When Orlando-based singer-songwriter Cat Ridgeway and I scheduled an interview for 9 in the morning on a Saturday ahead of her show this Wednesday at Subterranean, I lamented losing an opportunity to sleep in, but I loved her new album Sprinter so much that I had to talk with her. So I groggily yet eagerly logged on to Zoom at 8:56 and waited…and waited…and waited.
After exchanging a few emails with her manager and leaving a message on Cat’s voicemail (more on that in a second), over an hour had passed, and I figured we would need to reschedule. Then, at 10:09, Cat texted me: “HEY!!! Oh my goodness, I am so sorry!!”
Her show the night before ended at 1 in the morning, and she didn’t get to bed for another three hours, so she overslept. But our incredibly fun and engaging conversation more than made up for the delay, as did the opportunity to listen to her hilarious voicemail message: the opening moments of Sarah McLachlan’s charity ad staple “Angel,” with Cat gently inviting callers to “please take the time to donate your phone number, the reason you’re calling and anything else you’re able to contribute.”
(In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll own up to my own faux pas of my computer running out of space in the middle of recording the interview, forcing us to pivot and record on my phone instead.)
Last night must have been quite a show. How's the tour going so far?
It has been amazing. We've been having so much fun. This is the first time we've ever gone out on a proper headlining tour. We've always been more of a support act for other folks. And I honestly was kind of nervous. I wasn't sure the kind of ticket numbers we were going to be pulling because I haven't done a ton of touring outside of the southeast, like beyond Atlanta. We haven't really gotten that far north often. And people have shown up and shown out, and it has been so awesome.
I knew we were doing something right when we played just outside of Philadelphia. We had bring us a bass that they completely refinished and decorated with all this artwork that they did based off of the album. There are lyrics all over it. It's that kind of connection that has been happening at almost all of the shows.
That's got to be so humbling and overwhelming in the best way, to get that kind of response. Do you see that influencing the way you do shows, and the way you write songs, perhaps?
I think so. I realized how healing the music was for other people, because I wrote a lot of the songs on the new record for my own sake to process stuff that I personally had gone through. And I was kind of like, "‘"Well, maybe people will just feel like they got to know me better, and anyone who's already been keeping up with me, they'll just feel like there's an extra layer now." And not only did that happen, but when people feel like they get to know you better, they see themselves in the songs in a way that they hadn't before. And that has been unbelievable to experience.
I've gotten so many people sharing stories with me, different mental health things, people close to them that they either lost or almost lost. And now we're actually partnered with an organization called Find Your Anchor that makes suicide prevention boxes. It's almost like—if you remember geocaching, you know—you'd go find a thing, and then you'd add your own thing for the next person to find it, your own personal touch, like your fingerprint is in that little geocache for the next person.
So they make these boxes, and they're full of resources for mental health and reminders of reasons to stick around. People can add their own anchor, their own little reminder of something, into the box, and leave it somewhere for someone else to find. And so we have all those boxes. We have a bunch of them that we just have for free at our merch table.
And yeah, I mean, it's totally changed the way we do shows. We play a really crazy punk song on a banjo at the end of the show. And I was like, you know, because I'm screaming in it anyway, I was like, ‘Hey, how about we all just scream together if you need that?’ I've seen other people do that on stage before, and I've never really felt compelled to do it. But when we did it, it was so fun. And I actually had a lot of people after that show be like, ‘That was a vibe.’ And yeah, so it's definitely influenced different things I've done and the stories that I've told. I can definitely tell my relationship, especially with the craft of storytelling, is deepening in a way that I was not expecting it to.
You recently did an interview where you went track by track with all the songs on the new album. You pull from so many different areas when you're writing songs. When you're assembling an album with tracks based on mental health struggles, but also other topics, like you have one about a friend dating someone that you don't like, how do you mix all those into one cohesive piece of work?
I think that's where production comes into play, and just having sonic through-lines, even if the lyrics are kind of all over the place in your own life. If you can make the songs make sense on a record where, if someone's driving and they're just in the mood for the album, does it sound like they belong in the same space? I think that's probably the biggest thing.
When we were making Sprinter, we had songs that were worlds apart like that, but we pushed them in slightly different directions than we would have if they'd been on any other album, because they needed to feel like a family on that record.
When you get that, it makes the live show so much easier, because when the songs already kind of talk to each other in certain ways, you can have the most seamless transitions in a live setting.
You mentioned earlier that you typically have played on the East Coast, but you also played at Subterranean last October. What can audiences expect to see on Wednesday that they didn't get to see last time?
