Words / Maddie Browning
Photos / Dara Feller
Carol Ades’ Instagram bio used to state that she writes “music for the overachieving older sister.” As the oldest of four, it’s a burden she carries that she never asked for.
“It goes without saying that they’re just wound a little bit tighter,” she says. “ This pressure to forge your own path and to figure out what the world is before it happens to you is just so natural as an oldest sibling, and I think it’s so unfair.”
That “burden of perfectionism,” as she puts it, is infused into her music. She utilizes writing as a tool to untangle and unlearn the idea that she has to always know what’s next. Through her deeply vulnerable lyricism, Ades chronicles profuse sapphic infatuation and queer girlhood. Her music feels like opening a diary filled with angsty entries penned in swirling script with glittering ink.
The New Jersey raised, LA-based indie/alt-pop artist grew up listening to the radio. She would often sing her own melodies over other artists’ tracks.
“ I was a radio kid. I was like, ‘There are 10 artists in the world, and they’re all on the radio, and they’re all the Jonas Brothers. That is music, and that’s my music history,’” she says. “And then when I got a little bit older, it was really writing that introduced me to music in a new way.”
Ades is a masterful storyteller, which is her motivation for songwriting. As a 14-year-old, she became “addicted” to drafting her own tales of overwhelming, moody teen emotions.
“ A very, very dark, very haunted, singing in cursive vibes. Like a haunted Victorian child on piano — that was like my vibe,” she says.
At only 17, Ades was among the top eight contestants on season 5 of “The Voice” and went on to release music under her given name Caroline Pennell. In her early 20s, Ades started writing songs for other artists, including Selena Gomez, Kesha, and Demi Lovato. As she continued to gain more self-confidence, she realized that she wasn’t satisfied remaining behind the scenes – she wanted to be the one on stage.
“ The excitement of hearing myself when I would write a song about my own life was so palpable that I was just like, ‘Oh, I want to keep this going. I want to hear other people hear it, too. I really want to stand behind this because I really believe in what I’m saying,’” says Ades.
It’s often not music that inspires her songwriting; it’s other forms of media.
“ I’ve never been, in my adulthood, a big music listener, to be honest. I’m more of a story person, and I love TV, and I love musicals, and I love movies,” she says. “Writing these short form songs and getting to sing was just so cathartic and so like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like I’m in my own movie.’”
Her most recent EP “Worst Person in the World” was inspired by the 2021 romantic comedy-drama film “The Worst Person in the World.” Through 12 chapters, Julie (Renate Reinsve) reinvents herself, makes mistakes, and figures out who she is and what she wants.
“I’m the worst person in the world/ Or I’m just a girl,” Ades sings on her EP’s title track, realizing that no one knows how to perfectly float through life.
As for sonic muses, Ades listened to Lily Allen and leaned into the theatricality of “quirkier singer-songwriters.”
On “Worst Person in the World,” Ades allows herself to embrace the chaos of imperfection, self-assurance, and romance through poetic lyricism and lush soundscapes across six tracks. Ades pulls back to reflect and almost gazes at herself from above.
Her soft, wispy alto soars over a nostalgic guitar riff on “That’s my girl,” a sweet love song that’s rom-com ready. “ In a campy way, can you imagine if it started playing in the middle of ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire?’” she says.
Ades adds that she could see the song slotting in over the romantic female friendships in “Lady Bird” and “Booksmart.” But she also would love for “That’s my girl” to be in a ‘90s style film.
“ That would be amazing. Like when it’s fuzzy. Everything is so full 8K HD and you’re like, ‘I feel like I can touch it.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t wanna touch it. I want it to live in a different world,’” she says. “I think they should remake ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ but make everyone gay, and then they can have it there.”
On “Merry Go Round,” her voice echoes across empty space, building to an explosion of raw frustration and reverb. Through the allegory of a whirling carousel, she explores being tired of writing songs for other people, but not knowing how to stop.
“ I was fucking over it. I was just like, ‘It’s so easy for me to stay doing this because it’s what I’ve done, and I know I’m good at it, and everyone claps for me, and that feels good,’” she says. “But it wasn’t really what I wanted to do, and I started to get resentful of my own choices and my own life.”
As the music swells on the chorus, she sings, “It’s like/ I think breathing’s overrated/ Sick of standing still and waiting/ For the moment I figure it out/ I want off of this/ Merry-go, merry-go/ Round.”
No one could take her off of the ride, so she finally made the leap herself.
One of her most special moments on the project was when her grandmother starred in the music video for “Turns Out I’m Amazing.” She dons Ades’ signature cream and navy schoolgirl dress and dances across a barren house entryway.
