As shopping malls die a slow death across America, there is still one that’s thriving rent-free in Caroline Rose’s head: the Walt Whitman Shops on New York’s Long Island. 

“It’s the place you’d go if you had rich parents,” explains the singer-songwriter, who grew up about 30 minutes away in the modest town of Center Moriches. “If you could afford Abercrombie & Fitch.” Even today, the shopping center is where you can buy overpriced Anthropologie candles, score a J. Crew sweater, and nab an Auntie Anne’s pretzel—all apparently in the name of the famous American working-class poet.

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“That irony was never lost on me. I always found it weird when, like, truck stops and malls were named after politicians and playwrights,” Rose jokes. In Whitman’s case, he was born on Long Island so it’s an easy reclamation of a local hero. But even so, Rose says, someone clearly didn’t do their homework when name-checking him. “He wasn’t very capitalist to be associated with such a symbol of American overconsumption. He was a gay poet that lived with his mother until he was in his 40s and whose work was all about America being built by sweaty field workers.”

The name of the shopping mecca did make for a good album title, though. Rose’s latest stroke of genius is Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, recently released on Rose’s own label, Suck Records, and offering a platter of bizarre and catchy indie pop. If you’re trying to make sense of the title, though, it’s rather futile—at least in a literal sense. Like everything Rose does, there’s a surrealist, Cubist nature to the way they arrange names and songs, meant to make you stop and think, just like you would with a Dali painting at an art museum.

For their latest canvas, Rose saturates it with colorful thoughts on modern Americana, the void it leaves, and the soiled Petri dish by which our culture grows. With that context in mind, the title does fit quite well.

Like the Walt Whitman mall, “gentling a horse” is a real thing, a method for taming a wild stallion through small acts of trust. Rose learned about the practice at a recent show in Texas, and it gave them pause to think about how that relates to kids being reared in today’s superfluous landscape. “It made me think of being a teenager,” Rose said in recent press materials, “and how we were all expected to become well-adjusted healthy adults whilst being raised in an environment that felt spiritually and emotionally bankrupt.”

There’s a bit of this lost wanderer vibe to the whole album as Rose looks at the world around them and keeps saying, “what the actual fuck?”—just in more poetic terms. The wild rodeo of album opener “Yip Yip Yow” explicitly sets that tone. Originally written 10 years ago, ignited by a feeling of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time, the psychobilly explosion bemoans the conventions of narrow-minded small-town life and promotes staying true to your free-natured spirit—your “yip yip yow,” if you will. In the lyrics, Rose vows to bring theirs “all across the USA,” which they have done plenty of over the past 14 years since debuting with America Religious in 2012.

Today, Rose has extended that reach to Canada where they are currently holed up in a hotel room just outside Ottawa while on tour with Modest Mouse. Wearing an STP Motor Oil ballcap over vibrant reddish-pink hair and clothes that look like they may have been slept in for the early 9:00 a.m. call, Rose is scarfing down the last bites of a breakfast protein bar before beginning to say a mouthful about the new album.

“A lot of the things that I was thinking about [when making it] were my adolescence and growing up … and this experience of being an American. I’ve always had this fascination with American culture because it’s so bizarre,” they opine. “Like, you go to other countries, and they have this ancient history and some sort of tie to the land. And in the U.S., it just seems like these white people came over on ships and took over everything, and it just became a giant advertisement from the beginning. Our whole country is an advertisement!” Rose declares. 

If it wasn’t the mall named after a gay poet Rose was thinking about, it was the oddball Route 66 roadside attractions that give local economies a boost every summer. Italy may have the Colosseum, but hey! America has a pothole that looks like an alien ship footprint and you just gotta see it!

“I still have these inspirations of going on road trips with my family and staying in motels shaped like teepees,” Rose says, hesitant to laugh at something so cringeworthy. “Those inspirations are all still there, but now I’m an adult and it’s morphed into more of a case study of humanity and how people live here. The cognitive dissonance and the everyday satire in our lives is so palpable, especially now that we have this comic/tragic presidential cabinet that’s wreaking havoc on the whole country. … We all have to deal with the absurdity of living in the modern world. And you just have to laugh—at least that’s my coping strategy for being alive.”

There’s plenty of well-timed comedic relief across Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall. Just look at the cover art—a painting of someone in acar watching a palm tree catch on fire outside a Circle K with a cheetah crossing the street—and try not to smile at the profundity. On the cheeky electro-pop number “Chow Mein,” Rose also tries to make themselves believe “I am doing fine” while spilling leftovers in the back of a cab and drunkenly throwing up on a bouncer who won’t let them into a warehouse club that shills drinks they can’t even afford. Then there’s the Lynchian “Cement Head,” a loopy art rock track that reduces the human experience to having a head full of cement and lungs like two Ziploc bags with a soul for sale that they swear is “a bargain.”

Over the course of Rose’s 14-year career, this knack for crafting narrative songs has only gotten stronger, and with Gentling the Horse, the songs are so visceral and twisted, they could be the plot of a Kurt Vonnegut book, or maybe even a David Sedaris essay, that dissects the misadventures of life with acerbic wit. Or, even better, the script of a Pedro Almodovar film. “[He] is my favorite director of all time. I just love everything he does because it has this element of camp to it. But then he has these like soap opera stories. I’ve always had a dark sense of humor, and I’ve always loved that kind of stuff,” says Rose. 

Lately, they’ve also been getting into auteur Derek Jarman’s left-of-center films (thanks to the brother of an ex who lent his password for the Criterion Channel). “Oh, and I’ve been watching ‘The Sopranos,’” Rose adds. “I’m trying to watch it from start to finish. Actually, I’m trying to go back and watch all the classic HBO shows that I grew up with, too.”

