Catie Curtis
Newton Center, Massachusetts, United States | INDIE
Music
Press
January 11, 2012
Posted on January 9, 2012 by valerie
There are two things the audience attending Friday’s Catie Curtis concert seemed to learn: (1) Catie is an incredible storyteller whose powerful and uplifting lyrics can likely seduce a smile out of anyone; and (2) there was a little magic in the air that night.
Catie Curtis, an award-winning singer/songwriter, wife, mom, philanthropist and female “folk-rock goddess”, has an uncanny ability to radiate a positive and authentic glow felt by everyone in her presence. While she’s been to Bend a handful of times throughout the past decade, her credits include performing at the White House, and sharing the stage with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Dar Williams, Patty Griffin and Melissa Ferrick, among others.
What a night to kick off our North Rim Lodge Concert Series of 2012. It started off a bit magical with a timely light snowfall that looked dazzling against the white twinkling lights outside the Lodge. Yes, we’ve been waiting for this white stuff for some time now and it seemed to make us all a bit giddy as we prepared for Catie’s performance.
And then, a treat for us local Bendites! Catie brought guest, Jenna Lindbo, a Bend High graduate whose blossoming career led her to touring with Catie last fall. While the audience included much of Jenna’s friends and family, by the evening’s end, we all became fans of Jenna’s darling personality, moving lyrics and beautiful, clear voice (and boy, can she play a mean banjo!). One of the most moving moments of the night is when Jenna sang a song she wrote about the piano teacher that inspired her love of music, and her teacher’s late mother who had greatly influenced three generations of musicians. That teacher was in the audience and there were many damp eyes as we witnessed the love and appreciation between the two families.
And just when we thought it couldn’t possibly get any better, we experienced another treat during Catie and Jenna’s final performance of “Let There Be Life”. “Is there possibly someone in the audience who knows sign language?” Catie inquired. One hand in the second row shot up “I’m a sign language interpreter,” was the response. In this intimate crowd of 80 or so people, we learned that this interpreter, CM, had met her future wife on a cruise in which Catie had performed years earlier. This couple has been emotionally connected to Catie and her music ever since, which had landed them in Bend on this winter night. CM spontaneously but beautifully interpreted the lyrics of a moving song that was performed with a power and emotion that was not lost on anyone in the audience. - NorthRimBend.Com
By Moira E. McLaughlin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Catie Curtis is a bit surprising. She's all the things you might expect from a New England singer-songwriter: smart, thoughtful, soft-spoken. But, then, she's also something you wouldn't expect.
Catie Curtis, whose new CD, "Sweet Life," includes such upbeat songs as "Happy" and "Are You Ready to Fly?," is a little dark.
"I think we're all aware of the doom and gloom," Curtis says. "I think people are really anxious. There's no point in writing music that's reminding people of all the reasons to be anxious." And so she doesn't. Sure, she may be worried about the world, the country and the environment (especially since she just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," a post-apocalyptic novel), but you won't hear much of that on "Sweet Life." "I felt like I was gonna miss all the good stuff getting too laden with all the bad stuff happening in the world, so I tried to pay attention to all the beautiful things happening in my life," she says.
Two of those beautiful things are daughters Lucy, 6, and Celia, 4, whom she and her partner of 12 years adopted when the girls were babies. When asked about the joys of being a parent, Curtis pauses for a second before responding. "You know, I'm having like a thousand thoughts going through my head all at once," she says with a laugh and then jokes that it's when they're fast asleep that she really finds joy in them. But then the hope and beauty Curtis presents on her album comes through, and she adds, "I've really enjoyed being a family with them and my partner and creating an environment where we can really be ourselves."
Curtis, 43, grew up in a small, "homogenous" community in Maine, where she says she felt "kind of mute" and "suffocated" as a gay teen. An artist neighbor at a yard sale noticed Curtis looking longingly at a guitar. " 'I'll give this to you if you promise to play it,' " she remembers the neighbor telling her. "That kind of changed my life right there."
