REVIEW: Kaitlyn Kohler — Everywhere I Go (SINGLE)
“It’s been two weeks travelin’ on this endless highway / This job drives me crazy / Feel so alone” croons a dejected but melodic Kaitlyn Kohler in the first three lines of her new single “Everywhere I Go,” out everywhere quality alternative country music is sold and streamed this June. These lyrics, and all that follows in this track, are all heart and no brawn, but this isn’t to suggest Kaitlyn Kohler is somehow giving us a halfhearted performance in “Everywhere I Go” when the opposite is true. She’s letting the beat deliver the beefiness while she straddles a silky harmony, and together it makes for what could be her most mature song to date.
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As much as I dig the lyrical content in this single, most of the emotion here is in the execution, and particularly in the cadence of Kohler’s verse. She’s never completely in sync with the other components in the master mix — while it’s difficult for most to notice, she’s just a touch behind the rhythm of the strings as if to set herself apart from the beat intentionally. This yields a lot of anxiousness as we near the chorus, and an even more powerful climax on the other side.
The string play in this song is pretty weighty despite the minimalistic arrangement it’s placed in, but I would write part of this off to the effectiveness of the equalization.
“Everywhere I Go,” from a melodic point of view, is mixed more like a heavy pop track than it is a standard country single, and in doing this Kohler essentially makes it impossible for us not to feel the rumble of the instrumentation, even at its most muted and understated. It’s an interesting way of making contemporary pop, but more specifically, of rebelling against the mainstream model.
This hook in the chorus is as big and bold as I could ask for it to be, but I don’t think I would call it the centerpiece of the song — there’s simply too much detail, too many arms to the catharsis in the music, for me to deem any one element as being the focal point of our attention (at least intentionally). Kohler has a lot of angles to her sound, and once she puts out a proper full-length studio album I think we’re going to understand all of her capabilities better than we ever could in a handful of harmony-based singles.
If what I’m hearing in “Everywhere I Go” is on par with what I should expect to experience in the future material Kaitlyn Kohler releases, she hasn’t even begun to rake in the respect she’s going to get from critics with a lot more name recognition than myself. This is a difficult time to be trying to break into the mainstream for any artist, between both the social politics of the age and the competitiveness of the market, but if there’s one country singer/songwriter I would be betting on this June, it would be this one.
Colin Jordan
