Caitlin Canty’s guitar seems to have been around forever – it’s a battle-scarred Recording King Jumbo from 1939 – and her songs are the same way. Her melodies draw from the blues and folk tradition but in startlingly fresh ways and with lyrics as vivid and precise as Raymond Carver short stories. “They seem to exist without having been forced into existence,” says guitarist Rich Hinman, her frequent collaborator. Canty delivers them in a voice that’s clear, smart, ardent, sometimes aching yet always restrained, so that every quiver, burr and microtonal bend cuts deep.
Plenty of us already know Canty well. At 43, she has been building her sparkling indie-folk catalogue for 20 years: five full-length albums, four EPs, and million-streaming singles like her 2020 masterpiece, “Where is the Heart of My Country.” But for the rest, here’s your chance. Canty’s new album, Night Owl Envies the Mourning Dove, which is available to buy now and starts streaming Oct. 2, may be her best yet. To understand what makes this one special, it helps to know what the artist has been up to.
Canty’s last appearance in the Fretboard Journal multiverse came in March 2018, when she was set to release her winsome third LP, Motel Bouquet, produced by Noam Pikelny. (The Punch Brothers virtuoso put down his banjo to play slinky Telecaster on the album). In Seattle for a gig, Canty and Pikelny stopped by the FJ offices to tape a podcast. When Jason Verlinde asked them how they knew each other, they told him, sort of, but left out the part about falling in love and impending marriage. Canty didn’t want to exploit their romance to promote her music.
The seven years since have been tumultuous and wildly productive. In March 2020, the couple survived the Great East Nashville Tornado, which cut a swath of destruction down their block but somehow spared their house. They weathered the pandemic and brought their first baby boy into the world. In 2023, Canty released Quiet Flame, a glowing acoustic album produced by Chris Eldridge. It backed Canty with God’s Own East Nashville string band: multi-instrumentalist Sarah Jarosz, fiddler Brittany Haas, and double bassist Paul Kowert. Around the same time, Canty and Pikelny left Nashville for a remote mountaintop cabin in Vermont, not far from the house where Canty grew up, where her mother grew up, and where her parents still live.
While Pikelny rode the Punch Brothers train and co-founded the bluegrass supergroup Mighty Poplar, Canty steered her own course below the music-industry radar, making transformative art for a hard-won fanbase without the help of a record label or manager. She mails out albums and merch from a little Vermont post office, tends to her bicoastal following on Substack and Patreon, and gigs whenever she can. “I need to perform my songs,” she says, “but I can’t drop my life to tour everywhere under the sun. Because now there’s another baby to care for.”
In March 2024, six weeks before giving birth to her second child and already so big she could barely hold her guitar, Canty booked four days at Sam Kassirer’s 1790 farmhouse studio in Maine and made an album that sounds like New England – flintier, bluesier, harder-edged than Quiet Flame or Motel Bouquet. Night Owl is a return to the percussive electric vibe of Reckless Skyline, the critically acclaimed album Canty recorded in Massachusetts in 2015. This time she co-produced (with Kassirer, who also played keys) and cut the tracks live with a band drawn from the New England scene where she got her start – Hinman and drummer Ray Rizzo, who both play with Kassirer in Josh Ritter’s Royal City Band; bassist Jeremy Moses Curtis and harmony vocalist Matt Lorenz (Suitcase Junket), who both played on Reckless Skyline. “I had one chance to get the songs down before the baby came,” she says.
“Caitlin was so pregnant when we made this record,” says Hinman, who has toured with Canty off and on for a decade. “But she was just trucking right through it. She’s really tough that way. It was kind of amazing.”
“I was sort of terrified when she showed up with three guitars and a carful of groceries,” says Kassirer. “But I couldn’t believe the energy coming off of this person. She gets right to work. She knows exactly who she is and what she wants. And before you know it, we’re listening to a playback and she’s smiling and saying, ‘Man, it really sounds like me.’ That made me so happy.”
“She’s scrappy,” says Hinman. “She just does it herself. I don’t think she came into music with any expectation that it would be different. She keeps her operation lean and portable but always has what she needs to do a beautiful job. I mean, I’ve seen her pull a Fender Pro Junior amp out of her suitcase.”
Canty’s albums tend to pair her voice and guitar with a musical foil: Pikelny’s Tele on Motel Bouquet, Haas’s incandescent fiddle on Quiet Flame. Hinman fills that role here with a mighty arsenal – a 1936 Roy Smeck Deluxe (a fine match for Canty’s old Recording King), a 1980s Tokai Strat strung with flatwounds, a Show-Pro pedal steel, and a baritone Tele. Across all those flavors and textures, he provides just what the songs need to reinforce the sense that they are found objects, not made ones.
“There are a lot of before and after moments in my life,” Canty says. “And they’re embedded in these songs. Before the tornado, after the tornado. Before I had a baby, after I had a baby. When I lived in Nashville, when I lived in Vermont.”
They say parenthood turns you into a morning person the way being chased by a bear turns you into a runner. Night Owl explores themes of motherhood and the search for home, but Canty is wary of saying so, partly because she doesn’t want to exclude people who aren’t parents, and partly because of fear. “The crazy thing about becoming a mom? I’ve seen great artists take a step back to have kids, and they get swallowed up and don’t return. So that was always scary to me. But parenting is such a big part of my life right now – as a touring musician and as a writer – so of course the songs are steeped in the realities of being a mother. But I don’t want to lead with that fact because it would narrow their meaning.”
