Artist Profile: hemlock

hemlock, the project fronted by swamp-raised soul Carolina Chauffe, represents a vast collection of songs spotted across the sweeping plains of America. From Lafayette, Louisiana to Chicago, from Portland to Austin, hemlock captures the spirit of mud-strapped tires, of Kerouac gazing upon the world’s splendor from porches and ground hallowed by mere human touch.

Carolina’s musical journey began as a child, when they became a member of their local church choir, providing them with formal vocal training. As an instrumentalist, however, they are entirely self-trained. 

Eventually, Carolina helped to form a band called Shrugs, playing regional shows around Louisiana and neighboring states, which helped them to grow comfortable with the vulnerability of performing on stage.

When Shrugs dissolved, they bought a nylon string guitar from their friend, and the power of inspiration that arose from a new instrument brought hemlock, as a solo project, to life. Their sound, as it formed, slowly took on a shape of its own, wholly embodying the folk zeitgeist of an eager, rampant populism. They describe their own music, in part, as phone-fi, recorded with wholesome accessibility. 

“To me, [folk is the] music of the people, you know, it's for the people by the people. And if the tools that we have are our phones that are in our pockets all day… then why not use that?”

This practice of accessible recording also helped to inspire the artist’s developmental song-a-day project, where they choose one month out of each year to write and record a new song every day. Six of these projects are available on streaming services, “november” having been released in late 2024. Through the projects’ entrancing corpus of hand-picked instrumentals and softly-hummed lyrics, Carolina’s songwriting ability becomes abundantly clear, the scrapped-together memories of each day becoming ingrained into the music itself.

Over time, hemlock gained a rotating group of collaborators, which empowered Carolina to bring a fuller life to her work as a solo artist. Their recent project, 444, backed by a band composed of Bailey Minzenberger, Andy "Red" PK, and Jack Henry, collects many of these demos from Carolina’s annals, bringing them to an evolved and fuller life in their arrangements.

While all of the songs on the project underwent some sort of transformation, Carolina’s favorite is “Hazards”, which, in its final form, oscillates between a wailing summons and a soothing melancholy.

“The one that surprised me the most was “Hazards”... I'm kind of howling and growling some of the vocals, and I really like having other people supporting me. Having the band support me allowed me to kind of push my own sound further than ever. And so, when I listen to that demo, it's the same feeling but it was allowed to fully bloom and really explode in this way that I feel really proud of and feel like we realized the song and it's as it was intended.”

After departing their last permanent home in Chicago in November of 2023, Carolina has lived entirely on the road, touring and living out of borrowed bedrooms and sheds across the country. While this has limited their ability to write music frequently (they describe themselves, jokingly, as a “trucker who plays music sometimes”), it has also evoked a sense of transience and etherealness in their sound.

As they continue to work, they plan on settling down for a bit later this Spring, finding a semblance of stability in which to live and create. However, as hemlock continues, the project will continue to take its own shape, inspired by the places and people that Carolina has communed with.

“I just want to allow [my sound] to continue expanding and evolving in whatever direction is natural without having too much of a conscious hand in shaping it… I think that there's a lot of potential for the sound of hemlock to be molded by the collaborators that I work with and that work with me, so rather than trying to kind of guide the sound in any direction, I'll allow the sound to come to me, you know, as an opportunist in that way.”