Why She Needed To Mix Things Up

"At this point in my career, I knew I wanted to try something a little different, especially after talking to [regular producer] Bill [Chambers] and he was saying I should try a new producer,” singer-songwriter – she’s much more roots/folk and alt than straight country – Catherine Britt explains the genesis of her new album, Boneshaker. “So having all those different things on my mind would have taken me to a different place, for sure, but this album was very much inspired by a really great Steve Earle album I love called Washington Square Serenade, a very brave album by Steve done with a DJ that, I dunno, just changed me. I just really love the record and totally wanted to make something like that.” 

To that end, last year, Britt took herself off to the Catskills Mountains near Woodstock, setting up home in a yurt. “I’d recorded most of the album in my home studio and felt I wanted to get out of my comfort zone with my songwriting as well, so I just booked there, of all places, because I just thought it would be really cool to hire a yurt and hide in upstate New York for a while and write a record, so I did, and I’m glad I did because I ended up writing half the record there. The writing in the yurt was the easiest songwriting I’ve ever done, simply because that was all I was there to do, and I actually replaced songs I’d written already for the album. I probably won’t do it any other way in future, for sure.”

As well as co-writing the title track with Tony Buchan, Happier Day with Felicity Urquhart and When You’re Ready with Melanie Horsnell before she headed off to the yurt, Britt can now boast recording a duet with Steve Earle. “I haven’t written a lot of love songs and that’s because I haven’t really felt like it was appropriate or that I’d had that great love I guess that I felt I could imprint on the world forever in an album. It wasn’t until I met James and married that it was obviously different. So I wrote You & Me Against The World accidentally one day and I played it for him when he got home and he couldn’t look at me for two days,” she laughs. “I think he likes that Steve Earle sang on that song more than I did, but that’s ok with me.”

It was Ryan Hadlock’s body of work – he’s produced records for The Lumineers, Brandi Carlile and Foo Fighters – that convinced Britt he was the man to produce Boneshaker. “I was going in blind – I had no idea about anybody in Seattle – so Ryan was literally pulling people out for what he thought would fit the songs and me as an artist, and he did a great job obviously and I basically had The Lumineers and Vance Joy’s backing band as my house band in the studio – it was amazing.”