There’s this thing nobody talks about honestly: after enough heartbreak, you actually get comfortable in it. Comfortable might be the wrong word. Calibrated, maybe. My body learned the rhythms of things going sideways and started treating them as normal. Being kept at arm’s length felt like stability. Waiting on a text back felt like hope. I dated someone junior year who was all wrong and I was so damn at ease in the wrongness that when something good showed up after, I couldn’t compute it. Good felt suspicious. Good felt like a trap. I kept scanning for the catch, the reveal, the place where it turned into what I recognized. And the shit of it is, I almost blew a genuinely good thing because my ass was too wired for chaos to recognize it. That is what Caroline Romano’s ‘Not Used To You’ is about. She wrote the song I was too rattled to write for myself and made it sound like this while she was doing it.
The production on this track is exactly where it needs to be for the story it’s telling. There’s warmth in the mix but it doesn’t go soft which is right for a song about being unsettled by something that feels genuinely good. Caroline’s vocals have this confessional pull like she’s mid-thought and surprised by what’s coming out of her mouth. The arrangement gives her space. The guitar lines shimmer and the layers build without ever cluttering the space she needs. The whole thing moves at pace that feels like choosing your words carefully when you’re not sure you’re ready to say them.
Advertisement
Verse one drops you straight into the moment. “First glimpse I got amnesia / forgot the bruises on my heart / in an instant I just need ya / I never used to like this part” — that amnesia line is so fucking good. One look and the whole damage history just disappears. You don’t decide to forget it, you just do, involuntarily, and then you’re already wanting someone before your rational brain catches up to object. “I never used to like this part” is the admission that the wanting is the scary part, the place where you become vulnerable before you’ve decided to be.
Then she starts interrogating herself out loud in the pre-chorus. “Who the hell are you / just so out of the blue / your timing is kind of rude I swear / I hate that I adore the way that I adore / it’s concerning just how much you care” — “concerning just how much you care.” She is genuinely alarmed by his attentiveness and I feel that in my whole body. Being cared for when you’re not wired feels like a warning sign. He’s showing up and her nervous system is treating it as suspicious activity. That “I hate that I adore the way that I adore” is the whole messy contradiction laid out in one line: wanting someone and being annoyed at yourself for it.
The chorus is where ‘Not Used To You’ goes from relatable to genuinely sharp. “C’est la vie / whatever the fuck that means / got that je ne sais quoi baby / maybe I won’t cry when you kiss me / (no promises) / but it’s fine, cool / go and ruin my mood / break my miserable heart in two / just give me something that I’m used to / ’cause I’m not used to you” — ‘c’est la vie’ is French for ‘that’s life,’ but the ‘whatever the fuck that means’ she throws after it is doing more work than the translation ever could. And ‘je ne sais quoi,’ which is that certain something you can’t name or explain, is the perfect word for a person who short-circuits your whole system on sight. But the part that does actual damage is “maybe I won’t cry when you kiss me, no promises.” The possibility that being kissed gently might wreck you more than being treated badly? That’s where this song goes somewhere most pop doesn’t. And “break my miserable heart in two, just give me something that I’m used to” — she’s almost inviting the bad thing because at least that would feel familiar. The comfort in pain is not something people admit to easily and she put it in a chorus like it was nothing.
The second verse pulls in the literary angle, which tracks for a songwriter who clearly knows what she’s doing. “Last time I felt this speechless / I was standing in the rain / like a [character] by Jane Austen / addicted to the plot and pain” — addicted to the plot and pain is a hell of a self-indictment. We romanticize the suffering, the longing, the rain-soaked dramatic moment. A man who’s steady and present doesn’t have that narrative tension, and part of you misses the tension even when you know it was terrible for you. And then wanting to be “satisfied and disturbing” at the same time — she wants him to be good AND she wants an edge to it. That is such a specific ask and she lands it with complete confidence.
Advertisement
Caroline Romano is from Mississippi, now Nashville, and she does not pick a lane. Ballads that make you cry in your car, alt-rock that makes you throw something across the room. She’s comfortable in both. Her debut album – Oddities and Prodigies – dropped in 2022 with sixteen tracks and she’s been running ever since. Two EPs followed, A Brief Epic in 2023 and How The Good Girls Die in 2025, and the tastemakers noticed. Her live shows are the kind where the room gets loud and stays loud and she’s taken that energy on the road supporting Grayscale and Smallpools. She’s building something real.
She co-wrote ‘Not Used To You’ with Todd Tran, Sam Varga, and Michael Van Wagoner, and she describes it as “about being so used to having your heart broken or things going wrong that it’s almost uncomfortable when they go right.” Yes. Then she goes: “it’s holding your breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop.” I have held my breath through so many almost-good things, waiting for the reveal. Then she finishes it: “but hoping they kiss you anyway.” The hoping-anyway is what keeps this from being a song about damage. It’s a song about being mid-decision. Then she adds: “heartbreak is a habit that’s hard to shake, but ‘Not Used To You’ is the first realization that it could be something different this time.” The first realization. That’s the specific thing she’s writing about, that moment the idea shows up and you can’t dismiss it anymore.
The guy from college and I burned out clean, eventually. The actually good one that came after, I stopped treating him like a setup around week six. Stopped waiting for the part where he revealed himself as something familiar and broken. Took longer than it should have and I’m a little embarrassed about that if I’m being honest. But that first moment where I stopped holding my breath around him and just let myself be there? That’s this song. Caroline found the language for the exact stretch between protecting yourself and letting something in, and she made it sound this good while doing it.
