Single Review: Caitlin & Will – ‘Address In The Stars’

Season 2 of Can You Duet starts this June. And the first season winners Caitlin & Will still don’t have a single at radio yet.  The song ‘Even Now’ was released to iTunes last year – and was slated as a radio single for this year. But apparently, the radio programmers decided this tune was the better of the two.  As Caitlin Lynn said over at Country Universe on Leeann Ward’s review of this song:

Here is your truth…Sony, nor did Will or I switch our single. RADIO switched our single.  We went out on our radio tour the whole month of February. If you dont know how it works I’ll tell you…you go into a conference room or sometimes a kitchen with the Program Director and or Music Director (Sometimes they bring in staff and sometimes they dont) We play 3-5 songs for them, try to get to know them as best we can in under an hour and then leave to go do it all over again. Sometimes 5 stations in one day. At every station we would play Even Now and Address in the Stars. We gave them the single to play which was ‘Even Now’ and they said “No” we are not playing ‘Even Now’ we are playing ‘Address in the Stars’.

I made no secret in my review of ‘Even Now’, I think it’s one of the best songs to come out of Nashville in quite a while.  So, why the radio programmers decided ‘Address In The Stars’ is the better choice for the lead-single is still kind of a mystery to me.  Lyrically, it’s basically a re-write of LeAnn Rimes’ ‘Probably Wouldn’t Be This Way’.  Word is, Caitlin was inspired to write it after losing an aunt to breast cancer.  But does the song really hold up on its own without knowing the backstory?  No.

The song starts off simple enough with its piano intro and Caitlin brilliantly delivering the lines.  (She’s a modern-day Trisha Yearwood – a master of interpretation from the very beginning.) Then the chorus starts bombarding us with a wall of sound.  Caitlin’s vocal is never lost in all this sonic mess though.  She possesses one of those rare, instantly identifiable voices, and it’s plenty big enough to outshine even the glossiest production.  I’m a big fan of this duo.  But the more I think about it, this is exactly the kind of song I would expect radio to latch onto instead of an intelligent lament like ‘Even Now’.  Here’s hoping the pair succeeds anyway.

C+

Listen to ‘Address In The Stars’ at the official Caitlin & Will site.