“Positivity is Elemental to Who I Am”: Caroline Jones Takes Us Behind Her Vibrant New Album, ‘Good Omen’

Following a high-profile stint at Sphere Las Vegas as part of Zac Brown Band, Caroline Jones is readying her debut album with Nashville Harbor Records, Good Omen.

Arriving on February 13th, the project follows the Connecticut native's widely acclaimed trio of independent records, Bare Feet, Antipodes and Homesite. Jones has been a respected figure in the country music landscape for the best part of a decade.

Even so, in many ways, Good Omen feels like a rebirth. Jones has always infused a level of perception and wisdom into her music, whether she is conveying the challenges and joys of balancing country stardom with motherhood on ‘Being a Woman’, or tackling a unique form of grief on ‘Talking to Milo’, for instance.

But on Good Omen, the highs feel even more euphoric and the lows feel extra crushing. ‘You're It For Me, Honey’ is an undoubted stand-out, with Jones channelling Shania Twain as she delivers an utterly infectious earworm about newfound love.

“That song has been in the works for a few years”, Jones recalls to Holler, “I first had the idea when I was pretty freshly postpartum...Those pop-country productions are hard to do well, because you are merging so many sonic worlds. Obviously, Mutt Lange and Shania set the precedent, and really created that sound. We were trying to hark back to the late ‘90s, early 2000’s, while giving it a fresh twist”.

Jones was first spotted by Jimmy Buffett in 2017, with the Gulf and Western founding father bringing her out on tour in his Coral Reefer Band throughout 2018 and 2019. Buffett even wrote a track especially for Jones, ‘Gulf Coast Girl’, with the then-up-and-comer subsequently scoring coveted spots on tours with Kenny Chesney, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw and more. Jones remains one of the only artists on the planet to have a song that features both Buffett and Chesney, the two leading lights in the island-inspired, sunshine-fuelled sub-genre of country music.

When you're cutting your teeth with an artist that was renowned for lacing a sense of optimism and positivity into their music, it's hard for that not to rub off on your own sound. Jones continues Buffett's legacy of music designed to brighten listeners’ days, with each of her records being underpinned by a glass-half-full spirit.

Jones muses, “I think optimism has been a thread that's run through all of my albums. Positivity is elemental to who I am as a person, and how I want to look at the world”.

Good Omen features overwhelming explosions of joy - such as on ‘You're It For Me, Honey’ and ‘Family’ - but Jones doesn't just document the bright and galvanising hues of her life. Rather, she makes a concerted effort to dip into a melancholic palette, too, epitomised by the bittersweet ‘Divorce in a Small Town’ and the defiant ‘No Tellin’, which finds Jones getting candid about emotional abuse.

Jones reflects, “I've had the courage to look at harder topics, and I think a lot of that comes from becoming a mother, getting older and being in a marriage. I'm dealing with some of the darker colors of life more. So there's songs like ‘No Tellin’, ‘Divorce in a Small Town’ and ‘The Bridge’ that speak to some of the less pretty parts of life, but hopefully with a really compassionate and evocative eye”.

‘No Tellin’, in particular, showcases Jones’ ability to tackle a vulnerable topic with care and candour, while giving the track a movingly empowering and defiant tone.

That song was the product of years of therapy, “All the parsing through of all the lyrical material in that song, I've been doing for years. That song is about an abusive relationship I was in when I was younger that took me a really long time to process, and honestly to even face. So a lot of that work was just done on my own in therapy”.

Jones expands, “I felt like the song had been writing itself for years, you know? I just hope - I really hope - that song goes out in the world and reaches the people who need to hear it, because there's a lot of people who have been through abuse in so many different ways, and it's really hard to process. A lot of abuse is twisted and manipulative, and it's really hard to see the truth, especially when it happens in a vacuum, because there's so much shame. So with ‘No Tellin’, there's strength in even just telling the truth, even if you don't know exactly how to process it or what it means...When a situation gets oxygen around it, even if you tell just one person or five people - or you end up writing a song about it - you can learn so much. You realize that so many people have been through it”.

With ’No Tellin’, the songwriting came after the process had been started to process and work through the trauma, but as Jones explains, often, the writing itself can be a real-time form of therapy, with artists expressing the pain while they're still experiencing it.

Jones emphasises, “I know a lot of artists who feel like they can't process things until and unless they write about it. I don't think that's true for me, because I have a lot of different ways of processing through my feelings that work for me as well...I think I write better in retrospect. On this record, I had a lot of song ideas that I wrote from the titles...so I was writing from the concept, because I had these messages where I was like, ‘I want to distill this meaning or this lesson into this song’...What's cool is you end up writing a song, and then there are nuggets of wisdom that you didn't even know you had until after you write them”.

If you had to boil down the core philosophy behind Good Omen, you would end up somewhere between the title-track and ‘All The Things’. The former is a beautifully ethereal reflection on nature's messages of reassurance and encouragement, while ‘All The Things’ is a rallying battle-cry in which Jones proudly attests to how she is able to balance her career aspirations and her family life (“I can rock the baby, I can chase the dream / I can plant the garden and the in-between / I can be myself and I can wear your ring / Baby, with you, I can do all the things”).

Jones confirms, “‘All The Things’ was the first song I wrote for the album that I really felt like, ‘Wow, I have a direction, and I've written a song that really encapsulates my life over the last couple of years’. I look back on that song with such fond memories, but also hard memories of taking a four-and-a-half-month-old on tour, and trying to navigate the empowerment and momentum of being able to have a career and being a new mom. But also the anxiety that comes with that chapter of your life, and the pressure that comes with being a “Working Mom” or a “Rockstar Mom” out on tour. It's amazing, and it's such a gift, but it's hard”.

Jones goes on, “In a similar way, ‘Good Omen’ embodies so much about where I am right now in my musical chapter, in terms of the rootsiness, the acoustic instruments, the Appalachian dark-folk influence. And then, lyrically, it's very poetic. The harmony is a cornerstone of my music, and I've always stacked a bunch of vocals, but this entire song is in three-part harmony. It was written with two really wise women, Sarah Buxton and Joy Williams, and it's a deep song...If someone said, ‘Give me a snapshot of your music’, I would play them ‘Good Omen’”.

With the arrival of this album and a Zac Brown Band World Tour on the horizon - including a blockbuster set at London's BST Hyde Park - balanced with the thrill of watching her toddler grow with her husband, Jones is living by the cri-de-coeur of ‘All The Things’. As she triumphantly declares, “I get to hit the gas, I get to smell the roses / Where the adventure goes, that's where our home is”, Jones asserts herself as a flag-bearer for the dream-chasers - whatever that dream looks like.

Caroline Jones’ new album, Good Omen, is out on Friday, February 13th 2026.

Featured photography by Alysse Gafkjen

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