Caro Emerald’s dark reinvention: ‘I’m afraid that people will think I’m bitter’
“When I would go on radio shows here in the UK, people would say, ‘You need a make-up stylist,’” says Caroline van der Leeuw, the Dutch singer who formerly performed as Caro Emerald. A make-up stylist for radio, I ask? Why? “Because I wouldn’t look like a pop star if I didn’t. That’s where it crossed some kind of line where it didn’t feel good to me anymore. I had to be a star,” she says.
Between 2010 and around 2015, Caro Emerald alighted on a winning pop formula. Van der Leeuw sang jazzy vocals over retro, hip hop-infused, Winehouse-tinged pop in a package that was bundled up with Forties and Fifties styling and sprinkles of exotica. Think The Andrews Sisters doing mambo in a hipster Tiki bar.
It was bold, brassy and hugely successful: Caro Emerald’s two albums reached numbers four and one respectively in the UK, while her debut became the longest-running number one ever in the Netherlands, beating the decades-old record held by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. She won countless awards, played East London’s vast O2 arena, appeared on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny and performed on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.
Van der Leeuw enjoyed it. But she also felt trapped and unseen. Caro Emerald was a construct, a colourful mask behind which she felt increasingly uneasy, not least when she was asked to get dressed up for radio. So she has reinvented herself. Van der Leeuw’s new project is called The Jordan, a music venture that sees her eschew exotica for darker, dreamier and more pared back sonic terrain.
She has teamed up with producers David Kosten (Bat for Lashes and Marina Diamandis) and Eg White (Adele and Sam Smith) to record an album called Nowhere Near The Sky. Released next February, the album also features contributions from Portishead’s Adrian Utley. It marks a totally fresh start. Van der Leeuw went so far as to release The Jordan’s first few singles without revealing her involvement; she “just wanted it to be about the music” before people started associating it with The Person Who Used To Be Caro Emerald.
We meet in the café at the Museum of Brands in London’s Notting Hill. It is an apt location given that she is effectively ditching one brand to repackage and relaunch herself as another. Speaking to the 41-year-old, it’s clear just how much she needed change. Wearing a Beastie Boys T-shirt under a bomber jacket, there is no sign whatsoever of Caro. Like the colourful boxes of soap flakes and the Bakelite household ephemera that surround us, her previous incarnation is “definitely parked”.
So what happened? She describes decoupling herself from Caro as a “gradual process”. The big misconception was that Caro Emerald was a solo project, she explains. Caro was actually a band comprising a series of songwriters and producers and herself. But she was its public face. (The irony is that while The Jordan sounds like a band name, it is basically her striking out alone. The Jordan is the name of the Amsterdam suburb in which she grew up).
The first completed song Van der Leeuw and Kosten recorded for Nowhere Near The Sky was The Room, which opens the album. It’s a sparse and gently building ballad with shades of Lana Del Rey. Van der Leeuw describes finishing that song as “overwhelmingly emotional”. It acted as a launchpad. The process was cathartic. Numerous tracks on the album suggest frustration with the past, or at least a past. In Best Damn Day she sings, “I’ve been walking down this road too straight for too many miles.” While in A Price To Pay, she shouts, “I’m not going to be your showgirl / I wasn’t born to be this nice.” They sound like primal roars.
“I’m a bit afraid that people will think I’m really bitter, which I’m not. At least, not as bitter as I sound on that album,” she laughs. “But I guess if you’re in this business for a long time, and if you experience what I’ve experienced, then there’s things that you just don’t have time to come to terms with. I was just trying to do the best for everyone all the time. I felt very responsible. But at the same time we had this conceptual thing going on which was not enough about me. I wanted to create something that was closer to myself. I was always on stage representing something that felt less and less like it was me.”
This ate at her. “It started to just feel very wrong. I was always there, smiling at everyone, being nice and doing what everybody wanted me to do. And I felt very unseen and un-listened to.”
She is aware that as a successful pop star, no-one wants to hear about your frustrations. This meant that while she was – and remains – hugely grateful and thankful for her success, she bottled up her feelings. These seem to have spilled out into her new music. “I didn’t even intend to do that. I just happened,” she remarks.
Van der Leeuw will tour the new album (there’s a show in London’s Bush Hall next March). The gigs will comprise solely of Jordan tracks. Again, this is a potential concern. “I would hate it if [fans] would be disappointed,” she says. Having heard the album, I don’t think punters need to worry. Still, I wonder how her current pre-release excitement-cum-nerves compare with how she felt before she released her 2010 debut, Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor? It turns out that comparisons are moot: back then she really didn’t know what she was getting in to.
“When I started in the music industry… I did not know anything about the commercial music industry. So when I started, I didn’t even know what to want. And because I didn’t know, I was also not scared at what I could fail at,” she says. Still, that initial rush of success sounded bananas. She says it was “like a storm”. Her hope for 30,000 album sales was soon trumped when she started doing 10,000 a week. Sales kept growing. “People said to me, ‘This is extraordinary.’ I was, like, ‘OK, well if you say so.’” Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor sold over two million copies worldwide and was forcibly removed from the Dutch charts after 104 weeks due to a rule banning albums from spending over two years in the chart. Deleted Scenes was itself deleted, temporarily at least.
Being in the eye of the storm meant Van der Leeuw was blinded to its magnitude. Her hopes for The Jordan are somewhat more realistic. “I hope that I can tour internationally without going bankrupt,” she says with brutal honesty. Perhaps financial jeopardy is a downside of freedom.
Still, the sense of shackles being cast off infuses our entire chat, including a question about her childhood. I ask Van der Leeuw what music she listened to growing up. “This was always an awkward question for me before because I felt like I had to say something about jazz, which I did not listen to as a kid,” she admits. The answer was The Beatles, ABBA, Madonna and Mariah Carey followed by Nirvana, the Fugees, Biohazard and Wu-Tang Clan. So your average pop-to-alternative journey.
Van der Leeuw is aware that streaming has changed the music game since she started out 13 years ago. We are drowning in new music. She points out, flabbergasted, that an estimated 100,000 new tracks are added to streaming services every day. “I find it exhausting,” she says. “Sometimes I go, like, ‘Why am I even making music?’ There’s so much out there.”
The answer, she says, is an “inner fire” to create. It still burns strong. And this is brutally clear in the music of The Jordan. It is honest, moving and brave, even if its creation has meant confining Caro to a museum. So what’s next? Can we expect further evolution? Van der Leeuw smiles. She’s enjoying her new-found freedom too much to allow herself to be boxed in again. “This is me,” she says. “So wherever it takes me, I will just follow.”
Nowhere Near The Sky is released in February 2023 on Cooking Vinyl
