After completing her new album High & Low and turning the self-produced body of work in to her label, Caitlyn Smith wrote a song so powerful and important that the only answer was to cut it overnight, alone in her home. The recording’s vulnerability and isolation serves “The Great Pretender,” an appropriate closing track for her third studio project arriving April 14 on Monument Records.
“‘The Great Pretender’ is about the mask I’m guilty of putting on, pretending everything is perfect, when in reality, it’s anything but,” says the Critics Choice winner. “I wrote this song after High & Low was finished and turned in, but I knew it was too important to not have on the album, so I recorded it in my house alone.”
Nobody knows I’m crying in a bathroom stall
I’m living in a house of cards about to fall
But I make them believe that I’ve never been better
I am the great pretender
I am the great pretender
“I’d realized that I’d grown into this version of myself that only wanted to show and talk about the highs and became quite dependent on keeping up this façade that I have it all together,” Smith shares. “Real life is gritty, and wild, and never perfect, and it’s given me so much freedom to be able to be more vulnerable not always put on a happy face, and be honest and unafraid of the more difficult feelings.”
Written by Smith with Bob DiPiero and Joe Clemmons, you can listen to “The Great Pretender” HERE.
The additional six new tracks balance 2022’s critically-acclaimed High, celebrated by NPR as “her most fully realized project yet,” with High & Low capturing the full picture of who Smith is as an artist and as a creator – where embracing the yin and yang simply makes you more human.
Pre-save High & Low HERE.
Track listing (Denotes new song)
1 High – Intro
2 High
3 Dreamin’s Free
4 Lately
5 Mississippi
6 Good As Us
7 Alaska
8 Maybe In Another Life
9 I Think Of You
10 Nothing Against You
11 Downtown Baby
12 Writing Songs and Raising Babies
13 I Don’t Like The World Without You
14 The Great Pretender
In addition to celebrating the release of High last year, the Minnesota native earned her first Academy of Country Music Awards nomination for New Female Artist of the Year. With an upcoming performance at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium’s “Rock the Ryman” concert on March 1, Smith announces more shows soon.
For more information, visit caitlynsmith.com.
About Caitlyn Smith
Monument Records powerhouse vocalist Caitlyn Smith has won a Critics Choice Award, been nominated for an ACM Award, and written songs for Miley Cyrus, Dolly Parton, Meghan Trainor, John Legend and Garth Brooks. Her 2018 album Starfire and 2020’s Supernova saw her in the pages of TIME Magazine and The New York Times and named to Rolling Stone’s 10 country artists to know and Paste’s 10 country artists to watch. Last year, she released her self-produced project High, and this spring, completed the second half of that album, adding six new songs to make her full record, High & Low. In 2022 she opened for icons Reba and George Strait, while headlining her High & Low Tour.