During the second verse, she lays on her side on a bed, mirrored by a video of Ades doing the same thing. They seem to represent the connective tissue of girlhood that never leaves women as they age.
“ Girlhood is this embodiment of every version of yourself, every girl that you have ever been,” she says. “I think girlhood in itself is just an exploration of what girl you really are and what kind of girl you want to be, and making room for all of the girls that you want to be.”
In developing the music video, Ades says she was able to see all of the girls that her grandmother has been and still is.
“ She was really nervous, and she was a little bit self-conscious, and she was also really excited, and she was all of these things,” Ades says. “It was so amazing. I was just like, ‘Damn, we are really all just the same.’”
“Worst Person in the World” lives in a playful “Alice in Wonderland” dollhouse world. It’s an aesthetic Ades lives in even as she chats about her EP on Zoom. Sitting on a pale yellow couch, she wears a pointelle three-quarter sleeve top, and her soft red curls fall down her shoulders.
On the art for her single “That’s my girl,” Ades floats over a pile of gingham and ruffly pillows and blankets with drawn baby pink striped curtains. For “Merry Go Round,” she attempts to break free from a tiny red room with miniature furniture where she seems to be trapped. And on the cover of the EP, she reaches out across leafy foliage to a sweet yet spooky pink dollhouse where a tiny Ades sits on the roof.
“ Aesthetically, I love coming-of-age movies, and it was an ode to that and also, a way for me to visually relive some of my adolescence and do it differently, and do it in the way that I had dreamed of, where I’m so in touch with how I feel and so alive and weird and free and outspoken and loud,” she says. “When in reality I was so internal and so quiet and so shy.”
Her friend Blake Hilton created the dollhouse as a whimsical, conflicting pairing of pink and girly aesthetics with a slightly alarming haunted house.
“ I’m full of contradictions, and I really wanted it to feel a little ugly, a little bit fucked up, but also really beautiful,” says Ades. “And you’re just like, ‘I wanna go in there. That’s so cute.’ And then you go in, and you’re like, ‘This isn’t as cute as I thought it was.’”
Ades says Hilton perfectly captured her vision, and the house now sits in her studio. She wishes she had enough money to turn it into a human-sized version.
The overarching dollhouse aesthetic was also Ades’ way of saying goodbye to her childhood. “ It was just trying to visually represent that: This house is too small for you. You don’t live here anymore. Let it go,” she says.
Ades is now in a happy relationship with singer-songwriter and producer Madelene Eliasson — who goes by her artist name LonelyTwin, but she didn’t actually recognize that she was queer until she was 23.
“ When I came out I was just like, ‘Oh, awesome. Cool, I’m gay now,’” she jokes.
While Ades spirals about many things in her life, she says this realization gave her peace. She didn’t like having sex with men, and now she knew why.
“ I think as the overachieving, older child, there’s a relief, too, in finding the answer a lot of the time because you spend so long searching for it that that was really nice to realize, ‘Oh, I found it. I can just be it now,’” she explains.
For many queer people once they come out, there are moments from their past that they reflect back on and understand as glaring signs of their sexuality.
Ades recalled a hilarious diary entry where she wrote something to the effect of: “ I love my boyfriend so much. Also, I had a dream about literally making out with all of these women that looked like Cara Delevingne. What is that about? Anyway, I love my boyfriend, and I can’t wait to see him.”
With the release of popular hockey romance TV series “Off Campus,” Ades has received many more listeners. Her song “Hope Is a Scary Thing” — which now has over 4.6 million streams on Spotify — plays as Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli) ascends the stairs at his college house to find an inebriated Hannah Wells (Ella Bright) in his bed.
The single is about the anxiety of letting yourself imagine a future with someone you like when everything could come crashing down. It’s the perfect track to build the tension between the two characters.
“ It was so cool that people really resonated, and it’s my dream to have my songs in TV shows and movies – they are soundtrack songs,” says Ades. “That’s the world that it lives in, and I really want to pursue those other creative avenues where the worlds merge, and I think it makes a lot of sense, so I was so excited that this felt like a really natural beginning to that.”
Ades notes that there still aren’t many queer love stories onscreen, but “gay music wins.”
“You could put gay music in the background of the most boring straight love story ever, and it would make you feel something,” she says.
Hearing her song on a soundtrack has Ades thinking about her bright future and developing her next album.
“ I’m in a big dreaming state, just dreaming up all of the other dream projects I would like to be a part of, and dream movies I want my songs to live in, stories I want to tell of my own, different things I want to write in different ways than just songs,” she says. “It’s just introduced a lot of new people to my world, so the more the merrier.”
