INTERVIEW: Cat Clyde Brings Unapologetic Blues to Caffe Lena
09/20 @ Caffe Lena, Saratoga
Photo by Christy Bush
“I feel like blues is really punk rock—the expression is very unapologetic and you go to those very loud places and I feel like I’m given permission to express whatever it is.”
On September 20, singer-songwriter Cat Clyde will take the stage at Caffè Lena in Saratoga for a solo acoustic set as part of her Northeast tour with folk artist Willi Carlisle. Fresh off a stop at AmericanaFest in Nashville, Clyde is ready to share her deeply emotional and blues-infused songs.
I spoke with Clyde on the first day of the tour to talk about her inspirations, her love for the blues, and her latest single, “Wild One”.
Clyde’s music stands out in today’s indie landscape for its emotive storytelling and her gritty, expressive vocals. We discussed our shared love of the blues, and how her music is so influenced by it.
“I love early blues!” she said. “I feel like that was some of the first music I heard that really blew me away. It’s just so packed with emotion and truth and I feel like blues gives you permission to feel the deep blue feelings that are present and sometimes indescribable and can also transmute those feelings and alchemize them into something that feels quite good.”
Clyde feels a rebellious spirit in this genre that might fit in well in the near future of the contemporary music landscape.
“I feel like blues is really punk rock—the expression is very unapologetic and you go to those very loud places and I feel like I’m given permission to express whatever it is,” she said. “There’s a big part of me that hopes that comes about and I feel like blues music is really healing. There’s a lot of heaviness going on in the world right now so I feel like it would be super cool if the blues came back in an interesting way.”
Clyde’s newest single, “Wild One,” reflects a period of deep personal transformation.
“When I wrote it I was going through a very changing time and I felt like my heart was changing and my ideas of love were changing and my femininity was changing and I was at a place where I really started to reconnect with my wild self and my feminine self. I‘ve really been on a journey to connect with that and the importance and the power of that.”
The song also connects to Clyde’s Métis identity, which is a mixed-race, Indigenous ancestry from Canada. It’s a heritage she has sometimes felt distant from. During this period, she developed a close friendship with another Métis artist, which helped her explore her roots and spirituality. It also tied quite a bit into her writing process.
“I really learned a lot from them and got to do a lot of connecting to the natural world in both a spiritual and ancestral sense.”
One lyric from “Wild One”---“I know this room, I know this floor…”—echoes Leonard Cohen’s famous line from “Hallelujah”. Clyde intentionally altered it slightly, noting, “For me, that lyric really points to timelines – how time is not linear and how there are different realities and different timelines and they’re all happening now.”
This contemplation of time also further emphasizes the spirituality aspect of the song.
“I believe that a lot of times, I’ll write a song and it will be a message to my future self and I won’t necessarily understand the message until later. It kind of feels like when I was writing that song, all of those things were happening and I didn’t quite understand it but it felt very familiar to me and it’s something that I understand better now and probably will better later on.”
For audiences seeking music that speaks to the soul, Clyde’s sold-out performance at Caffe Lena this weekend promises to be a transformative experience where the past, present, and future of roots music all converge.
For more information, visit https://www.caffelena.org/event/willi-carlisle/