See Zac Brown Tourmate Caroline Jones’ Bucolic ‘Country Girl’ Video
Caroline Jones heads back to the family farm and trades in glitzy, big-city heels for practical, down-home cowboy boots in the idyllic new clip for “Country Girl,” premiering today on Rolling Stone Country.
“That song is probably the most traditional country song I’ve ever written, and it’s the word-for-word story of my upbringing and my childhood,” says Jones, an alum of Rolling Stone Country‘s 10 New Country Artists You Need to Know. “I grew up in the Northeast but my dad is from Tennessee, and he wanted to raise us the way he had been raised – with certain values, a love of the great outdoors, an appreciation for hunting and fishing. He failed miserably in the latter two, but it was still my way of spending time with my dad.”
“Country Girl” stands out as an acoustic, almost beat-less reverie on Jones’ Bare Feet EP, which is full of shiny fusions of country and guitar pop. The track also features one of Jones’ most memorable vocal performances: As she pushes towards the higher end of her vocal register, she trills in a manner that evokes Appalachian singers of old. “I love that style of singing,” she says. “When I discovered country music, that lonesome call was one of the things that drew me to Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. But I didn’t think about any of that when I was writing the song, it just came out that way. The vocal was really emotional to me.”
Jones decided to pick “Country Girl” as her latest single after gauging crowd response to the track while supporting the Zac Brown Band on tour. (Her gig as opener continues with shows at the Hollywood Bowl on October 28th and 29th.) But she was initially hesitant to film a video for the song. “In the beginning I wasn’t sure I would like making music videos; I’m not super into image and fashion,” she says. “[But] I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. It’s writing a song with image as the medium instead of melody and lyric.”