Eighteen months in the making, “honest” is a breakup song that refuses to end
Ask Rodrigo Caraballo-Marin what “honest” sounded like a year ago and the answer is that it sounded nothing like this. The song, released under his Blue Capricorn moniker, has been through a year and a half of rewrites, a change of headspace, and a collaborator who arrived with her own ideas about where it should settle.
That collaborator is LOREN KOLE, the Cuban-American artist and producer who, like Caraballo-Marin, is based in Dallas. They met a few years ago, and he knew then he wanted to work with her eventually. When his second EP, when you come back, transcend me, began to take shape, inviting her in felt, in his words, natural. What they found they shared was less a sound than a question: what music does to the person making it, and what they hoped to pass on through their own work.
Most songs about a failed relationship reach for a verdict. “honest” holds off. It lingers in the uncertainty and attachment that remain after love has stopped working, which is where most people actually live for a while. Synths and delicate keys carry the song, with atmospheric guitar and percussion kept restrained enough that the space between the two voices does as much work as the voices. The guitar is Jesse Katz’s, the mix and bass synthesizer Alex Bhore’s.
The song’s long life shows in how Caraballo-Marin talks about it. “It felt like this song had lived a life because it had evolved into something so pure and precious to us,” he says. He describes the finished track as “nothing more than a song about vulnerability and accepting failed love,” and credits LOREN KOLE with helping him get further into that headspace, and with finding a musical ambiance that spoke to them both. Her role, by his account, was as much about permission as production.
It sits third on a seven-track EP that moves between ambient texture, experimental production and indie rock. Caraballo-Marin’s influences, from Massive Attack and Portishead to James Blake and Nicolas Jaar, explain the appetite for atmosphere. The songwriting around it stays direct. His 2023 EP ¡AYÚDAME! introduced a Dallas artist who treats melancholy as something with hope folded inside it, and “honest” extends that.
Elsewhere on the record, “MISERICORDIA” brings in Black Taffy, another Dallas collaborator, and a title like when you come back, transcend me suggests the EP’s subject is not closure. “honest” is the track that says so plainly: some endings are accepted before they are understood, and the song is what that looks like.
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