Where is my love? Cat Clyde howls, opening her new album Mud Blood Bone with abandon. Can't find my love? It's not the somber lament of a longing woman, but a feral eruption, the roar of an animal on the edge. Her voice crumples with dismay, a swampy croon over romping keys. I got a hole in my chest / I can't take the emptiness / Where is my love? It's the essential question of Mud Blood Bone, a void eleven frenetic songs sizzle to fill.
The Métis Canadian songwriter's fourth full-length and first release with Concord Records finds her at a point of personal evolution. "I wrote these songs at the end of a big cycle," she shares. "Love was not present in my life and I didn't know where to find it or how to get it back." Essential to the search, Clyde discovered, was relinquishing old notions. "In the past, I felt like love chained me, controlled me, put me in a cage."
Produced with Drew Vandenberg (Toro Y Moi, Faye Webster, S.G. Goodman) and recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia, Clyde's new collection exists in a sonic overlap; the rockabilly grit of contemporaries like Sierra Ferrell, The Deslondes, or Nick Shoulders, meets the vulnerable, folk rock volatility of Big Thief or Angel Olsen. "Drew was the perfect person to help me assemble the players and bring this collection to life," says Clyde. "Everyone brought their own unique gift to the studio. I create from a place of instinct, and once we all locked in, it felt easy, and we were able to capture the songs live." Liam Duncan of Boy Golden was another integral collaborator. "He was there from day one demos to the album's finalization," Clyde explains, "as a great friend, musician, and anchor to the original sentiment of each song."
Clyde's foundational relationship with music began through a vent in the floor. "I'd lift the rug up to hear my grandfather playing his fiddle along to cassette tapes in the basement." This was in North Ontario at summertime family gatherings, the best of which would culminate in impromptu family jam sessions. "I can't really remember a time when I wasn't singing."
After a fleeting, childhood stint with the piano, Clyde took on the guitar around age thirteen. "When I discovered Blues music—well—that changed my life." The riffs of Lead Belly and Robert Johnson were too complicated for her small, preteen hands to master, but they inspired Clyde to write her own songs. She busked through adolescence, joined a punk band called Shit Bats in college, and recorded her first album in a friend's basement before she graduated. Four full-lengths later, Clyde's voice vibrates with that ferocious confidence of one who's been doing this her whole life.
Mud Blood Bone exudes a nomadic independence. Clyde penned some of the songs in her 1973 Boler trailer, parked temporarily on a farm in Ontario, others on a narrow boat in England, and the rest in transit from one festival to another, letting lyrics stream freely from a jetlagged dream state. "Constantly being on the move, having to navigate new environments, it forces me to be present, and to confront my own feelings," Clyde says. "You can't hide behind comforts. You have to know exactly who you are, and what you want."
The result is uninhibited, raw, pure; it's the sound of personal truth discovered in real time. Clyde is cracked wide open and what spills out—equal parts despair, invocation, discovery, and celebration—is the love she went looking for.
