“On her debut full-length album, Partner (Coming late 2024), Caley Conway pulls from jazz, classic pop, indie rock and folk, making sure that just when you think you know what the album is, you’re proven wrong.
The songs are carefully, thoughtfully structured but are in no way formulaic, making for unpredictable melodies and inventive arrangements. This album is a firefly evading the jar. And that's where its brilliance lies - in its freedom, its unwillingness to be a kept thing. It is organic and explorative. It keeps you guessing as to where it's going to light up next.
However hard to pin down, the throughline in this collection is the Caley Conway of it all. The clarity in her voice and the confidence in her lyrics reveal someone who really knows who they are. You can sense how comfortably she holds a pen and a tune and you’re never concerned that she doesn’t know where she’s leading you.
With control and intention, Caley’s vocals do plenty of melodic exercising but leave you the sense that she hasn’t nearly tapped out her range, that she’s showing restraint. And her voice is as difficult to place in time as ever. It’s only in the lyrical and musical context that you get a sense of when you are.
On Partner, Caley depicts the sensory experience of being a person in the age of the doom scroll, with the whole world in your hand. She makes you see, feel and taste things so that no matter how existential things get, no matter how many ‘what if’s’ queue for your attention, you’re grounded by a swingset or a smoothie or a yellow bird. She takes you through the really big things (like Love and Loss) by way of the little things (like slow mornings and trips to theme parks).
Despite the layers and complexity of the arrangement, instrumentation and production of these records, you can still feel the warmth and space of the room, as if the songs are happening in real time and you’re in the studio with Caley & Co. Well, if the studio was on a spaceship and the spaceship was on a mission to teach the multiverse about Joni Mitchell and jazz and how weird things have gotten on Earth.”
-Casey O’Brien
“Caley Conway is a rare bird. Her voice is pure, lilting and effortless. Her writing trusts you, rewards patience and attentiveness and leaves space, knowing that the listener’s imagination plays its own parts and that those parts are valid and beautiful, that the hearing completes the song. Not many artists are so generous in this way. Only the best. And that’s probably the simplest way to put it: Caley is the best. Solid hang too.”
-Robby Schiller