We have a new bass player with us right now who has been absolutely crushing it. And last time we came through, we had a quartet. Our sax player unfortunately wasn't able to come on this run with us, but he's still part of the band. We love him dearly. But because we're only playing as a trio, it's opened me up to more lead-style playing, which I normally had not done before. So there's a lot more of that. There's also a lot more looping, because I wanted to create more soundscapes and really push the trio to sound as big as it possibly could. It has been so fun. It's gotten kind of experimental in certain sets, and it's fun. It's a good time.
Sprinter is your first album in five years, but a lot of the tracks were written long before that. “Posture” was written when you were in high school, and you have elements of that original demo in the new recording. How surreal is it to duet with yourself from a decade ago?
Man, when I first heard that final recording, I just cried. It's the most full-circle thing you could possibly do with sound, I think, to sing with yourself like that. It was like co-writing with somebody else, because I felt like so much change had happened in that 10-year span. I brought a big handful of demos into the studio, and I showed them to my co-producer, Mike , and “Posture” was one. At the time, actually, it was called “XX,” because it reminded me of the XX, the little guitar part did. All I had was the “I'll be round” part, and that was it. And “I've been working on my posture.” Those were the only two lyrics I had.
And I was like, ‘I don't know what this means. I have no idea what this is, but I've always thought it vibes.’ And Mike goes, ‘Yeah, dude, that really vibes.’ And I was like, ‘Ok, well, I guess we can start re-recording it piece by piece, right?’ And I thought we were going to rebuild it track by track. And he's like, ‘No, dude, this vibes. Send me that.’ And so I sent him this little demo. It was not mixed or anything. I made this in my bedroom by myself. And he imported that and we just added on top of it. So the demo is the record, and then we just added more stuff. And I was like, ‘No way,’ like, I did not think we were going to work off of it that way.
I'm so glad we did. It was really cool because all the decisions I made back then are working in tandem with all the decisions we made now. And I think that's kind of a really on-the-nose metaphor for life. I really sat there and thought about the lyrics, and I was like, ‘When I wrote that, I had no idea what it meant.’ And as I was combing through so much stuff from the rest of the songs on this record, it became really clear to me, I knew exactly what it meant. It just took me a lot of time. It's so funny because you hear people say all the time, like, ‘Oh, I wrote that song, and at the time, I didn't know what it was about and blah, blah, blah.’ And that actually happens. That actually does happen, and it feels very profound when it does.
But yeah, super-cool to come back to that song, but also that sound. Because I had so many songs in this more indie-alt vein when I was younger that ended up just not getting recorded. I was working with really, really amazing folks on my last couple of records, but I ended up putting out music that felt more like collaborative processes with them rather than my own thing. So this record, I was like, ‘OK, I want to hone in on my personal sound and what I do and what makes me really excited.’ And “Posture” was one of those songs that I'd had forever that I always kept coming back to. It felt like a really nice place to start, so it's funny for me to hear a lot of people say this album's such a shift. And it's like, no, it's coming back to center for me. But yeah, I love that song. And I love how it came out.
I’d imagine that sometimes digging through the archives, you find things that make you think, ‘I can't believe I ever thought this was good,’ along with the things like “Posture” where you realize with the life experience you have now, you’re finally ready to tackle it. Was there any hesitation or intimidation in digging through your archives?
No, I love doing that. I really do. I've always been a huge fan of just collecting. So I have hundreds of little voice memo ideas in various folders on various laptops, and if I ever get stuck writing something, it's been really great to be able to just go back into those and be like, ‘Oh, the bridge of this song was really cool. I wonder if that would work as the chorus here.’ I just kind of, you know, pluck what I need from time to time.
It's always so weird when you have a song from five years ago and then another song from eight years ago, and you're like, ‘Oh, they're sister songs. They go together. Oh, cool.’ That's such a fun thing to do. So yeah, I love going through the archives. Do they sound like complete crap sometimes? Yeah, but that's the beauty of it. If you can sift through that and find the cool part, that's the craft. That's the fun part for me.
And it's going to come in handy when, 30 years from now, you're releasing the six-disc box set of the album with all the demos.
Yeah.
Aside from yourself, who would be your dream duet partner and why?
That's such a great question. I think it would be so fun to sing with Dijon. I feel like he's so soulful and so raw with the way he delivers his vocals. I feel like if you really leaned into a duet with him, that would be absolutely unreal. Kind of surprised he hasn't done that yet. Maybe I should call him.
I think you should. One of the other highlights of the album is “Epilogue,” which, musically, I feel goes more places in three-and-a-half minutes than some artists go in their entire discography.
Oh my God. Thank you.
Going back to that earlier question of blending so many different songs about so many different subjects on a single album, how do you craft a song that has all of that controlled chaos, so to speak, but still has the trademarks of a solid pop single?
