It was March of 2020 and Rachelle Barr had just spent a month writing a song every single day. That’s when her job as a public school teacher abruptly shifted online, thanks to the pandemic.

“Friday they let us out of school and said we’re going to do some school online,” she recalls. “On Saturday three of my closest friends and I finally got all the pieces together to have a recording studio in my living room. It was amazing timing because all of a sudden we have endless hours at home and a place to record.”

Her sophomore album A Little Fog was recorded in the days and weeks that followed and released this month under her artist name Cartinglee. Creativity blossoms in space, Barr says, and you have to give it room to grow. Her living room – and her home on a few acres in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee – proved the perfect setting.

The album’s first song, “Lauderback Lullaby,” is named for the ridge she lives on and inspired by the sounds she hears there, like the road and train tracks at the bottom of the mountain and the sirens and train engines frequently passing by. The first line of “Amaranth” is “ride each muddy wave upon the swift Hiwassee,” the river about 40 minutes from her house that her family goes tubing on. And she wrote “Dreamer” after visiting Cloudland Canyon in northwest Georgia and going for a hike along a creek.

“The connection to place feels really natural, but when I started to dig in you can tell that the land where we live is not well, in the way that sometimes we are not well,” Barr says. “As a society we believe in this hierarchy of life that maybe is not the healthiest way for us to see an ecosystem. In ‘Picture of the Cloud’ I talk about nothing is wrong from the nuclear bomb and when I wrote the song I was hearing the sirens from the nuclear power plant across the river from me. I can’t see it but I can hear the sirens when they do testing.”

And so A Little Fog captures that weighty, anxious feeling that Barr, and a lot of others, began to feel back in the spring of 2020, that understanding that dramatic change is upon us.  It explores the connection between personal traumas and traumas of the natural world.

That mood is especially evident in “Amaranth,” the album’s fourth track.

“It has that ominous feeling with the bass line,” she says. “It creates a sense of something ominous coming and the drums behind it create a sense of change that is coming. Many people have described that song to me as peaceful and I’m thinking how can you feel that song is peaceful? There’s a growing dissonance in the harmonies as the song moves along and by the end you have these ominous drums in the distance and an accordion that gives the song weight.”

But it’s not all foreboding; Barr wrote the songs while coming into a healthy relationship with the life around her and she likens the music to living in a haunted forest and being terrified in the beginning but then growing to realize there are benefits.

“The longer you live there the more comfortable you become with the ghosts,” she says. “The more you see their medicine and understand they have the power to heal you and you might have the power to heal them. I think that’s pretty powerful and that’s kind of what this album is all about.”

Barr describes herself as a piano player who writes folk songs and the new album explores a lot of different genres and styles, like rock and grunge. There are of course folk songs, and piano-driven tunes, but the album remains cohesive as it narrates a mood of lingering anxiety in the aftermath of something.

She plans some album release shows and other performances in the coming months and hopes to play in nearby Chattanooga as well as places like Knoxville and Atlanta. She’s also releasing A Little Fog on vinyl this fall, and is starting another month of writing a song every day this May.

“There’s definitely more music coming, there’s a lot more,” she says.

For more, follow Cartinglee on Facebook (cartinglee), Instagram (cartinglee_music) and Bandcamp (cartinglee.bandcamp.com/music).