Former Whiskeytown singer and violinist Caitlin Cary will release her debut LP, While You Weren’t Looking, on March 26th. Backed by a few of Whiskeytown’s myriad former members including husband and drummer Skillet Gilmore, the album features a handful of Cary’s recently written songs and tunes penned and set aside while Whiskeytown were still a band.
Included in the latter category is "I Ain’t Found Nobody Yet," the last of the album’s eleven songs, which Cary says she’d lost track of until her suddenly famous former band mate Ryan Adams reminded her of it. "Ryan actually helped me write it," Cary says. "It’s based on a song that I’d written a long time ago and lost and forgotten. He said, ‘What about ‘I Ain’t Found Nobody Yet’? That was a great song. You need to work on that.’ I couldn’t remember what it was, so he and I worked it out together."Cary says her conception of the LP evolved during the time she spent working on the album and securing a record deal. "I think it would have been more like Waltzie (an EP she released in 2000), more sort of folksy and organic and unpolished," she says. "I think having the amount of time I had to spend on it turned it into something a lot more complicated. I think it’s a really pretty diverse record, from some of the more straight country songs to a few songs that kind of borrow from Dusty Springfield; soul songs with horns."
Encouraged by producer (and former dB’s member) Chris Stamey, whom Cary describes as her "champion," the singer took chances with the accompaniment. "There’s one song that has a toy elephant clacking around on it and several songs that use pretty wild percussion, you know beating on a frying pan or weird percussion instruments," she says. "We mined the Casio keyboard we found at a thrift store for some sounds. Chris Stamey’s daughter has a beautiful toy piano that sounds like little bells."
The initial pressing of the disc will feature a four-song mini-disc that will include a duet with Adams on "The Battle," a former staple of Whiskeytown’s live set. "It’s sort of a really fond memory of a romantic time when Ryan and I used to write together before any crazy shit happened," Cary says. "For me, it sort of crystallizes what was most important about Whiskeytown, which was him and me writing and singing together."
Given Adams’ recent popularity, Cary confessed some ambivalence about including "The Battle" with her solo album. "I sort of did battle, so to speak, with myself about whether it should be on the record at all, because clearly I’m trying to step away from Ryan and do my own thing," she says. "But I love the song so much and I feel like it’s one of the few Whiskeytown songs that was really, totally half me. I really was invested it and people loved it live."
Cary plans to tour in spring, backed by a lineup that she hopes will include mostly people that played on the album, including former Whiskeytown guitarist Mike Daly, ex-Jayhawks keyboardist Jen Gunderman and Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster.
Last year, Adams estimated that Whiskeytown had as many as sixty unreleased songs, and, although no timetable exists for issuing the material, Cary offered a quick peek into the vaults. "Every record we ever made there were at least ten songs that didn’t get on it," she says. "There’s tons of Ryan’s demo four-track stuff. There’s a record we made in the Christmas time of ’97 or ’98, where we came off a tour and went into the studio with Chris [Stamey] and made a whole record called Forever Valentine. I think it’s pretty good, but you can tell that it was made in a couple days. It’s no Stranger’s Almanac but there’s some great stuff on it."
COLIN DEVENISH
(January 14, 2002)