For me, the process of writing that song was one of the strangest I've ever experienced. And every song is so different. Honestly, you can you can write songs your entire life, and no two are ever going to come to you in the same way. So that song, I was very inspired by the song “Talk on Indolence” by the Avett Brothers. If you're familiar with it, it starts off like, “I've been locking myself up in my house for some time now, reading and writing and reading and thinking and searching for reasons.” Vocally, it’s these rapid-fire, almost rapping kind of lyrics. I was like, ‘That would be so fun to have a moment like that on the record.’
We started covering “Talk on Indolence” as a band, so it had been in our set list, and what I really loved about it was that it created such a dynamic high in our set energy arc. And I wanted to get to a place where I didn't have to cover somebody else's song—no shade to the Avett Brothers, they're super cool, but I wanted to be able to have my own work that has that kind of energy. So I set out to make this super rapid-fire lyric, and I just started writing, “When the time comes for my own procession, hope God forgives all my transgressions,” and then I was like, ‘Ok, well, what else rhymes with that?’ And then I just used every “-shun” word that I knew.
I ended up writing it lyrics-first, but then I had no idea how to put it to a cadence. I just wrote and let the cadence of the words flow like a poem. Normally, I'm a melody-first writer, so to have this massive chunk of lyrics with no melody in my head yet, it was kind of intimidating, and I actually didn't think that song was gonna make the record, because it took me so long to figure out where to place it all. Once I finally got some semblance of a form, I recorded in my home studio, just vocals, banjo, guitar, and I had the worst drum loop behind it. It sounded so bad, and I sent it to Mike out in Asheville, and he's like, ‘Okay, I can kind of see where this is going. I think I can whittle this down a little bit.’
So he took out some of my transitional parts, and he was so right, like, nothing needed to be that long. I wanted it to feel like a punk song where it was just, like, hard, fast, done, boom. Then he added the bass and some swimmy lead guitar stuff to it remotely. So then he sends that back to me. I'm like, ‘That's cool.’ Then he sends that whole thing to his best friend, the drummer Josiah Wolfe of the band Y, and their project Tall Tall Trees. I had forgotten to relay to Josiah that I really didn't want toms in the drums, like, I really wanted it to be hi-hat and snare, just, like, old-school 80s-style punk. And he went the complete opposite direction and added all the toms in the world. And so when I heard that, I was like, ‘Man, this feels...I don't know about this.’
And I sat on it for a while, and then I realized, ‘No, this is actually super-sick,’ and it kind of pulled it into more of a Joan Jett or Bangles kind of space. And so once we had all of that, everyone had added their thing without interference because we were recording remotely in three completely different locations away from each other. I'd never recorded a song like that before, and working like that also influenced the way I was editing the writing process.
This record was also the first time I was writing while we were recording, which I did not realize how imperative that is to my process, because now I want to make a record like that every time. That was amazing. That song came out really, really cool after I had guidance and flavor added from really great musicians. Mike and Josie really brought that one to life.
You mentioned that you weren't even sure if it would end up on the record. And I remember in that track-by-track interview, you said something similar about “Look Ma, No Plans,” and now you think it might be a single. How do you decide on which tracks are going to be featured in promoting the album?
This is the first time I am putting a record out with a team helping me behind it. It's kind of been a democracy where everyone just kind of puts their vote in, like, ‘I like these songs.’ ‘I like these songs.’ And I'm like, ‘Ok, well, here's industry pros telling me what they think.’ And if there are common denominators between everybody, that's kind of the direction we went in. I also let friends hear the record, and I wanted people who were in the industry and people who were not in the industry to give me their take. And when those were in alignment, I was like, ‘Ok, cool. That feels like the right move.’
“Epilogue” ended up being the first single. I was not expecting that. I felt like at first, my thought process was, ‘Wow, this record's really different. Maybe we should ease people into the sound change and do something that's a little closer to the previous recordings.’ And the team was like, ‘Nope, smack them in the face. Just come out with “Epilogue.” It's really exciting. You're about to go on tour. It's a tour song. Let it be a tour song.’ Ultimately, I could have vetoed that decision, but why? Why would you go against people who have your best interests at heart? So “Epilogue” became the first single.
And with “Look Ma, No Plans,” that was another record that I was finishing at my house, and that song became a completely different song. The only thing that stayed the same from the beginning of the demo that I showed Mike was one of the guitar riffs. And then it just completely, I rewrote everything else. I didn't think it was going to make it because nothing I was doing was feeling right, because the song wanted to be over here, and it started off over here. And it took me forever, but it ended up this really slow slacker rock 90s thing.
Mike actually had gotten kind of attached to the more upbeat melody and stuff, and he was like, ‘Are you sure?’ And I was like, ‘I've never been more sure of anything in my life. It needs to go over here. It needs to be way chiller, but the instrumentation can stay very strange.’ And for a while, when we were trying to work on the parts, we didn't have live drums in it either. Mike had put this crazy drum machine in the background, and it sounded like a Nine Inch Nails track for a minute. And I was like, ‘Well, this is way out there, but I'm cool with that.’ I wanted to just have it be fun.
