Right as the COVID-19 pandemic began to take hold in 2020, Caitlyn Smith released her sophomore album, Supernova. Unable to tour the LP, the singer-songwriter opted to give several of its tracks the acoustic treatment and release them as an EP. “This is my favorite way to listen to music—stripped down, raw, just how it was written,” Smith tells Apple Music. “I am a singer-songwriter, and really I'm just a songwriter. And so the songs are birthed with just a voice and a guitar, or a voice and a piano.” Comprising four Supernova songs and one track—the powerhouse ballad “Tacoma”—from her debut LP, Starfire, Supernova Acoustic is a showcase both for Smith’s irresistible songwriting and for her megawatt voice, which especially shines against these sparse arrangements. She even includes the original voice-memo demo of Supernova’s title track, truly pulling back the curtain on her creative process. Below, Smith walks Apple Music through each of Supernova Acoustic’s tracks. I Can’t “I've lived in Nashville for 10, 11 years, and this city's changed so much. And thankfully I've changed so much. I'm a different person than when I first moved to Nashville. And so, I sat down with my co-writers, Ben West and Stephen Wilson Jr., and we kind of just talked about this idea of change and how it's inevitable for us all. But sometimes when we come up against that moment where, you know, you need to move on, let go, or fix something, it can feel impossible. It can feel like ‘I can't,’ right?” Put Me Back Together “I've been married to my husband, Rollie, for almost 12 years. And he's my greatest muse, sometimes much to his dismay. I'm quite a mess of a person at times, and so I feel incredibly grateful to have found a partner who can sweep me up at the end of the night and put me back together. Cheat Codes and Kiiara recorded a version of it and released it. But I've always felt so close to just the version of me and a piano that I wanted to put it out there.” Rare Bird “‘Rare Bird’ is one of my favorite songs to play live. I think those wailing choruses and the crunchy verse lyrics just make me really excited. And I remember when Jon Randall threw this idea out to Ben West and I, we were so excited. I remember we wanted to paint these wild, beautiful verses, lyrics like ‘You wrap my heart up like a satin silhouette’ or like ‘You fly right off the screen like a Technicolor John Wayne and you take me home.’ That's one of my favorite lines that I've ever been a part of.” Tacoma “This is an old friend. One of my favorite songs to perform live—and it's always a moment in my show, like my heart explodes every time I sing it—is ‘Tacoma.’ When it's just me and a guitar. There's not a version of me just doing it stripped down like that.” Supernova (Voice Memo) “I had written this song with Aimee Mayo and then went home to play it for my husband. And so this version of ‘Supernova’ is me sitting at my piano, my little baby grand, in our living room, and playing it for my husband. And my little son Tom is in the background; he's probably two. What I loved about the song is you can kind of hear them in the background a little bit and at the very end, he goes, ‘Yay.’ And I think it just added to the magic of the song. It's a moment in time that was captured.”