Heaven’s Just A Flight by Caroline Kingsbury
by Lana Fleischli
About three weeks ago, I went to dinner at my friend Claire's house. There, I met Caroline and got reacquainted with her girlfriend, Liv, a family friend of Claire’s. It was a really nice night and we talked about music a lot, as Caroline and Liv had recently returned from touring. Claire had spoken to me previously about how amazing Caroline was live. After meeting her and talking with her, I knew that I needed to listen to her album, Heaven’s Just A Flight.
This album really stands out to me because of how eclectic it is. There’s pretty much something for everyone! I really enjoyed the pop and rock feel to it. The first song that stood out to me was “16.” The reason that it stood out to me is very ridiculous. I am turning seventeen in a few weeks and I have a mental playlist of songs that are about being seventeen. There are so many. However, on my sixteenth birthday, I could find barely any songs about being sixteen, which is interesting because of how romanticized being sixteen is in the media, especially in John Hughes films. As I listened to the song even more, I heard that idea in it, except a bit different. She sings about being sixteen and how crazy it is, but she also sings about looking back and seeing how she wasn’t being her authentic self. It is admirable to see how she can look back and see how much she has grown.
There are a lot of themes of love and loss in Heaven’s Just A Flight. Kingsbury talks about a fear of falling in love in the song “Fall In Love.” She sings about how she “never really wanted to fall in love” because she “has been alone with a broken heart so long.” I wonder if the fear of losing someone isn’t just about love, but also about her brother?
When we were all talking, she talked about how much her album was impacted by the death of her brother. She talked about how her brother was the first person to show her music that wasn’t Christian music. The album itself is riddled with his impact. She said, “He passed away in October 2019, my album was almost done, but it really changed the path of the record. I wrote the title track a few weeks before he died.”
Fear is exhibited in this album from being sixteen and being afraid to be her true self, to the fear of falling in love because losing them would hurt too much, to the lasting impacts that her brother’s death have left. This album and it’s message hits hard. At the same time, it is a joy to listen to because the music immerses you. Like I said, this album has something for everyone!