released albums, she recently signed to Rounder, which put out her third LP, Mint Condition, a gorgeous reflection on finding peace amid upheaval and confusion. “I don’t think I considered being an artist,” Spence says. “[There was just] a need for someone to be singing my songs. And [that person] was me.”
The album establishes Spence as a writer somewhere between Kathleen Edwards and Guy Clark in her deft chronicles of interpersonal complexity. She relies on the Nashville tradition of rigorous songcraft and is obsessive about songwriting on both a literary and formal level: how words work in relation to one another, how removing a word like “when” can change the entire meter of a verse, how a protagonist in one song on her album seems to respond to a narrator on another. When she was writing “Sometimes a Woman Is an Island,” Spence flicked on “English major brain” and created a line that unlocked the entire meaning of the song: “Sometimes a woman is a bell.”
Spence’s craft has even impressed Emmylou Harris, who appears on Mint Condition’s poignant title track. Spence wrote the song back in 2013 from the perspective of her grandparents, with Harris’ iconic voice in mind.
Spence has also had to grow comfortable with the inherent beauty of her own singing. “I would love to be able to rock a little bit, but there’s no denying the tenderness and softness of my voice,” she says. “I just have to be like, ‘Yeah, OK, I’ve got a sweet voice.’”
Spence’s potent, unflashy sound feels like part of a movement, also exemplified by Kelsey Waldon, Erin Rae, and Michaela Anne, fellow rising singer-songwriters who share her mission of stripping country and folk music back to its core elements. “People always ask, ‘is it hard to do this?’” says Spence. “And I mean, everything’s hard. But because it’s so hard to make a living, seeing anybody rise up always feels like a victory. That’s the greatest joy of living here.”
ON THE RISE
As Belle & Sebastian share their buoyant 2026 Scotland World Cup anthem ‘It Only Takes One Lion’, frontman Stuart Murdoch has spoken to NME about capturing the feeling back home and his hopes for the team since childhood.
Released today (Tuesday June 2), the Scottish indie heroes’ bid for their nation’s tournament anthem was written after the team’s surprise 4-2 qualifying win against Denmark.
“I felt like we were watching history in the moment, like the hand of God from the old National Lottery adverts was pointing at us,” Murdoch told NME about that game-changing victory. “It was meant to be. Scotland aren’t a terrific team and Denmark are better, but it just felt that day that Scotland were destined to win. Three out of the four goals were things of beauty.”
Produced by and co-written with Pete Ferguson and premiered at the band’s recent London Royal Albert Hall show as part of the anniversary tour for their classic first two albums ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, the soaring song is intrinsically Belle & Sebastian as it morphs from a hymn to a an orchestral disco jam as Murdoch sings of a nation’s hopes and his own boyhood dreams.
NME spoke to Murdoch from the band’s North American tour, where we found him in a graveyard in Texas. “I was just looking for a park because Austin is a pretty scary place downtown now, so I’ve ended up in the Texas Cemetery,” he shared via Zoom.
Was there anyone famous buried there?
“I was looking around and I found the founder of Austin City Limits, which is pretty cool as that’s where we’re playing tonight. I’m looking at one now and it just says, ‘Martin: he loved the law’. Then underneath it says, ‘Billie Louise: she loved the lawyer’.”
We joke that there’s the opening to a Belle & Sebastian song if there ever there was one. “It’s great! It’s given me inspiration.”
For now, read the rest of interview with Murdoch below as he tells us about Scotland’s chances, 30 years of hurt, if fans will be singing it at the top of their lungs in Canada, the US and Mexico this summer, and what’s next for the band.
NME: Hello Stuart. Here we are with ‘It Only Takes One Lion’ Who needs three?
Stuart Murdoch: “Who needs three? Good question. I wouldn’t know!”
What’s the mood been like in Scotland since you qualified?
“It’s funny. I’ve noticed this everywhere: with the World Cup there’s a mixture of cynicism and anticipation. When the actual tournament starts, everyone will get excited about it. Because of FIFA, the peace prize, the ticket prices, people seem quite down about it. I found that in Mexico. They were quite fed up with the general hype about it. I’m in the States just now and you shouldn’t believe all the hype: people are people. The States are just as ‘great’ as ever. We love coming here, we love the cities. The general sense of North American optimism will make for a good tournament.”
