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.