She doesn't know what happened to that woman, but in a way, she pays homage to her through her new nonprofit group, "Aspire to Inspire," which provides guitars to economically disadvantaged youths. Since August, the organization has raised $8,000 and given 15 guitars to kids.
"It's been important because a lot of the motivation for me was to connect with people," Curtis says. "I believe a lot of the problems in the world are caused by people feeling disconnected and not part of a community and not caring about people they know. With music, you can't help but connect with people."
After graduating from Brown University in 1987 with a degree in American history, Curtis says, she knew she wanted to pursue music. She played at open-mike sessions and toured, but her big break came when she lost her eyeglasses. She took a gig at the Bottom Line in New York to pay for new ones. It just so happened that guys from the EMI record label were there. They liked asked to sign her right then and there.
The story sounds unbelievable now, but back then, Curtis says, many of her friends, such as Jonatha Brooke and Martin Sexton, were getting signed. The labels were looking for the singer-songwriter sound.
Even so, Curtis's career has not been one of sudden fame and fortune. Curtis likens it to being on a ferry, moving so slowly you hardly notice it's moving at all. "All this work and all this time, every so often I look up and I am amazed that I am moving," she says.
The ferry does keep moving, however, albeit subtly. Curtis's songs have been showcased on the television series "Grey's Anatomy" and "Dawson's Creek." Country music star Trisha Yearwood covered her song "Troubled Mind." And she had two albums, "Truth From Lies" and "Catie Curtis," on EMI, as well as five others on smaller labels.
And Curtis hopes for more.
- Washington Post
Catie Curtis is one of those artists that I feel like I’ve grown up in parallel with. From her heartfelt and innocent early music, to her work as a woman getting in touch with her deeper layers, and on through her new collection of songs that reads as the work of a woman who understands who she is and what she holds dear, Curtis has provided a soundtrack for a generation of folkies.
As part of the folkrock-rich 1990s, the Boston-based Curtis cut her teeth in the company of such icons as the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, Tracy Chapman and the like; artists who have taken the slow and steady route to making music, who prioritize self-expression and artistic integrity, and Curtis is right there with them. With an impressive catalog to her name, Curtis has been a consistent voice in the folk world for the last 20-plus years.
Her forthcoming release (August 30), Stretch Limousine on Fire (Compass Records), is a well-crafted and insightful affair; an open and honest offering that explores longing, love, life, creativity and self. Curtis is at the top of her songwriting game here, crafting songs that are engaging, touching, relate-able and tight. She sings of her childhood memories, embracing the unknown, life as a musician, marriage and family, appreciating the small things, and the inevitability of death.
Produced by Lorne Entress and featuring Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lisa Loeb, Julie Wolf and more, Stretch Limousine on Fire is a musical portrait of a woman who is deeply content with herself and her life. Curtis sings from a place of knowing that life is a magnificent and fleeting gift that should be cherished despite enormous personal and global challenges.
Balancing a diverse range of topics and moods, Curtis has made an album that resonates of joy, insight and gratitude. As she sings in “Let It Last,” I know it can’t last/And all I ask is let it last a little longer.
by Cat Johnson - No Depression
Discography
• Truth From Lies (EMI/Guardian, 1995)
• Catie Curtis (EMI/Guardian, 1997)
• A Crash Course In Roses (Rykodisc,1999)
• My Shirt Looks Good On You (Rykodisc, 2001)
• Acoustic Valentine (2003)
• From Years to Hours ... The Early Recordings (2003)
• Dreaming in Romance Languages (Vanguard, 2004)
• Long Night Moon (Compass, 2006)
• Sweet Life (Compass, 2008)
• Hello, Stranger (Compass, 2009)
• Stretch Limousine on Fire (Compass, 2011)
• A Catie Curtis Christmas (2012)
Photos
Bio
Plenty of performers succumb to the temptation to cruise on autopilot two decades into their careers. That’s the safe and simple way to go, after all. But Catie Curtis, dubbed a “folk-rock goddess” by The New Yorker and treated as one by her loyal fans, is one veteran artist who has resolutely refused to coast along in comfort. Her 13th album, Flying Dream, is a work of both continuity and courage, capturing the way she’s embraced a season of heady change with the emotional intelligence that has been her songwriting signature.