This penchant for the cinematic also happens to be a byproduct of their environment. Several years ago, Rose uprooted to Los Angeles (after a stint in Austin) and has found it incredibly rich for their kind of storytelling. “I always loved going there [to L.A.] because … well I have this theory that you can tell what the character of a city is based on the signs that are stapled to a telephone pole,” they say. Their tone says trust me on this. “In New York, it’s like, want to learn how to play guitar? Need a dog walker? And there’s plenty of pull tabs at the bottom. You go to L.A. and it’s like, have you experienced an alien abduction? And all the tabs are gone. I love that! Or you’ll meet somebody who you think is completely normal, and then you find a tin foil cap in their bag, and they start going on a rant about 5G towers. I think it overlaps with the same inspiration of the roadside attraction creatures … L.A. is just such a hotbed for bizarre stories, and I love it.”

There’s a sense Rose is building a little cast of these randos in Gentling the Horse. Their first-person trials bring in a range of characters that become specific foils along the journey. On the bouncy “Conversation with Shiv (AKA Liquid K song),” for example, Rose catches up with an old-time friend after some kind of estrangement. Small talk ensues: You’re pregnant again? Did you know they shut down the sugar factory for condos? But as the two warm up, so do the memories: Want to rob a Hobby Lobby again? Remember the outlet mall and that Auntie Anne’s where you caught me sucking down a 4Loco? And by the end, Rose has a heartbreaking confession: “I really could have been a better friend … I left you just like your daddy did.”

Another prime example comes to life on the somber rock serenade, “Valery (Please Don’t Be Mad at Me)” where Rose recounts the mundane—like gas station beer and trips to Aldi—to the ghost of a friend who’s no longer there. It’s as if to keep the spirit close and the narrator’s regrets at bay. In reality, Valery is an amalgamation of two friends Rose had that succumbed to heroin addiction, one of them tragically overdosing, becoming another kind of devastating portrait Rose paints of the American wasteland. Many years later, they are just starting to find the space to process it all.

“I’ve had these friends who’ve been trapped in these really difficult lives and situations,” Rose shares, pulling the bill of their ballcap down further to avoid making eye contact as the conversation turns steelier. “I don’t know why all of a sudden, I’m ready to think about that now. Maybe just because I was thinking a lot about my adolescence and growing up as a teenager and my early 20s. … But a lot of it is coming out on this album, and it helps me be emotionally healthy when I can make a story that kind of involves these hard things that I’ve never really emoted.” There’s one acoustic softie on the album, “Notes to Teenage Self,” that draws out this heavy reflection.

But soon enough, along comes some guy named Jim who Rose could give two shits about. On the lo-fi rocker “Hello Again, Jim,” Rose eviscerates the poor guy during an impromptu run-in, probably on the streets of L.A. where you can often find Rose cycling around town. “You do not mean a thing to me, don’t owe you anything,” Rose declares in the song, cutting down the dude’s has-been coasting with cuts from a knife as dull as he is. “Viper Room was cool in the ’90s, you were blowing lines in the bathroom with Johnny and Leo back before they called it WeHo … ahh everyone loved you then.”

“I have had so many interactions with this very specific type of person who kind of pretends to be like ‘one of the gang.’ And it’s usually music industry people who have these stories, all these crazy stories of being in the music industry when like Pearl Jam was making it big … but at the end of the day, they’re just out of touch, misogynistic, and rude and don’t understand their own power,” Roses summarizes with the precision of an FBI profiler. “It just makes me want to beat my head against the wall every time I have to interact with people like that, and I can’t keep my mouth shut. It’s probably held my career back to be honest. But I find it really fun to be able to make a story and laugh about it.”

If you get Rose talking about the industry long enough, you’ll realize they can also be dead serious about the people that are really messing it up for independent artists like them. For years, Rose has been trying to organize musicians and venue employees to fight for stronger labor protections and collective bargaining rights. It’s a topic they are keen to soapbox when talking about their own work.

“I was sort of an armchair activist until the pandemic and then watching all these venues close or get bought by Live Nation whose power just exponentially grew from preying on all these smaller, independent clubs and staff,” they explain. “And they’re going to keep expanding so that management and promotion [services], owning all the venues, they already have ticketing and the entire touring industry … when they start owning more, there’s less competition. They can set prices. We’re already seeing it. We’ve been seeing it for years. So unless there’s some way [for the rest of us] to organize, it’s not going to stop. The only way that we can combat these huge companies is the majority of the people that work in the bottom half of the pyramid being able to unite in numbers, that’s all the power we have.”

Rose is not defeated though; rather, they are just finding ways to work around the pitfalls in the meantime. In February 2025, they released an album called Year of the Slug that was recorded entirely on an iPhone and tooled with GarageBand. Rose chose not to go a label route (they’d been there and done that with Mom + Pop and New West in a previous life), instead opting to put the record on Bandcamp.

“And it did so much better than I think any of us anticipated it to,” Rose happily shares. “I just had these demos that I was going to turn into an album. But the more I played them for people, the more they were like, these are really good just the way they are.” They did no press or interviews around it and chose Bandcamp for distribution, liking that it’s “sort of a modern-day equivalent of finding something in a record shop,” they surmise rather than counting on streaming algorithms for curation.

“It grew by word of mouth, and the record actually funded me starting my own label, which is just crazy.” In a way, it’s proof of life of the American dream that Rose longingly hunts for on Gentling the Horse. It may never be found inside the Walt Whitman Shops, but it still lies within people who aren’t buying any of the bullshit.

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