Brian D'Ambrosio interview with Caitlin Canty

Описание: Caitlin Canty: Tending to Fires,
Getting to Truth

By Brian D'Ambrosio

New days and clean slates keep coming for singer-songwriter Caitlin Canty. She is sharpening her skills, raising a family, and continuing to build a body of work that reflects resilience, quiet strength, and resolute honesty. Her new record, Night Owl Envies the Mourning Dove, is a testament to her evolving artistry – an album that turns natural solitude, domestic change, and hard-earned wisdom into a collection of songs that sound both grounded in the earth and untethered from time.

Canty was born in Proctor, Vermont in 1982 and grew up surrounded by rural landscapes and the gentle rhythms of smalltown life. Raised by a schoolteacher mother and a house-painter father, she found song in ordinary moments – singing in chorus and playing trombone in school before receiving her first guitar and VHS-tape lessons at age 17. After earning a biology degree from Williams College she moved to New York City, where she worked for the Emmy-nominated series Live from the Artists Den while pursuing music on her own terms.

Her early releases – including Golden Hour (2012) and the breakout Reckless Skyline (2015) – drew acclaim for her “casually devastating voice” and “hauntingly urgent” Americana ballads. She won the Telluride Troubadour songwriting competition in 2015 and began touring extensively across the U.S. and Europe, collaborating with artists like Peter Bradley Adams and Jamey Johnson, and earning praise from Rolling Stone, NPR, and No Depression for her gritty lyricism and radiant poise.

In recent years, she and her husband, musician Noam Pikelny, moved back to Vermont, settling on a mountaintop near her childhood home. There, Canty continues to record, tour, and write – with the same battered 1939 Recording King guitar that has accompanied her throughout her career.

One of the album’s most tender tracks, “Don’t Worry About Nothing,” carries the voice of a mother consoling and encouraging against the endless churn of small anxieties. It is at once lullaby, sermon, and reminder: that one bad thing does not mean the whole world has collapsed.

“There is a mom’s voice and perspective to focus and worry about the things that do matter,” Canty explained. “But also how little worries and little jealousies can work against us… Tornadoes, awful things, [they] remind you how short life is and what’s actually important.”

The song’s origins stretch back to a small mishap – her young son’s toy castle tumbling down – but its weight comes from deeper, darker places. In March 2020, a tornado tore through her East Nashville neighborhood, missing her home by mere yards. Not long after, the pandemic upended the world. The castle was a metaphor, she realized, for the way everything can crash at once, yet perspective offers a way forward.

For Canty, who released Reckless Skyline a decade ago, the test of time has reshaped her relationship to both music and ambition. “My real goal is to be writing more and better songs,” she said. “My real goal is to be connecting with more people through those songs, playing with musicians that I adore, and getting on good stages. Not worrying about courting people, but to do right by the music.”

Doing right by the music has meant widening her scope. Night Owl Envies the Mourning Dove reaches for longevity, not trends. It sits comfortably in a lineage of songwriters who, like Canty, trust the songs to outlive themselves. “I look to musicians who have had longer careers, like Dolly Parton,” she said. “She is singing songs that she wrote in her 20s. There are so many who have a gorgeous output of songs that are their lifelong friends. It’s not about when they were written or how people liked them then.”

Canty doesn’t wait around for the muse. To her, waiting for inspiration is “a fool’s errand.” She compares songs to photographs – fleeting impressions that must be captured before they fade. “You take a picture and you remember it as notable and beautiful and there is something about it that makes you want to share it. That type of inspiration sparks a song. It happens countless times a day.”

But the challenge, she says, is to honor the purity of that first flash. “You are lucky if you have the time from start to finish to complete the song and make the world go away. The fewer co-writers the better, including myself. If you open it up again in two weeks, or a year, you have different eyes… and that brings too many people and opinions into the room rather than one solid voice.”

Some of her most recent songs arrived in just such a spark – like during a violent rainstorm in Vermont. Alone in her cabin as thunder cracked over the mountains, Canty felt a song arrive like lightning. Hungry, shivering, and unable to leave, she turned to the page.

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