The songs derive undeniable power from the deep experience of grown-up living, from life changes that refract through them in unexpected ways. The album’s title track, for example, begins with a very Vermont idea – “I might stay in the mountains/Never come down never come down” – but Canty wrote it in the flatlands of Middle Tennessee before she knew she’d be moving back north. “We started coming up to Vermont from Nashville during the pandemic for two months at a time, and I immediately felt like I’d never left. And then Noam fell in love with it here. So we started coming four months at a time, and finally left Nashville to be here full-time.
“We’re living in the literal clouds,” she says. “On a dirt road on top of a mountain. We see the full night moon coming up over the mountains, and we see it set the next morning on the other side – amazing. We’re very far from people, so we don’t have to listen to everybody mow their lawns around the clock. And the slower march of time here is helpful when the whole world feels like it’s on fire. But there’s a lot we miss about Nashville. It felt like home, too.” So on “Night Owl,” she doesn’t want to “leave the street where I met you/And leave the stair where we fell in love.” And in “Dear Home Again,” a slo-mo Celtic dirge with a thick, foreboding drone produced by Kassirer’s pump organ and Rizzo’s water-filled singing bowls, Canty sings about “setting off on a deep ocean” in a voice that cuts through the fog with sweet memories of “swaying fields … gentle woods … and laughing stream” while wondering “Oh will I see my dear home again?”
“I mean it quite literally,” she says. “What is home? Can you get back to it? The
idea of home is always morphing: my literal house, my neighborhood that was unrecognizable after a tornado, my country that does not look like the place I thought it was. Where will my boys call home? How long before the place you call home changes? I don’t know. To be determined.”
Taken together, the first three songs on “Night Owl” trace a progression from passion recalled to passion rekindled to passion squandered. The recollection comes in “Hotter than Hell,” the album’s first song and lead single, a rousing anthem of scorching young love that deserves to blare from car radios all summer long.
Way back in the mountains
Black cherry wood
Hotter than hell
Your heart in my hand
The thunder of blood
Drumming through the land
My body the land
The song gets across both the urgency of live-wire passion and the tattoo it leaves behind years later, “after the fever breaks.” Making his Tokai Strat sound like a lap steel, Hinman delivers a thick, broken-fever slide solo that staggers before it soars, gathering strength for a searing final flight that sets up a shattering bridge: Canty’s burnished voice tangled with Lorenz’s harmonies, the barest hint of rasp creeping in on the last word of the couplet to tell you she’s not making this up:
Years flash by faster than you think they will
The sweat on your neck I can taste it still
Passion rekindled is the subject of “Open the Window,” an R&B number about two people doing the dishes until one of them makes a demand: “Open the window, let the night roll in/tell me you love me, could stand to hear it again/Listen to the song/Spin me round the kitchen.” Kassirer suggested to Canty that she put down her guitar for this one and she sings with real power, letting herself go, trusting her upper register. Kassirer caught the performance live and spare with lots of room reverb, a B-3 throb and a 335 solo, and no backing vocals. He was going for a Muddy Waters’ Folk Singervibe, and got it.
That gives way to a story of passion squandered by familiarity, a slow waltz, powered by Kassirer’s muted piano, about a relationship gone so wrong that “we’d have to be strangers to be lovers again.” Imagining a life where she’d left him, she concludes, “I’d miss my dog the most.” Ouch.
After that three-song journey, the record clears the air with a busting-from-the-gate rocker called “Electric Guitar,” a wake-up call for anyone who ever put aside their dream to raise a family. “Did you put down that electric guitar you bought but never played?” The song came to Canty the day her toddler discovered her long-neglected early-‘60s Kay Speed Demon hollowbody in its dusty case under the bed. She held it upright so he could pluck it like a double bass and then, while he investigated the empty case, she tuned it up and started writing the song. She finished it at a 2021 songwriters’ retreat in New Hampshire, where she played it for friends one night, then came down to breakfast the next morning and heard them singing it together. (And yes, she strummed the hell out of her Speed Demon when she tracked the song at Kassirer’s studio.) “Electric Guitar” is one of the tougher songs on the record, along with “High on a Lie” (a guided tour through states of self-delusion) and “Bird Dog” (a swaggering rocker about being fed up with heartbreak). But with Canty, sometimes the softest songs hit hardest.
“Heartache Don’t Live Here,” the only co-write on the record (she composed it with singer-songwriter Jamey Johnson) is a stately song of liberation, a peaceful stroll through an old house that feels bigger and brighter since someone who’s never mentioned moved out. Old acoustic guitars chime and Canty sings, “Those old blues they still do come knocking/Nobody answers the door/That burden can just keep on walking/Heartache don’t live here no more.”
The emotional centerpiece of the album, “Don’t Worry About Nothing” is as gentle as anything on Quiet Flame. A fingerpicked lullaby – a hug disguised as a song – begins with Canty consoling her little boy after a bully wrecks his building-block castle, then pivots to Canty’s mother consoling her. “Don’t worry about nothing/a new day keeps coming/even the morning learned how to break.”
“I started writing it as a mom to my little one,” she says, “but the rest of the song is entirely written from my mom to me. In her voice, what she said to me after the tornado was a huge life event for us. So, don’t worry about nothing? Well, there clearly are some major real-life things to worry about, whether it’s a tornado or a pandemic or the results of an election. But the message is, Don’t let your mind get eaten by whatever’s chasing you. And so that’s my mom: She’s weathered some of the worst things that can happen, and she is the happiest, most stable person I’ve ever known. And so very wise.”
Even by Canty’s standards, the song is deliberately undersung, plainspoken and lovely. “Well, it feels like it’s my mom’s voice, so, yeah, Cathy Canty wouldn’t be out there showing off.” And neither would Cathy Canty’s daughter.
