Cherry Valley might be a real town in Tennessee, but for Carter Faith, her Cherry Valley exists in her imagination. And now, on her debut album. Out Friday, the rising country star’s excellent first record finds her navigating the turbulence of early adulthood, lost love, and the kind of over-the-top emotions (and irony) that come with life changes with an unmistakable country twang.
“I would write songs, and some of them would live in Cherry Valley and some of them didn’t,” Faith tells Rolling Stone. “It was just this fantastical dreamland that I created in my head, and I wanted my songs to live in that world too. I love the drama. I wanted them all to feel like they could fit in that very weird, Alice in Wonderland world.”
For Faith, Cherry Valley became an escape — a world where she could unload emotions she often sidestepped in real life, spinning them into hyper-emotional lyrics and tongue-in-cheek lines about breakups, boys, and a chihuahua named Betty. She credits Lana Del Rey (“queen of drama”), Kacey Musgraves (“queen of simplifying a complex emotion but adding color”), and Taylor Swift (“queen of doing everything all at once”) as the blueprints for her songwriting style.
And Faith is well aware that Swift dropped her own record, Life of a Showgirl, the same day as her Cherry Valley. Friends asked if she’d push the date. Her answer? “Bitch, she’s Taylor Swift! It’s special and exciting that my very first album is out the same day.” It’s almost a first-circle moment for her: “I vividly remember the first album I ever bought with my own money was Red and I went to Target before school and got the CD,” she says. “I had a boombox next to my bed and I just wore that thing out. I’ll never forget that day.”
From her apartment in Nashville, after manifesting Project Runway runner-up Utica Queen making her an outfit one day, Carter Faith breaks down some of her favorite songs from the debut album.
I could expand upon “Six String” and make a whole album about that song I feel like because it’s kind of a journey in itself.I just wanted that song to be as dramatic as the emotions of it all felt. Lyrically, there’s some Beatles inspiration in there. The Beatles reference is, “While my guitar gently weeps,” and so the end of that is, “He played me like a six-string and wonder why I gently weep.” There’s a lot of sonic Beatles references in there, too. I wrote that the same day as “Misery Loves Company.”
The first verse lyrics, I really love because I brought them to five writing rooms and they were all like, “This is way too morbid,” and I was like, “That’s the point.” So when I finally was with people who got it, that was really special. “You’ve been staring out the window three days now, but you won’t even go outside. I feel like a widow walking around this house. Birds are circling. Something must have died.” We wrote two extremely dramatic songs that day, which I love. I was like, “If you get it, you get it.” I love simplifying things, but I also love exaggerating them lyrically.
You’ll love this story. I was at a truck stop, and I think I had taken an edible on the drive. We were at Love’s, a truck stop, I think we were in the middle of Texas, and I was shopping in there. I love all their silly sunglasses and things. And this old lady walked up to me and said something about my outfit, which was atrocious, and she had this chihuahua named Betty. And her chihuahua, Betty, had pink glittery nails and a pink glittery collar, and her shiny name tag. And I just thought, “If that bitch was a person, she would steal my man for sure,” and I never stopped thinking about her. I always wanted a little ugly dog. We took the idea to Shane McAnally, and he was like, “Hell yeah. Let’s write a song called Betty. Why would we not do that?”
I wrote “Changed” with Ashley Monroe and Connie Harrington, and we went to Connie’s lake house, and that’s actually the place where me and Ashley were driving to when we drove through Cherry Valley. There’s some universe thing to me there because I was going through a breakup and thinking about another breakup at the same time. They were such different breakups, but I was realizing I got so much out of both of them for better and for worse. So we started writing this song. It came out really cosmically. There were fireflies everywhere. There was a baby deer on the lake while we were listening to it back. I think that’s why I put those few songs at the end that have that acceptance feeling, because then you start the album over again. It’s always a process, like a cyclical thing. When I write these songs, I get out at least the harsher emotions of it all and I can take a step back, and I can read what I wrote and see how I was processing it.
This was a song I almost didn’t put on the album because I couldn’t really find where it fit into it. The album is such an emotional roller coaster. This is a song where I’m talking to my younger self or another person and giving advice and I just think it’s a little ironic because it’s a crazy bitch album, and I’m like, “Who am I to give advice?” But I think then, when I took a step back and realized it was kind of me talking to myself, that was important to me. Someone said this to me recently: “I love watching you tell a story because it’s like you’re walking down a path and then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait. This over here,’ you’re picking up things on the way,” and that is so real. That’s how my ADD brain works, but also that’s life, right? You walk on this journey and then you see something to the right and take a second. And so for the album, of course I wanted it to feel like this tight, locked story, but I think I love those human elements that kind of pop in, like “Sails” or “So I Sing.”
