Women Who Rock: Caroline Smith

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Caroline Smith's story is a coming-of-age tale -- only hers was done publicly, through music.

In the matter of a few years, she went from playing folk rock as Caroline Smith and the Goodnight Sleeps, to Caroline Smith: soul-singer, chorus belter and feminist leader.

Smith grew up in Detroit Lakes. Her mom helped land her first show at a Minnesota summertime staple.

"She got me my very first gig at Zorbaz," Smith said. "I grew up with my dad playing music all the time. He was in a band and wrote songs. I always felt super natural to write songs to me. But my mom listened to a lot of female singer-songwriters that were really inspiring to me like Carly Simon and Carol King and stuff like that. So I think all of those things just kind of like pushed me up to be who I am."

In her mid-twenties, she already has three albums, and in those albums you can hear Smith growing up. It was in 2013 that she released an album completely unlike the folk ones that gave her so much success early in her career.

"As I grew up and matured and just wanted to establish my own sound of what I actually listened to. I wanted to make a record that I would have listened to if it wasn't my own. And that's what 'Half About Being a Woman' was," Smith said.

Before deciding to go a new direction, Smith and her bandmates were stuck.

"It was really disheartening and it almost broke us up. And when I kind of got enough confidence to write the songs I wanted to write and make the music that I wanted to make, that really just cleared so much up for our band. We become such a happier little unit. For the first time ever, recording music was fun and easy, intentional. It felt like all the stars aligned."

And that's her message to you.

"There's that really cheesy expression: 'Be yourself, everybody else is taken.' But that's really true, and that's what happened with me," Smith said. "And as soon as I unlocked that … the whole record came pouring out of me very, very quick. I wrote the whole record in like a month, two months."

Smith says she will only do things that reflect women in a positive way. And that's even in her album title: "Half About Being A Woman."

"[The album title] is the imperfections and the things that you're ashamed of. And you don't have to be ashamed of them anymore," she said.

Click here to visit Caroline Smith's website.