Heartbreak can be just as devastating when imagined as when felt firsthand. The song “Caroline” by Sleeping Jesus proves it.  

It’s about a love story gone bad. It’s emotional and nostalgic, the kind of song you might think comes from real heartbreak. But it doesn’t. The heartbreak in “Caroline” is imagined — a story built from feeling, not experience. 

Nick Elstad is the lead singer, songwriter and one of the guitarists in Sleeping Jesus. For him, the story behind it lives somewhere else: in the space where imagination meets emotion.  

He says that’s where the inspiration for the song — and for the band’s new album, Shotgun, — came from.

Instead of coming from a devastating, life-altering heartbreak, the song emerged from a creative intensity of its own. Even after decades of making music, that process remains mysterious and astonishing to him.

"It's almost like magic. It seems like witchcraft or something like that. I think that music is kind of like spellbinding," he said. 

He was in a writing haze when he shared a demo of "Caroline." He sent a few versions to his bandmates, along with a number of other songs. They listened, gave feedback and he remembers they were on board.  

But something didn’t fit for Elstad when they first began workshopping it.  

"One day, a set of chords doesn't really hit you a certain way, and then the next day, you might play the same exact chord, slightly different, and there's like an emotional connection that you have with them,” Elstad said.  

“That's what I always look for, like something that feels almost like it wants to be a movie.”

Elstad builds songs by shaping the music and lyrics together, never starting with the words alone. 

He originally wrote it with heavy electronic drums and a pulse that pushed the song forward with a “perpetual motion.” He knew the story he wanted to tell required constant motion. 

"The lyrics need to, like, feel married to the melody and to the chords. So I was figuring out a way that we could do this song justice," he said.  

After experimenting with how they played his original and incorporating instruments like steel guitar and mandolin, the band found that it needed to be acoustic and folk. 

They embraced the change.    

That evolution in genre and sound is familiar to the band. They’ve been playing together for almost a decade and have become a staple of the Winona music scene. They started in indie and indie rock.

Finding the right genre label was a struggle for the band until their most recent albums. They’ve since dabbled in Americana and folk. They even incorporate country.  

They will always have their indie roots, Elstad says, but, according to him, Sleeping Jesus now make whatever music they want to make.  

"Caroline" on the album "Shotgun" by Sleeping Jesus is out now.  

Experience the song at the heart of this story — watch the “Caroline” video below.

This story originally published on the MPR News website.