Caitlin Cary, the onetime fiddle player, harmony singer, songwriter and angel foil to Ryan Adams’ devil in the infamous alt.country band/trainwreck known as Whiskeytown, has a new album out, While You Weren’t Looking (on North Carolina’s Yep Roc Records). If early reviews are any indication, Adams and the rest of the now-defunct band would have been well served to give Cary a few more star turns when the lights went down. No Depression called the record “The best recording yet to surface from the remnants of Whiskeytown,” and magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker have given similar raves.
Apparently, while none of us were looking, Cary has moved from the impressive promise of one solo EP, Waltzie, into a powerhouse songwriter, equal parts piercing and polished. Those who saw Whiskeytown always admired her quiet tenacity and humbleness, not to mention the fact she seemed to be the only one in the room who could shut Adams up.
Now she’s getting the chance to do the talking, and she says she realizes now why Adams sometimes reacted as he did, either on stage or to the media. Don’t look for her to change, however. Talking to CL from the house she shares with husband, former Whiskeytown drummer Skillet Gilmore, Cary speaks just like she sings: measured, on target, and always with a bit of sugar to help the medicine go down.
Creative Loafing: Your songs always seem to work on at least a couple of different levels. How has your background and graduate study in creative writing affected your songwriting?
Caitlin Cary: It’s apples and oranges. I’m quite sure that maybe unconsciously I come up with more interesting ways of expressing an idea from having practiced writing, but the form is definitely constraining. (Former Whiskeytown multi-instrumentalist) Mike Daly and I were sitting outside last night working on a song that I had pretty much finished, but which needed a few lines. Boy, were those few lines a bear, because the words that rhymed were just not good. It took forever to get to (a point where) we were like “at least that doesn’t suck.” I think because of the form, it’s almost more difficult to stick to the truth in a way. When you’re writing a story or writing about a feeling or whatever you know, as a story writer you’re bound to tell the truth as you see it, and you can’t when you’re constrained by the form and with what words rhyme and what sounds musical. There’s certain words… there was one last night when we were trying to rhyme something with the word “feel” and we came up with appeal. You can’t sing the word “appeal.” It sounds terrible, you know.
You write first without music, correct? Just with a vocal melody or that sort of thing?
Yes, I do tend to write just the skeleton of the song. I have written a few on the guitar, but I’m a pretty rudimentary guitar player — so I try not to write too many on the guitar because they’re all going to sound the same, since I can only play about three chords.
Was the Waltzie EP sort of to test the waters artistically and maybe a little bit commercially as well?
It was mostly an act of impatience. I had been struggling trying to wrap up loose ends with Whiskeytown, and I had sort of had a carrot hanging in front of my nose about a major label solo deal. I got caught up in how long it always seems to take to make a record if you don’t have a deal, and getting funding to make the record. I got offered a European tour, and I thought, “I’ve got to have something out there to justify this touring,” so we quickly slapped together Waltzie out of what were essentially demos for the record. I had initially thought it would be kind of a limited edition EP, and then all of those songs would then end up on the big record. But due to the whole thing taking even more time, I ended up writing a lot of new stuff, too.
Speaking of other projects, Tres Chicas is still ongoing, right?
Oh, yeah. Each of us has our own bands, of course, and Tanya just had a baby six months ago. But we love to play and just sort of do it around town. We keep threatening to make a record, but there hasn’t been time. It’s funny — I thought in the time before While You Weren’t Looking came out that I would be able to do a Tres Chicas record, and I’ve realized now that I would have probably tried to slit my wrists had I tried to accomplish that. I’ve been incredibly busy rehearsing and getting the tour together and getting musicians to do the tour and on and on. The Chicas had this dream of making a live record. We were going to rent a church and do the live thing, but not yet, I guess.
I’ve read lots of comparisons with your singing on this album to Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention and Linda Thompson. How much, if any, was stuff like that an influence?
I often wonder if these comparisons would be made had I not done that particular cover (Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Withered and Died” on Waltzie). I love Linda’s singing dearly, though I didn’t know that music until soon before I did that cover. I think if there’s a connection, it’s that I probably grew up listening to music similar to what those guys listened to. I never was a Fairport Convention on Pentangle fan. It wasn’t my cup of tea. My parents would have scoffed at that as being “not true” or not as good as the original.
Folks are saying they’re having a hard time getting the free mini bonus CD (packaged with a limited number of copies of the new record). Have they let you hear about that one?
Bless their hearts. I didn’t mean to do that to folks. It wasn’t a sales gimmick. I mean, I guess it was a sales gimmick, but it never dawned on me that people would be annoyed that they couldn’t get it. But I do hear it from people.
You still work at a restaurant, right? Are people sort of still surprised that you still have a day job?
Oh, I get that a lot. I think a lot of musicians do. People think that if your face is in Rolling Stone that you’re automatically living in a mansion and have a personal manager, and nothing could be further from the truth for most people.
Do people ever come in and recognize you and start up conversations and such?
That happens quite a lot, particularly because (Tres Chicas) play at the Humble Pie, so I’ll wait tables and get up out of the kitchen from washing pots and go up on stage and play. That happens frequently. I kind of enjoy it, actually, because it keeps everything real. Plus, I’m sort of addicted to waiting tables. *
This article appears in Apr 24-30, 2002.
