Colbie Caillat‘s first solo album since 2016, Along the Way, is out October 6. Many of the songs were inspired by Colbie’s 2020 breakup with her fiancé, Justin Young, who she’d been with for nearly a decade, but she insists that the album’s not a downer.
“It’s absolutely a breakup album,” she laughs. “But in the most optimistic way. It’s about endings and how they bring on new beginnings.” But she notes that it took her a long time to get into the right headspace to release the album.
“I recorded this album over two years ago and I remember thinking, like, ‘I don’t know how I can sing these songs,"” she tells ABC Audio. “How am I going to go promote these, like, with a smile on my face?”
“The fact that it’s been this much time and I actually, I’ve digested it all and now I’m just wanting to share these songs for anyone who’s going through that … I feel like it will help people,” she says, adding that she’s excited for her fans to hear it.
Colbie says of Along the Way, “I feel like this is the album I’m most proud of … and so I feel like [listeners will] come along, because it’s all the things that they need or that they’re used to from what I’ve released in the past — just a more mature, elevated version of it.”
Colbie made the album after disbanding her short-lived country group, Go West, but Along the Way also has a country sound to it.
“Now it’s mostly all I listen to and I’m a superfan,” she says of country music. In addition, Colbie says some of her old songs have elements that are similar to country music, making her “feel really comfortable with it.”
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