Carousel

The Ride That Won’t Let You Off

Some songs arrive from places of strength, confident assertions of desire or joy. "Carousel" is not one of those songs. It comes from the rubble, from the aftermath of something that broke a person into pieces, and it asks a question that anyone who has loved and lost will recognize: what happens when something real finds you before you have finished falling apart?

Made in the Dark

The song emerges from one of the most difficult periods in Cannons’ decade-long history. Lead vocalist Michelle Joy spent the months before the recording of Everything Glows navigating a severe anemia diagnosis, major abdominal surgery that temporarily threatened her ability to sing, and the dissolution of her marriage.^[1][2] The trio (Clapham, Davis, and Joy) had been touring relentlessly, and the burnout had consequences that went far beyond exhaustion.^[2]

Rather than delay the album, they used the enforced slowdown as a creative opening. The illness and personal ruptures became, paradoxically, the album’s most generative raw material.^[1] Joy has described the record as the most vulnerable work the band has ever made, one born from taking a step back and really reflecting, both as a band and as individuals, instead of just pushing forward.^[1]

The band has been candid about the album’s conceptual framework: a journey about losing yourself in the dark and slowly finding your way back to light.^[3] "Carousel," the album’s second track, arrives early in that journey, before any resolution has been reached, in the moment when the spinning is still very much happening.

Still Spinning

The carousel metaphor at the heart of the song does more work than it might initially seem. The image suggests not just movement but circular, repetitive movement with no obvious exit. Being on a carousel means spinning around and around, colorful and sometimes beautiful from the outside, but exhausting and disorienting from within.

It is a precise metaphor for the emotional aftermath of a relationship collapse: the same thoughts returning, the same grief cycling back, the same moments replayed. The narrator opens the song explicitly in that state, having been shattered and spinning in a pattern of heartache that seems to have no stopping point.

What distinguishes the song from a standard breakup narrative is its central dramatic turn: a new connection does not arrive after the narrator has healed. It arrives while the carousel is still moving, while the narrator is still visibly undone. The song does not pretend that the timing is clean or convenient. It simply records what happened.

The World Changes Color

The second half of the song shifts registers in a way that catches listeners off guard. The opening establishes pain and fragmentation, but the later imagery becomes surreal and almost ecstatic. Joy conjures a mind changed in color, vivid scenes from a transformed interior world, sensory language that has nothing in common with the careful, muted emotional palette of someone slowly recovering.^[4]

This is the song’s central insight. It does not describe what happens after careful, managed recovery. It describes what happens when something true crashes into you before you have rebuilt your walls. In that state, with no defenses left to deploy, a genuine connection can change the quality of your entire inner world, not gradually, but suddenly.

Joy has spoken about her songwriting process as a form of mantra-making, a practice of writing toward something she needs rather than reporting something she has already resolved.^[5] "Carousel" has that quality of aspiration built into its structure. It is not a finished story. It is a story in the middle of becoming.

Silent Readiness

There is also a quality of patient recognition woven through the song. The narrator conveys a sense of having been internally prepared for this specific connection without consciously knowing it, a silent readiness that preceded the meeting itself.

This transforms "Carousel" from a song about falling in love to something closer to a song about recognizing what was always there. The narrator has been carrying this readiness, this internal preparedness for genuine connection, through all the pain and spinning. The new person does not create that capacity. They simply reveal it.^[6]

That framing puts an interesting pressure on the carousel metaphor itself. What if the spinning was not just grief? What if it was also searching? A carousel does not go forward, but it is always in motion. Perhaps the narrator has been circling toward something without being able to name it.

Placed Within the Album

Sitting at track two on Everything Glows, "Carousel" functions as the album’s first dramatic turn. The record as a whole charts an arc from darkness into light, with the band’s stated ambition being to make an album about remembering what it feels like to glow.^[3] Within that arc, "Carousel" is the moment of first contact, the interruption of the spiral, the unexpected presence that suggests the dark may not be permanent.

FEMMUSIC Magazine praised Everything Glows for navigating "heartbreak and codependence, brokenness and, ultimately, liberation," calling it a significant creative step forward for the band.^[7] AllMusic places the record within indie electronic and alternative dance traditions that use atmospheric production as emotional architecture.^[8] "Carousel" demonstrates both qualities: emotionally precise and sonically immersive, its whistling textures and intimate vocal performance creating a sound world that mirrors the narrator’s shifting interior states.

Why This Song Lands

Cannons have always been a band that specializes in emotional precision. What makes "Carousel" particular is its refusal of the standard romantic timeline. Most love songs are either about the thrill of new connection (uncomplicated desire) or the pain of ending (uncomplicated grief). This song operates in the harder territory between those poles, where grief and opening are happening simultaneously, where you are still bleeding from one thing and being reached by another.

That honesty about timing is what draws listeners in. The cultural script says: heal first, then open. Joy’s lyric (and the experience it draws from) proposes something different: that sometimes healing and opening happen at the same time, that what finds you in your broken state might be exactly what was always meant to find you.

Cannons themselves formed through an unconventional connection, with Joy joining the band through a Craigslist ad and the three recording their first song without ever meeting in person.^[9] There is something fitting about the fact that the band’s most personally confessional album contains a song about unexpected arrival, about connection forming before the conditions seem right. It mirrors their own origin story.

The Light That Found You First

"Carousel" does not promise that the spinning stops. It suggests something more complicated and, ultimately, more true: that even when you are still turning, still disoriented, still mid-fall, something real can arrive and change the quality of the light.

The inner world that seemed so stuck and so colorless can become something vivid and surreal again. Not because you fixed yourself. Because you let something in while you were still broken.

That is not a comfortable message. It requires the kind of vulnerability that people who have been hurt tend to close off first. But it is a deeply human one, and it is why this song sits so naturally at the heart of an album about remembering what it feels like to glow.