CAROLINE COTTER with ANNETTE WASILIK

CAROLINE COTTER
“Find me somewhere out on the road / Take me into your heart and into your home,” Caroline Cotter sings in the first song on her third album, Gently as I Go. The new music takes listeners around the world and deep into human emotions, reminding them that home can be anywhere, if you’ve found someone who shares your heart.
“Don’t Wait,” the first single from Gently as I Go, encourages listeners to seize the day — “a reminder that we have in our power the ability to take action and create our present and future,” Cotter says. Ironically, though, the singer-songwriter ended up waiting three years to release her new album. She had just finished recording the 11 songs in March of 2020, and with the world reeling, she simply couldn’t find a reason or the motivation to share them. “To me, at the time, it felt unimportant,” Cotter admits.
Fortunately, the past three years have only strengthened Cotter’s belief in these songs while further defining her own essence. Gently as I Go explores travel and connection, essential to who Caroline is, as well as things many of us experience such as procrastination, love, life and death, nostalgia and growing up, loss and gratitude. Often, even the most disparate of those ideas coexist: for example, in “The Year of the Wrecking Ball.” Written by Cotter in early 2020, during Escape to Create’s month-long artist residency in Seaside, Florida, the song wrestles with the dissolution of a traditional family and the loss of a safe, comforting place from childhood, but finds gratitude for the beautiful, albeit different, relationships formed in the wake.
Songs dealing with difficult transitions that we face continue to pop up throughout the album, including “The Call,” which Cotter wrote for her 104-year-old grandfather’s funeral, and the title track, about saying goodbye to a partner in love, life, and music. Throughout, Cotter’s “smooth, tremulous soprano” (WickedLocal.com) and calming delivery are reminiscent of the female folk singers who came before her: Mary Chapin Carpenter or Natalie Merchant, for example.
Often, the peace Cotter’s songs bring is as much for her as it is for her audience. She started “Don’t Wait” to offer words of encouragement to a friend but recalls that it quickly became clear its message was something she also needed to hear, and now it’s “a song for all of us who put off creating our lives to the fullest,” Cotter says. “We really do already have all that we need. And yet, without confidence, our fullest life can appear murky or completely out of reach.”
Prior to making music her full-time pursuit, Cotter traveled the world working in international education. Quitting her job in 2015, even without much of a fanbase and on a shoestring budget, she trusted that touring was the best way for her to forge connections.
“There’s just this opening of doors that happens that totally shifts things. It’s a complete game-changer,” notes Cotter, a Rhode Island native now living just outside Acadia National Park in Maine. “When I’ve shared myself in this way, then people are really excited to share what they’ve got around them.”
But what’s a globetrotter, who has played more than 1000 shows in 45 states and 14 countries, to do when a worldwide pandemic makes travel nearly impossible?
“I became very close to nature and just hugged a lot of trees and rocks,” says Cotter with a chuckle. She nannied, worked on a goat farm, gardened, revitalized an arts non-profit, and taught music and songwriting. “In a way, I had to reinvent myself. I had to find a deeper sense of belonging and meaning in things that weren’t what I knew of myself for the prior 15 years. I identified as a traveler, a singer-songwriter, and a performer, and all of a sudden, I had nobody to sing to and nowhere to go.”
As Gently as I Go concludes with “Morning Mantra,” a musical warm hug of a reminder to keep going in a world that often feels dark, sad, and full of troubles that are out of our control, it serves to calm Caroline as well. She was diagnosed with ADD as a child and both songwriting and travel are key parts of how she manages to stay sane. Caroline released her debut album in 2015 and a second album in 2018, and is both a 2018 Freshgrass/No Depression Songwriter of the Year award finalist and a 2019 Rocky Mountain Folks Fest Songwriter Showcase finalist.
“Songwriting for me is a cathartic expression of my life experience. It’s creative expression that just completely shifts me and gets out the ickiness,” shares Cotter, recounting a recent moment when sitting down and writing a song wiped away the anxious feeling she had been dealing with all day. “Seeing new things and connecting with people helps also, because I can get so deep into my own head, and the second I start a conversation with somebody else, it’s not about me anymore.”
And it’s a win-win. “It’s inevitable that after a show, somebody will come and share their experience with me,” Cotter says, “so it’s got the right effect, you know? It helps us all feel not alone.

ANNETTE WASILIK
Annette's performances are marked by her compelling alto and moving songs that "touch you to the bone". In the tradition of the poet songwriter, with rich tones reminiscent of Linda Thompson or Natalie Merchant, she weaves a spell both startling in its intimacy and expansive in its vision. Her songwriting influences include Jane Siberry, Lucinda Williams and John Prine to mention just a few. Both down to earth and deeply atmospheric, Annette’s songs are explorations into longing, love, loss, God, home, homesickness and hope.
"I found my first guitar in an old tin wardrobe in my basement. Its bridge was broken but it was love at first sight, as if I found a buried treasure in my backyard. The room spun and everything. I glued the bridge back on and never looked back." On songwriting Annette says, "It feels like diving for pearls. I sink down and don't know what's going to happen. Usually a combination of emotion, melody and phrasing opens the way for the lyrics."
In her late teens and twenties. Annette was performing in local cafes, small venues and eventually festivals. When her daughter was small, Annette took a break from performing to attend her family and grow her healing practice. Now she is out performing again and becoming known in the DC area and nationally as a powerful songwriter and performer. Annette's debut CD, Songs from the Talking House, was awarded Contemporary Folk Recording of the Year by the Washington Area Music Association in April 2016. She also won Honorable Mention for her song Don't Look Down in the 2016 MidAtlantic Song Contest. Her January 2020 release, Love & Fire, is her first album on the Azalea City Cooperative label. On release, it landed at #6 on FAI Folk DJ chart and #1 on the NACC chart and ended up #40 for the year.
In 2019, Annette created a new concert series, Local Cream, to showcase the best local and regional songwriters and co-hosts a popular monthly songwriting circle. In the spring of 2022, her song "Almost" was a finalist in The Great American Song Contest and won "Outstanding Achievement in Songwriting" Award.