Late last year we featured ‘Mystic Light‘, the lead single from London, Ontario singer-songwriter Cat Clyde‘s new album Down Rounder. “A fresh vision of the country style,” as we called it. “One crafted from personal emotion but imbued with something more ancient and mysterious too.” Now the record has been released and delivers on the single’s promise. A collection of songs which combines classic acoustic folk (‘Not Going Back’), slow, swaying country (like closer ‘Send You Love’) and big, barnstorming rockers (‘Papa Took My Totems’) to take advantage of Clyde’s flexible singing voice and poetic, contemplative writing to explore landscapes both geographical and spiritual.
The title refers to a slang term for a drunk or a wanderer. “I’ve always felt like a rounder,” Clyde explains. “I feel the term encapsulates the lost and searching nature of railroad hobos, cowboys, gold miners, adventurers—a rounder is someone who moves around through natural landscapes looking for answers, to make sense of it all through movement and experience. To find something or some place that could feel like home, to belong to the land and feel a part of something greater.”
Nowhere is this ethos clearer than on the rollicking opening track, which has recently gotten the video treatment, a love song to both a person and the rejuvenating effect of constant change and motion. “During the making of this record I felt very lost and low,” Clyde continues of the album as a whole, “and felt the songs were a way for me to explore myself and venture more deeply into my own natural landscape within. I was a down rounder, low down but still a rounder.”
Down Rounder is out now and available from the Cat Clyde Bandcamp page. Clyde is also currently on tour in the UK and Europe supporting Lissie. Buy a ticket for the remaining dates on her website.
Tue, Feb 28 Koko | London, UK
Wed, Mar 1 Banquet Records | Kingston Upon Thames, UK
Fri, Mar 3 Melkweg | Amsterdam, Netherlands
Photo credit: Strummer Jasson