CAROLINE COTTER‘s sunlit songs honor the countless ways of being human. With her honeyed voice and disarmingly honest lyrics, Cotter sings about connection, nostalgia, gratitude, loss and wanderlust. Lyrics like, “Find me somewhere out on the road / Take me into your heart and into your home,” make perfect sense from a touring artist who has played over 1000 shows in 45 states and 16 countries. She has performed at churches, art galleries, barns, yoga studios, punk bars, Parisian living rooms and even a schooner off the coast of Maine. Everywhere she goes, her oracular songs elicit emotion and spark insight—medicine for our collective longing.

Growing up in Rhode Island, Cotter played piano and listened to records by luminaries like The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Carpenters and Bob Dylan. She spent her early twenties in Spain, Thailand and India; studying yoga and meditation; sleeping on train station floors; washing clothes in the sink; and witnessing the innumerable ways people live. Walking the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrim’s trail across northern Spain, she felt “wildly alive. Waking with the sun in the east and walking west each day, I felt free yet full-of-purpose” —a feeling she would later recognize and reclaim as a touring musician.

As a songwriter, Cotter waits for the wellspring of emotion to arise and then wrings her experience out into rhyming couplets. The process typically starts with nostalgia or longing—wondering about the way things were or the way things could be. She’s endlessly questioning existence, spinning and carding her worries, hopes, and joys into the fabric of her songs. Cotter has released three records, Dreaming as I Do (2015), Home on the River (2018) and Gently as I Go (2023). Under the Radar magazine says her music, “brings forth an abiding sense of warmth and welcome, offering an uplifting reminder to make the most of every moment.”

Cotter’s songs move effortlessly from the grand to the granular. Take “Coming Your Way,” a traveler’s anthem about the people who keep her afloat by opening their hearts and homes. Or “The Year of the Wrecking Ball,” in which the narrator revisits her childhood home and wrestles with the dissolution of her family and sense of continuity. Then there’s “Gone Away,” a hymn for the lost and downtrodden—or anyone needing to be called back to their life’s purpose. With the precision of an analog photographer, Cotter adjusts the aperture of her attention to move between the particular and universal qualities of our lives.

Cotter has performed at the Freshgrass Festival (North Adams, MA), Rocky Mountain Folk Fest (Lyons, CO), Ossipee Music Festival (Ossipee, NH), Falcon Ridge Folk Festival (Hillsdale, NY), Rockwood Music Hall (New York, NY), Isis Music Hall (Asheville, NC), The Alberta Rose Theatre (Portland, OR), Swallow Hill (Denver, CO) and more. She won the Maine Songwriters Association Contest and was a finalist at the Freshgrass and Rocky Mountain Folk Fest Songwriting Competitions. When not living nomadically, Cotter resides on the coast of Maine.