Kim Ruehl: You’re on your way to your “one and only band show tonight” …
Catie Curtis: Yeah [laughs]
Why is that the only one? And how? Is it just that all the musicians live there?
Yes, well all the musicians live here … I’m so happy to play with them. They’re such a great group of musicians. It’s just a dream to have them onstage. Since they live here, I can also have them just play on some of the songs. They don’t play on all the songs. Some of them will just be a duo or a trio. I would feel really bad to bring a band on tour just to have them play a couple of songs; but since they live here that’s okay. I could never afford to tour with a whole band
I find one really big benefit of playing with a band versus solo – a difference – it really exercises your storytelling muscle. You’ve really got to have great banter, great stories if you’re a solo performer, because it’s a far more intimate situation when you’re alone onstage. You’ve got to have those stories. You can kind of tell these stories when you play with a band, but for some reason it’s just better when you’re solo because people are quieter and they feel like they get a more intimate experience with you.
Tell me about this new record and where that came from for you.
Well the new material was really written while we were waiting for my daughter Celia – she’s two years old now, she was coming from Guatemala – and we were just waiting to [have her in our lives]. Waiting is just unfamiliar to people, you know. Usually, there are so many things, you just want it and you go get it. So this record was about that time when we were just waiting. We knew she had been born and she was in the world and she would be ours, but there was some time waiting.
And it’s about … that time searching for hope … and especially searching for hope in a time like this. I look at things now with the war and Katrina and the president that I just don’t support at all, and we’re just waiting for hope.
Speaking of Katrina – you wrote the song with Mark Erelli that won the International Songwriting Competition (ISC). How did that come to be? You two have written a few songs together.
Yeah we’ve written maybe three or four songs together. And that was just one that my manager liked and said, you know, "can I submit this for this competition?" so it was the first one that I had ever submitted to them and it was pretty cool that it won.
Just out of curiosity, what do you get for that? Or is it just the pleasure of knowing you wrote the winning song?
Oh no, it’s the pleasure and … well there are prizes. I had an interview with this person earlier who asked me if we donated the winnings from that song to [the relief effort]. And we did, we donated quite a bit. But it is kind of weird to win prizes from singing a song like that. I don’t know that a whole lot of people have heard it, but hopefully it’ll bring attention to the issues in the song.
Yeah, well, and you have that karaoke version on your website ...
[laughs] Yeah, well you know how sometimes you’ll record the vocals first or you’ll record separate from the instruments. Well that’s a song where we had to re-cut the vocals to the instrument track. And I was just in the recording studio having so much fun singing to the track that I thought this song has to be made into a karaoke track. So I guess people can use it for whatever they want, wherever they want to sing it, to share how they feel about things that are going on now.
You know, some people, when they become a parent, become sort of more introspective, more insular and conservative; but do you feel like having children brings social and political issues into a more pressing perspective for you?
Oh absolutely. It’s more important than ever to be involved. You know my partner and I are married in the state of Massachusetts. And we were standing in the kitchen the other morning fixing breakfast, and our kids were in there getting ready in the morning. We had the radio on and there was a show on with our governor Mitch Romney, who’s up for re-election now, and they were saying that gay marriage in Massachusetts has damaged the kids in Massachusetts. I was just so upset, because here we are with our children in our home, you know?
I think the stakes get higher when you have children because you think you don’t want your kids to grow up in a world like this. And I think parenthood just makes you even more of the person you are; and people that get more introspective probably never were active in the first place.
