Casey Dubie's 'Into The Moon' Shows The Rawness Of Love

“No matter what I do, I can’t make you happy,” sings Casey Dubie at the opening of her debut record, Into the Moon. Her voice, soft, is at first accompanied only by simple instrumentals. New sounds—a glittering chime, for instance—enter swiftly as the song progresses, and when she sings,“In the hazy glow silver lining,” a drum beat comes in. At every moment in the song comes something new, smoothly, like instruments counting off before jumping rope.

A product of origin and experience, Into the Moon is haunting in its rawness. There’s a sense of immense love and loyalty and yet longing: Through the seven-track record, we find the speaker grappling with all of these different sides of (presumably) different relationships. Dubie leads the listener through these moments, moving them through failed past relationships and the general pain of it all and too into moments of pure love. But they aren’t love songs in the traditional sense. Dubie doesn’t cry out of lovesickness; rather, she states bluntly the way she feels about these different situations, and she doesn’t try to sugarcoat the intensity of any of it.

“I’d definitely say growing up [in Vermont] influenced my writing,” she tells Suburban Rose. “Lyrically, I tend to write with a lot of images/metaphors and sonically I’ve recently branched out from my rural/simple roots and added a lot more textures and layers.”

These metaphors elevate the feelings that Dubie tries to convey. “Confetti,” the first single off the record, likens memories to confetti. This evokes a certain bittersweetness: though confetti typically regards a celebratory affair, Dubie uses it as a way to show the fleeting way that good moments last.

Piece by piece each with a history / Hovering for a moment till they all come falling down, down, down.

The moments are positively remembered, and though they were good to live through, they were ultimately broken by some form of heartbreak, and they are now scattered and forgotten in the way confetti is.

Noteworthy is the penultimate track, a cover of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late.” It is by no means the strongest track on the record, if only because it isn’t original music; still, it’s noteworthy because of how fully Dubie has transformed it into her own. It sounds—and I promise this is in a good way—almost like elevator music, like the kind of song you’d listen to in a super obscure jazz lounge. Her voice rises sweetly over the smooth slowness of the bass and the subtle horns.

The production on the record is phenomenal, too. Says Dubie:

My producer, Micah, is incredibly creative and thoughtful. A lot of the sounds you hear on the record we made in the studio, rather than using samples. One of my favorite examples of this was in “Into the Moon”; the percussion at the end of the song is largely driven by a low, ambient beat—we mic’d the piano pedal going up and down and used that!

“Into the Moon” closes the record and features these spacey satellite-esque sounds. They blip in and out of the track, and the echoing backing vocals distort it further. “Say goodbye and I will follow you into the moon,” she sings. It feels weightless, dizzied. (There’s also a really lovely music video for it that feels similarly.) The simplicity of the lyrics themselves paired with these experimental sounds makes for an incredibly unique, three-dimensional track that rounds the record out really nicely.

There can be found in Dubie’s songs a certain hope despite the melancholy. It is self-reflective; I don’t want to assume that everything written is in Dubie’s perspective, but it’s great that she is not afraid to lay out the speaker’s own faults and flaws, especially as they relate to the potential failures noted in the context of each track.

This authenticity and the cleanness of the production is too, I think, represented by the cover art for the record and the individual singles, all of which are simply made:

My husband, Corin, did all the covers (he also played horn on a lot of the tracks). We wanted to use this image of the moon and have them all fit together and tell a story as well as visually reflect each song. “Confetti” is probably the most obvious because of the splatter pain of color. “Into the Moon” displays the somber, dark harvest moon (consistent with the moodiness of the track). “It’s Too Late” shows a moon sinking beneath the waves. And finally the cover flips that same line so now you can see the wave line was actually a profile of a face.

"Confetti"

"Into the Moon"

"It's Too Late"

I don’t know for sure whether each track is an isolated event or if everything is interconnected. At this point, it doesn’t even matter. In a way, the means by which we move through space and through the different times of our own lives suggests that everything is interconnected, somehow; and so even if there is an overlap, each song on Into the Moon holds its own and defines particular unrelated moments.