While Curtis has most often composed solo—only occasionally co-writing with such respected peers as Beth Nielson Chapman, Mary Gauthier, Fred Wilhelm and Mark Erelli (a song she co-penned with the latter won Grand Prize in the 2006 International Songwriting Competition)—on her latest CD she took a chance on a start-to-finish collaboration with Sugarland co-founder and modern folk songwriting luminary Kristen Hall.
Gauthier introduced the two talents, and from there, says Curtis (a Maine native), “We discovered that we were very compatible in writing together. After we had a couple songs under our belts, I wanted to keep going.”
“We both care about what we're saying and the message we convey,” adds Hall. “When you're alone out there on a stage, it requires you stand behind your words, quite literally.”
The songs on Flying Dream are sure to connect with her audience and continue the conversation she’s been carrying on with them for nearly two decades. Curtis came to those co-writing sessions with a desire to articulate “some really universal experiences.” “What’s eerie,” she says, “is how much the songs ended up being true to my life.”
She’s always drawn emotionally honest art from her circumstances, sharing reflections on searching for love and finding it, on joining two lives together and—once Massachusetts extended the legal right—on marrying, on becoming adoptive parents and a myriad other experiences, and the autobiographical threads have enriched her work and endeared her to listeners. Because Curtis and her wife Liz are now separated after 17 years together, and their daughters are becoming more independent as they inch toward adolescence, and life just plain doesn’t look or feel the same as it once did, there were complex new corners of the human heart that begged to be explored in this song cycle.
Says Hall, “There’s a lot of bittersweet in it, which is my favorite flavor by a mile.” There’s a lot else in it too, every bit of it delivered in Curtis’s fetching, feathery timbre. Like songs illustrating the powerfully pleasing and painful pull that love can exert on a yielding heart (“Four Walls,” “Maybe Tomorrow,” Bacharach’s “This Girl’s In Love With You”, and the breathtaking “When You Find Love”). And songs that get at the soul-sick experience of sensing trouble in one’s relationship (“If I’m Right,” a song laced with artful wordplay, and “Orion,” which traces out a story of sibling betrayal from Greek mythology). It’s no accident that the album is bookended by songs that deal with choosing to not withdraw from life, but rather savor the simple, sensual and sacred surprises it brings (opening track “Flying Dream,” which has its origins in a trip to Guatemala to visit their adoptive daughters’ birth families, “Live Laugh Love,” an irrepressibly upbeat number that arrives midway through, and closing tune “The Voyager”).
“Sometimes things change in ways that you don’t expect,” Curtis reflects. “It can be really challenging and painful. But I think part of what’s in this record is this feeling of being authentic, going with the ride, going with the dream, and living passionately. I really tend to be resilient and want to look at things in a way where I’m trying to find the meaning in it, find what’s gonna work out about it. It may sound corny...but to me, that’s survival.”
However, as a former social worker, and a confessional folk-pop poet who absorbed the lessons of the politically agitating ‘60s folk revival, the acutely reflective ‘70s singer-songwriter movement and the solidarity of self-expression that was Lilith Fair in the ‘90s (which she played, by the way), Curtis is all about shared triumphs, shared stories and shared causes. She produces concerts in support of Voices United for Separation of Church and State, she got ordained by the Universal Life Church so that she could officiate at her fans’ same-sex weddings, and she writes and sings about joyful and jarring sensations alike from a posture of empathy.
“My goal is not just to reflect my own personal life, but to reflect back to people what happens in life, in their lives, in our world,” she says. “As we all know, sh#t happens.”
Wise words from a truly intrepid songwriter.
Band Members
Links
