A memory on loop: Your Smith stands underneath a spotlight. Short, curly hair sharpens her cheekbones. Light bounces off her white shirt and soaks into her black pants. She’s triumphant, more reassured than I’ve ever seen her, a homegrown songwriter returned to preach this creed: “You can always change your mind.”

“You can always change your mind.” Vague and alluring. Does your relationship deplete your energy? You can end it. Does your job clash with your values? You could quit. After making a change, do you feel better? If not, change your mind again. Each decision has trade-offs, and it’s a privilege to be able to choose. But anyone can answer these questions: What are you afraid of? Who do you want to be?

Your Smith shared this advice during a 2018 First Avenue show. At the time, Smith was living in Los Angeles and had recently debuted her new stage name. Three years later, a lot about her life has changed. The Detroit Lakes-born artist has moved back to Minnesota with her partner and a baby on the way. Plus, she’s in the middle of a “writing renaissance.”

In Between Plans

“I specifically moved to LA to expand my horizons as an artist; as a human; as a woman,” says Caroline Smith, who records and performs as Your Smith. “And it was the challenge I needed in my life.” Smith is sitting in a Northeast Minneapolis coffee shop, wearing a big, blue button-up and mom jeans. As a 20-something in the Twin Cities, she was a big fish in a small pond, leading Caroline Smith and the Good Night Sleeps and duetting with Lizzo. By 2015, she wanted to be a “tiny fish in a huge ocean” and headed west, where she could write songs with bigger fish and escape the Minneapolis microscope.

LA brought Smith freedom and big wins. As Your Smith, she released two EPs: Bad Habit and Wild Wild Woman. She sold out the Troubadour in West Hollywood, and her song “Wild Wild Woman” soundtracked a big moment in the Showtime series The L Word: Generation Q. In Smith’s personal life, she explored her queerness and androgyny, free to do so in a land of so many strangers.

“But you know, I turned 29; I turned 30; I turned 31,” Smith says. “There was still this anxiety in the back of my head that had to do with my biological clock.”

Smith says she adores family, from her mom and siblings to her nieces and nephews. She has dreamed of having her own kids to bring to Christmases and concerts and canoe trips. But when she left Minnesota, she put 2,000 miles between herself and her family. “So there was always this pull between Los Angeles, [which] had my heart completely,” she says. “And then this question mark looming, like, ‘What's my future? Am I trading in my career as a professional songwriter in the studio every day — when I'm not on tour — for that desire to have a family of my own some day?’”

Out in LA, she started dating Adam To, a chef who had a flourishing career and his own Minneapolis roots. “We were so happy with our careers and our lives and our community,” Smith says. “But at home, we always missed each other. We [figured], when I get here with my cooking career, or when I get here with my music, then we'll have a family.”

Home Again

In spring 2020, COVID-19 put Smith and To’s careers on ice. “We were in Los Angeles for probably two weeks, holed up in our one-bedroom apartment, no AC, not a ton of room,” Smith says. Her mom, who had just moved in with a partner, offered them use of her air-conditioned house near Lake Harriet. “So we used it as an excuse to pack up all this s*** and leave LA,” Smith continues. “It was traumatic, because we loved LA so much, and we didn't get to say goodbye to people. But in the back of our heads, I think we both were looking for an excuse to start a family and do all the stuff that we always wanted to do.”

Since the April 2020 move, Smith’s life has been full of change. After returning to Minnesota, she went back to undergrad, and she’ll complete her English degree this month. Smith and To bought a duplex in South Minneapolis. And — yep! Smith is five months pregnant, giddy and physically exhausted and as ready as she’ll ever be.

Smith wouldn’t have had time for these personal shifts if she’d followed the crowd. At the advent of the pandemic, she watched her musical peers pivot from tour to TikTok and livestreams. “I was like, with all due respect to my management, I'm gonna sit this one out for six months. And then that six months turned into a year. For a year, I just didn't worry about music,” she says.

Of course, Smith’s version of “coasting” looks like others’ “full plate.” During her break from music, she wanted to keep learning and evolving. She called a family friend who worked as an independent construction contractor and offered help. “I worked with him all summer and throughout the fall, and he just taught me everything,” she says. “We replumbed locker room showers. We sawed through cement, put in egress windows ... hung drywall, tiled, did everything.”

