Early on in my interview with musician Cat Clyde, one of the most distinctive voices to come out of Ontario since Alanis Morissette, I ask her a fairly innocuous question. Where is she based? “I’m not really based anywhere,” she answers. Perhaps I should have known: on her 2023 album Down Rounder, she delved into an existence that some might describe as rootless. She calls it freedom.
Right now, at least, she’s in Seattle, Washington, rehearsing with her band, getting ready for a new tour in support of her latest work, Mud Blood Bone. Her fourth album is a raw, visceral record that melds folk, Americana, rock and country, with the 26-year-old clawing her way out of the ash and dirt to deliver some of the best songs of her career. Heavily inspired by the end of a long-term relationship with her former bandmate, Strummer Jasson, it opens on “Where Is My Love”, a yodelling wolf-howl of despair delivered over snarls of electric guitar and jangling acoustic strums: “I got a hole in my chest/ I can’t take the emptiness/ Where is my love?”
Clyde’s distinctive singing style – think Sheryl Crow meets Patsy Cline – she thinks, was a way to regulate her nervous system as a kid, growing up in a “chaotic” household in rural Ontario. “I moved around a lot – my parents were pretty chaotic people,” she tells me over video call, clattering around in the kitchen as she makes a cup of tea. Music, meanwhile, has become a means of figuring things out: Down Rounder was written during a period in which she felt “really low and disconnected”, tired from travel and touring. Mud Blood Bone tussles with the heartache and confusion of being out in the wilderness, post-breakup, but also uses Clyde’s smart humour to take on matters of patriarchy, identity and her place in today’s world.
She has a masterful way of capturing the sense of rootlessness that comes with a relationship’s end, like the unspooling of a kite as it hurtles into the sky. “Everything I knew of love/ Flew out the blue tarp high above,” she sings on “Wild One”. “And I feel heavy, I feel sad/ Thinking about the times we had/ All we shared and all we made/ Carved into a single blade.” The title for Mud Blood Bone appears in a lyric on this song, too. “It was a huge transition period for me,” Clyde says of the time she spent writing this album. The breakup was “a really painful experience … And I felt like I went through a rebirth, through the mud, blood and changing in my bones – I changed my whole life, every aspect of it.”
You hear this in two contrasting songs: “I Am Now”, the centrepiece of the album that unfolds over stark, graceful piano notes and ghostly echoes of pedal steel guitar, and the tremendous “Night Eyes”, like a country-fied take on Liza Minnelli’s “Maybe This Time”, as Clyde hollers: “Build a fire in the caves of me, but know I’ll never be a slave again for love.” Recording “Night Eyes” was emotional – Clyde actually wrote it around the time she was recording Down Rounder but didn’t think it belonged on that album. She and piano player Eric Olsen found themselves alone in the studio and recorded it live: “After the final take, we were both crying,” she recalls, “and we had to leave the studio for a while – we both just went into the woods, away from each other, and I didn’t talk for about an hour.” She had more fun on the rollicking “Man’s World”, which is accompanied by a music video that casts Clyde in disguise as a boxer, fooling her male rival. “I really just wanted to punch a guy in the head,” she cracks.
She’s in a new relationship, with a musician based in London who plays with the folk-rock artist LA Salami. They were friends first, meeting when she opened for his band on their US tour: “We stayed in touch over the years, sometimes he would tour manage for me when I was in the UK. And then I was just [touring] solo, and we really connected.” He inspired a few songs on the record, including the gorgeous closer “Another Time”, with its swooning slide guitar and steady percussion. Given Clyde’s roving ways, I doubt the long distance presents too much of an issue. “I do enjoy it,” she says of the travelling about, crashing on friends’ sofas and in spare rooms. “I have a ton of freedom in my life – I can go to Winnipeg to hang out with my friends there, or buy a plane ticket and go to Seattle to be with my band, or to London to be with my partner.”
Finishing Mud Blood Bone felt like she’d written herself out of something, even if she might not fully understand what her words mean until months or even years later. Her perspective on relationships has certainly changed: “I had to relearn a lot of things and check in with what my values are, how to maintain them, set boundaries and stand up for myself,” she says. “It was painful, but I used it to evolve into a better version of myself, so it’s kind of a gift, in a way. It’s given me a lot of clarity about what I want, the direction I want to go in.”
What direction is that, I ask, and she smiles.
“Forward,” she says firmly.
‘Mud Blood Bone’ is out now
