Some things feel so serendipitous it’s hard not to believe there’s some purpose in everything coming together at the right place, in the right time, with the right people.
That’s certainly the case with Lighthouse, the debut album by local rock band Career Woman. Released on June 6, Lighthouse has been a long time coming, but it took those three ingredients above for it to be fully cooked.
To celebrate, Career Woman—a once solo act, now full band led by frontwoman and recent UC Santa Cruz graduate Melody Caudill—is throwing an album release party on July 17 at the Crepe Place with Dolly Creamer and Hearsing.
“My first year in college was pretty rough,” Caudill explains. “So it was hard to get to the place where I am now. It’s rare to have band members you connect with—on a personal and musical level—let alone to have a community of bands, photographers and artists. It’s so special.”
The community she’s talking about is the new wave of Santa Cruz bands bubbling to the surface of attention. Dubbed by Santa Cruz Recording Studio wizard and platinum record producer Jim Wirt as “Santa Cruz Surf Punk,” the scene includes bands like Trestles, Plumskin, Hearsing (which Caudill is also in) and others.
But it’s those three bands in particular—along with Oakland indie pop act Small Crush—that Caudill has formed a bond with since moving to Santa Cruz.
“It was a ‘meant to be’ situation because I had been introduced to my bandmembers, who are also in Small Crush, before I even chose to go to UC Santa Cruz,” she says, adding she met her band—Jackson Felton, Allen Moreno and Joey Chavez—through her record label, Lauren Records.
Label owner Aaron Kovacs introduced her to Small Crush, who is on legendary Bay Area label Asian Man Records.
“They were only a few years older—and there aren’t many people my age on either label—so [Kovacs] connected us to make some songs,” she remembers. “That went so well that when I moved to Santa Cruz they joined my band.”
Caudill is no stranger to the music world. She grew up in a musical family and has been writing songs since she was a child. Throughout her teenage years she wrote and recorded singles with her father, who is also in indie rock bands. In 2023—at the age of 19—Caudill released Career Woman’s debut EP, Grapevine.
But Lighthouse marks Caudill’s first, proper, full-length album. It’s also the first time she’s released anything on physical media, previously only going through streaming services. However, this time fans—new, old and soon-to-be—can purchase the album on CD or light blue vinyl.
The album “came at a great, pivotal time in my life,” she says. “I’m 21, just graduated college and now have my first album. A lot of things I’ve worked on my whole life have culminated right now.”
For fans of dreamy indie pop with pop-punk undertones, it’s easy to see what she’s talking about. Career Woman’s songs are fully fleshed-out songs with a clear path and written with obvious intention from start to finish. Pulling the themes from her life, Caudill is still able to tell stories that everyone can relate to without making them too personal or murky, while still conveying the ups and downs of being young in America.
Take the opening track, “Piano Song,” in which Caudill writes about being a twentysomething in college, “flirting with boys” and “forgetting my keys.” Then there’s these lines—“I am living in the present /and I am in good company”—followed by a list of affirmations that conclude, “But If you ask me if I’m ready/ I’d say ‘I don’t know’/I wouldn’t trust my own instincts/if they were stuffed down my throat.”
That juxtaposition of confidence while acknowledging her distrust in herself is such a universal feeling, even if most won’t admit it. After all, being a child is thinking adults know what they’re doing. Being an adult is realizing nobody knows what the hell is going on.
Then there are the singles, “Boyfriends” and “Mel’s Drive In,” both of which have videos conceptualized and directed by Caudill.
In “Boyfriends” she sings, “Me and my friends/we don’t like men/but we got boyfriends,” a perfect representation of how many young women feel in a country where men try to legislate what they can—and can’t—do with their bodies and women-hating incels have emerged from their parents’ basements and entered the mainstream as somehow acceptable ideologues.
The other single, “Mel’s Drive In,” was almost a throwaway: unfinished and about a painful subject in Caudill’s life. But that’s when the right person—drummer Jackson Felton—stepped in at the right time.
“He was like, ‘No, this is the best one, just trust me,’” she says. “And then it became my favorite song that we’ve ever written.”
Career Woman plays at 8pm on July 17 at the Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $10. 429-6994.