Now that Smith and To own a house, Smith has applied those skills at home. “I'm so consumed with my duplex timeline and my pregnancy timelines,” she says. “I'm allowing myself that, because I've only ever lived my life by my touring timeline since I was 16 years old.”

Simple Season

Shortly after getting vaccinated, Smith asked Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus if he’d like to hang out and write music together.

“I remember being in high school and seeing an article about Caroline Smith and thinking that she was the s***,” Luppen says via phone. “She’s an incredible songwriter … We scheduled two days [at Hippo Campus’ studio], and in those two days, we cranked out two great songs. It was pretty seamless.”

Smith, Luppen, and Luppen’s Hippo Campus bandmates Nathan Stocker and DeCarlo Jackson have been working on a Your Smith album that “feels like Minneapolis again,” Smith says. “We just f*** off for seven days straight and have gut-busting laughing, and the songs live on a hard drive until we want to dig them up and be like, 'What's the song “Stepdaddy” sound like?'”

Their new music is “sort of ’70s,” according to Luppen. “Kind of a merge between the Caroline Smith and the Good Night Sleeps stuff and the stuff she made out in LA with [producer] Tommy [English]. There's definitely a pop element to it, but … she wants it more rustic and Laurel Canyon-y.”

This organic Minneapolis project has attracted one of Smith’s dream producers: Rostam, who came up in Vampire Weekend and has produced music by Haim and Maggie Rogers. Earlier this year, he heard a clip of the new Your Smith music over Instagram and wanted in.

Smith has long admired Rostam’s ability to make music sound “throwback and new at the same time,” she says. “That's what I tried to do with Your Smith ... I would always reference Rostam. I cried the first time he sent back a song, because I was like, 'This is always what I wanted to sound like.'”

The Rostam-and-Hippo-infused Your Smith album doesn’t have a release date and won’t for a while, especially given Smith’s focus on home and family. “But I'm definitely gonna hunker down with Caroline this winter and get a good handle on it,” Luppen says. “We have like eight songs now, and I think we're gonna churn out a bunch more.”

Quality time is the big difference between Minneapolis and LA songwriting, Smith says: “When you're writing in LA, you finish the song at the end of the day that you started the song. Here … it’s way more about us having fun and doing what we want to do.”

Luppen likens his own LA songwriting sessions to speed-dating. “An artist comes in, and you talk for an hour. And then it's like, all right, let's write a song,” he says. “All you can do in those situations is make shit that knocks really hard, which is a great exercise, because pop music is difficult to write. But I think there's a lot more nuance to making a good record.”

Follow Your Arrow

“Success is far too often defined solely by financials or numbers and not by the personal fulfillment element,” says Seth Cummings, CEO of LA-based management company Bailey Blues, which represents Smith, K. Flay, and Raffaella, an pop artist who happens to be dating Luppen. “When we first sat down with Caroline, she sent us a list of goals,” Cummings says: “‘In the next five years, I want to buy a house, I want to have a baby.’ There's a bunch of others on this list — like, she wants to write a book at some point — that I know she'll do.”

Cummings still mourns Smith’s pre-COVID momentum. “I know she's been an artist for a long time,” he says, “but we'd only been working with her for maybe a year or 15 months. We put out some music, we got her supporting other people on the road, and then we did a headline run, and shows in London and Berlin were all sold out. All the record labels [were] calling. It felt like, ‘This is going to be her moment.’ And then the pandemic pulled the plug.”

“​​But I don't know, we kid with her, like, she won the pandemic, in terms of what she's accomplished,” Cummings continues. “Maybe not on the music side. But people that have had solely music endeavors during the pandemic, it hasn't been fun.”

“I needed that [time away] in my life so, so much, and I was terrified to ever do it,” Smith says. “Because you're scared that if you go away, they'll forget you. And maybe they've forgotten me? I don't know. I don't care … I decided [life] doesn't need to be that hard. This rise and grind thing? It's total bulls***. As long as music calls me, I'll meet it. When it stops calling me, like it did in the beginning of the pandemic, I'm going to stop.”

Smith exhorts her fellow musicians, “Do what you want to do. And don't let the music industry tell you what you can and cannot do, because they don't know anything. They just follow what the crowd already likes. ‘You can't have kids, you can't be in school, you can't explore other things’ … Those fears are make-believe. Those are just built-in mechanisms of capitalism. Do what you want to do.”

And remember: You can always change your mind.