One of my biggest goals on this record was to have the record feel great playing it live. And I thought that's a cool way to do that, Nine Inch Nails drums. But then we ended up putting real drums in just because that's where the song took us. Sometimes a song will fake you out like that, and you’ve got to be willing to ride the wave. I would love to release as a weird bonus track or something because it's so freaking strange.
I’d love to hear that. You mentioned earlier how the title track is about mental health struggles and that you’ve partnered with Find Your Anchor. How have you seen that partnership resonate with audiences on the tour so far?
Oh my gosh. I mean, the stories that people have shared with me, I'm just honored people feel safe enough in the space we've created at our shows to share that type of stuff, those stories. Again, I think the biggest thing for me, the most validating thing that's happened was when we were in Pennsylvania and a high schooler had brought this bass that they'd spent two months sanding down, painting, refinishing, setting up, and playing to the show. And it's covered with lyrics. There's a check engine light on it. There's just art all over it.
And when they gave it to me, I remember they were like, ‘Hey, I just wanted you to know that ‘Sprinter’ literally saved my life.’ And as a songwriter and a storyteller, you hope that the power of a story and the power of words are going to help somebody. But again, I wrote it more for myself. And then to have it reach somebody in that way, that's so tangible, is crazy. And I will never forget that. And now we have that bass, and it's the touring bass. We bring it on stage every night. I just never would have imagined my song was doing that for somebody. Excuse me.
I have some friends that I've known for years, people who have followed our band for years, that I know personally, like, stayed at their house personally. And I've been told stories and background on folks that I had no idea about when I knew them personally. And I think that's the whole thing, you never know who's struggling with this stuff. And if you talk about it, it breaks this weird invisible wall down. Whether I know you personally or not, if we can connect on something, it just makes people remember, "Oh, there are people out there who care about me." And everybody has those people, and I think music is such a great vessel for people to feel it, even if they don't fully understand it.
It's been the craziest whiplash for me. Because I won't lie, at first, before this song came out and people would tell me personal stories, it kind of made me uncomfortable. I didn't know how to receive that. I didn't realize how that is the highest compliment somebody can give you, sharing something like that from their life. But with this song coming out, it reframed a lot of things for me and it put a lot of things into perspective. And I realized like, "Oh dang, like, this is what it's for. This is why we're doing what we're doing."
But yeah, I have since gotten more comfortable with the whole exchanging of stories. And I'm really, really grateful for that. And I'm glad I'm personally in a more grounded space to receive it because it's kind of…it's the most beautiful and profound thing I think you can have as a songwriter, for people to take your work into themselves and show it back to you.
Speaking of whiplash, you are doing 14 shows in 18 days on this tour. How do you keep the energy and stay sane at that pace?
Copious amounts of caffeine. No, honestly, I live for this. I always knew since I was a little kid that I wanted to tour and I wanted to play music like this. But now that I'm fully living this life, it is so freaking sick. Last night, I think I said to my bandmates like four different times, ‘I love my life so much.’ And they were like ‘Yeah, us too.’
In all seriousness, when you break down touring, what it is, is taking art that means something to you, getting to see a bunch of new places that you probably haven't been to before, or if you had, getting to see cool places again and seeing more of them, catching up with old friends, making new friends, meeting really interesting people, and just getting into different situations that just keep you growing and changing at all times. So you're traveling with art, sharing it with cool people, and seeing cool places. What else could you possibly ask for in this life?
There’s a standup comic I love, Anthony Jeselnik, and he says that his job is not performing, it’s traveling. Getting on a bus every day or flying somewhere is the stressful part. Being on stage is too rewarding to feel like work.
Yeah, for sure. And getting on stage with good musicians who communicate well and have that chemistry like we do right now. There's nothing better. Every night’s different, It feels like different meditations on each song from night to night. It's like, ‘Here's the take we're gonna have on this as a unit together today. And this one is never gonna exist again.’ And so you're just fully present in it. And that's so fun. It's so fun.
But also, I just love getting people amped up. Like music is meant to be fun and life is meant to be fun. And I wanna help remind people of that, even with the struggle that may come with it. I'm realizing now that that's just a really great connection point, but we can still have fun. So if I'm not sweaty and out of breath by the end of the show, I didn't do what I wanted to do.
The last show on the tour is May 18th. How late do you think you’ll sleep in on the 19th?
Until the 20th.
Listen to Sprinter and see Cat Ridgeway with Friend of a Friend at Subterranean Wednesday, May 14 (doors open 7:30pm, show starts at 8pm). Tickets ($15) are on sale now.
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