15 year-old Caroline Carlile fronts a touring band and a festival

Caroline Carlile, 15, is a regional changemaker and a talented musician. The niece of Brandi Carlile uses her formidable artistry not only to front a band, SmallTown Strings, but – along with her bandmates – to run this weekend’s Kettle River Music Festival, a growing event in her hometown of Curlew.

“During the pandemic, we were all very sad because we would have had a year without any music festivals, any live music, doing absolutely no gigs,” she said. Rather than face the gloom, Carlile and her family got to thinking: what about bringing all of that excitement to their home in beautiful Curlew?

“We got together a group of our friends, and some local music teachers and band members’ parents and we came up with all these creative ideas of what our dream festival would be.”

Then the work began. It took a year for the festival to come together, and in summer of 2021 the first Kettle River Music Festival was held in Curlew, on the shores of the river. “It was a huge labor of love, blood, sweat and tears” said Carlile.

Now, Carlile said, “I could safely say that the kettle River Music Festival is the biggest musical event in the history of this town.”

Her work with the festival stretches beyond bringing musicians into the same space, although the collaborative aspect of the festival is a big draw for Carlile, who said that “as a musician, one of the most powerful things that you can do is collaborate with other artists.”

The nonprofit organization that was started to run the festival also funds local students college tours and scholarships.

“We got to give out a $2,500 scholarship,” Carlile said, “and the girl who received it is going to go to college and she’s going to be a music teacher.”

Carlile’s band, SmallTown Strings, naturally topped festival’s the roster, which included such names as Ben Miller and Blake Noble.

SmallTown Strings is “all kids, with the exception of my dad, who is definitely a kid” Carlile said. They play Americana, folk and bluegrass in a mix of covers and original pieces. “It’s any genre of music played on traditional bluegrass instruments” she said.

Carlile started the band with her 12-year-old brother JayJ Carlile, who plays fiddle. They added Aurora Wentz, 17, on mandolin, bass and other instruments, and Hannah Jackson, 17, on guitar, keys, vocals and more. All four band members are ambitious about their musical futures.

Their two released singles, “Ramblin’” and “Haunted Heart,” are gentle and softspoken compositions built on finger-picked guitar lines. The writing is delicate and relatively pared-back, allowing the lyrics to shine through.

“ ‘Ramblin’ ’ was written about romanticized ideas of what being on the road was gonna be like, because I wrote that when I was 12,” said Carlile.

Just a few years after writing “Ramblin’ ” Carlile got to go on her first real tour, only it wasn’t exactly the “romanticized” experience she wrote about. It was “a lot less sleep and a lot more staying overnight in WalMart parking lots,” she said with hearty cheer.

The band traveled to California, Nashville, and around the Northwest at the start of this summer, supporting other groups and headlining their own sets. They called it the “flat broke tour” because “small bands, we do not make money on the first tour. That’s for sure.”

“I played some of the songs that I had written and never played for a big crowd before” she said.

Right after this year’s Kettle River Music Festival, which runs Friday and Saturday, they will head out for a second tour to Salt Lake City and Montana.

Carlile is able to keep up with touring because of her enrollment at Insight School of Washington, an online public school.

It’s easy to forget that Carlile is just 15. She refuses to allow her youth to hold her back, and at this point has more touring experience than most songwriters in their early 20s. With a festival, tours, and two tracks behind her, it’ll be a treat to see what happens next. For now, she has a new tour scheduled and ambitions to record more releases this fall.

But who’s to say what the future holds for Caroline Carlile and SmallTown Strings.