“With Scotland though, people will definitely be excited about it. You have to understand, it’s been 30 years since Scotland qualified so I think everybody and their dog has written a song for the team.”
How do you meet the challenge of penning a World Cup anthem, when there have been so many legendary bangers and absolutely shite duds?
“I never planned it. I woke up with a tune in my head and a feeling. That’s the way it should always be for songs. I couldn’t control myself and it was quite straight-forward. I wrote this initial bit about how I felt about the current World Cup team and the qualifying game. It was more introspective.
“When it starts off with, ‘The days are dark and long…’, it’s just my general feeling about football. I’ve been going to see my own team quite a lot recently. It’s my little anthem for how I feel about football and following Scotland for the last 50 years, just the ups and downs. It’s quite a heartfelt thing. When I was eight or nine, the Scottish team meant so much to me, it the thing I was most invested in. There’s a line in there about how I used to memorise the whole squad before ‘78 and 82.”
Tell us about lyric: “This is Scotland, where everyone knows you start with nothing… where you can join an army for peace”…
“My wife made the video for it and she said, ‘I’m not sure I like that line about everyone starting with nothing’. Our first game is against Haiti and they really have nothing. Their country is pretty poor and they’re going through hard times. It was almost a throwaway line and I’m not sure what I meant by it, but in a footballing sense every game starts with nothing. Even if it’s against Brazil, you’ve always got a chance!
“The army refers to The Tartan Army, which has really been quite a remarkable institution for the past 30 years. We changed from drunken buffoons that used to wreck things to this excellent supporting brigade.”
It’s not your standard football sing-along. Can you see it being sung in the terraces?
“I’m not sure, I didn’t cynically design it for that. Many people have said to me in the past, ‘None of your songs have a chorus, you need to write one’. ‘This is Scotland’ is a chorus! They things need to happen organically. I’m sure the fans will still be singing ‘Yes sir, I can boogie’ for years to come.”
What do you actually think of Scotland’s chances right now?
“With the last Euros, they maybe got stage fright or didn’t have that tournament experience. I think Andy Robertson [captain] will be telling them, ‘We really need to produce our best stuff’. If they do and we see them actually playing football, then I don’t really care about the results that much. I just want to see Scotland exceeding our expectations of them. That Denmark game was so crazy that everything after just feels like a bonus.”
If miracles do happen and Scotland make it to the final, how will you celebrate? A free gig in Glasgow?
“Of course, yes! Free everything. If we even got close, I think the whole country would shut down for a year and the GDP would drop. We’d go into a massive recession but no one would care.
“We were playing a gig in Mexico City and I told the crowd, ‘It’s you and us, Mexico and Scotland in the final’. Mexico have never really got close either. I told them it would be five goals a piece, even after everyone takes a penalty and we have to share the trophy. I would settle for that.”
You released two albums in quick succession with 2022’s ‘A Bit of Previous’, 2023’s ‘Late Developers’ and then your debut novel Nobody’s Empire in 2024. You’ve been busy! Is there any progress on new material?
“We went through a period where we recorded a lot and we said, ‘Let’s not record for a while and give ourselves a couple of cycles off’. We’re doing these 30th anniversary shows so we’re just going to lean on the back catalogue and cruise for a while. We’re doing a year on and a year off so everyone can focus on different things.
We’re not looking at new Belles stuff for a while. I’m meant to be developing Nobody’s Empire into a film, so that’s my next task. It’s a long way off from being made but I’m going to write the script for that.”
Scotland’s first World Cup tournament match is against Haiti on Sunday June 14, before they go on to play Morocco on Friday June 19 and Brazil on Wednesday June 24.
The band’s ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ anniversary tour continues throughout the summer, performing the iconic albums in full during across the UK, Europe, North America, Mexico, Australia, Singapore and Japan. Visit here for tickets and more information.
