In one moment, Kaitlyn Kohler’s new single “Everywhere I Go” is the picture of a perfect country/pop anthem; in the next, it’s a more complicated and personal piece, designed with the bones of a folk song but delivered unto us with a surreal softness not common of such content (in modern times, at least).
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To put it as simply as possible, “Everywhere I Go” isn’t the kind of country single that comes to us as easily categorized as some of the mainstream material you’re going to hear on the FM dial in the year 2023. There’s a mysteriousness to Kohler’s artistic persona that bleeds into her music without fail, and although she’s far from being the only young indie player worth keeping a close eye on this season, she asserts herself as one of the brightest new voices in her scene in this latest official studio recording.
She doesn’t have anything to hide from the audience here – if anything, there’s a desire to be heard and unmasked in this track that I hadn’t picked up on in her greenhorn songs found on her eponymous debut some four years ago, both of which are just as intimate in tone.
The strings in this song are a big source of emotionality from beginning to end, and I think it’s fairly obvious – even to the untrained ear – that they’re being played by actual fingers rather than sampled from some computer-generated recording on the board as I’ve encountered in a lot of country this year.
There’s been such an enormous spike in inauthenticity among major label songwriters in the last couple of years, mostly in adherence to a pseudo-retro movement that hasn’t found any stability with audiences outside of the Tennessee scene; none of that, however, has influence over what this Texan has constructed for us here.
Her chorus performance dabbles in a few familiar indie country cosmetics, but the bottom line is that nothing in “Everywhere I Go” sounds even remotely recycled (the exact opposite if I’m to be perfectly honest). This is a simple composition from a lyrical perspective, with the lead vocal providing all of the color we need to appreciate the depth of every verse, thus requiring none of the robotic faceting typical among some of the similarly-stylized singles I’ve listened to lately.
If this track is giving us a good idea as to who Kaitlyn Kohler is and, perhaps even more importantly, who she wants to be as a professional recording artist, I think she’s going to find her way into the hearts of audiences around the globe a lot sooner than some of her competition in the industry would prefer. She’s done remarkably well with the melodies she’s shared in the content she’s recorded so far in her career, and for her next project, I think she should consider recording something even louder and perhaps more sonically brash.
She has a versatile skillset you can tell is just begging to be exploited more than it already has been, and if given the right tools to do so, I think Kohler could take the sound of “Everywhere I Go” and bring it to a stadium-sized venue with little difficulty.
Chadwick Easton