Listening to Caitlynne Curtis for a few seconds is all it takes to get you asking questions: How isn’t she a huge household name by now? how did she manage to fly under our radar for so long, and even: Why was she rejected on the X factor when she was 16? Well, all I can say is that with well over 40 million cross-platform streams all of these unjust assertions are steadily being rectified, and people are waking up to the very well-cultivated talents of Caitlynne Curtis.
After her then-heartbreaking rejection from X-Factor, Caitlynne thought that was that for her career, thankfully something kept her from fully giving up, and it was perhaps that very same rejection that ended up pushing her further into music because tempering talent against hardship is often the key that ignites a lot of artists’ true potential. At age 19, her life got turned upside down with the arrival of her son, putting her career in the freezer and getting a job selling cars to support the both of them, Curtis took to recording song covers and posting them on Instagram to keep the dream alive. Her next big break moment would come when she was signed to Struggle Jennings’ own independent label -Angels & Outlaws- where she would get to make her full-length debut release in 2021.
Although I was made aware of her awesome music a little while ago, I feel like with this brand new single she’s continuing to push the envelope further on her way to the top. “Mood Swings” is an incredibly dexterous song about the complexities of a life lived chaotically, and Caitlynne’s impactful vocal performance feeds your ears every bit of emotional nuance that the subject demands, and she does it with the supreme charisma and consummate professionalism of someone who’s been pretty much doing this since she was 6 years old.Â
It took “Mood Swings” to come out to realize just how rare songs like these seem to be nowadays in my experience. Caitlynne confides “I based it around a couple who are both going thru life and using drugs/alcohol to cope which in return causes it to become toxic”. Most of the songs that I seem to be getting these days tend to be based on a personal experience from the writer’s POV, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, having songs that derive primarily from the imagination feels very refreshing, and I think it can be quite liberating for a lot of other songwriters to explore those avenues as well.
Usually set firmly on the side of Pop, Caitlynne must have worn her steel-studded leather jacket for this one, because “Mood Swings” is as legitimately hard-rock as it gets, with some fine & mighty riffs that play extremely well with her powerful and emotive voice, and all that raw and wild energy of the genre playing very well off the nature of the lyrics, almost as if the song was secretly written as the cautionary tale about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, or any other tragedy-bound rock couple you could think of. I hope Caitlynne keeps exploring this rock sound further, especially since her voice is such a great fit.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the artist Story: Samuel Aponte
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