“I’m so in love with myself,” Caroline Rose sings on her latest synth-strutting single, “it’s so romantic.” “Feel the Way I Want” is the first taste of Rose’s follow-up to 2017’s Loner, an album that found the former alt-country troubadour reinventing herself as a playful pop auteur.
“Feel the Way I Want” is an electro-rock “Feeling Myself” that finds the singer-songwriter leaning fully into the sound and image she’s spent the past four years sculpting. With a Prince-meets-MGMT hook as its main anchor, Rose spends the four-minute anthem brushing off a flurry of burdensome expectations. “I realized at some point that I’m not going to fit into any one box,” she recently said, “and maybe that’s a good thing.”
If the verses on Rose’s latest represent the troubles and turmoil she’s faced over the past half-decade as she’s carved out her own artistic path, the chorus celebrates her arrival with triumphant nonsense: “Feel the way, feel the way, feel the way, feel the way, feel the way, yeah!” she sings. It’s the sound of a singer finally, and gloriously, stumbling into herself.