Caitlin Cary plays fiddle and sings harmony in the alt country band Whiskeytown, which is currently on hiatus. With frontman Ryan Adams recording a critically acclaimed solo effort, Cary has stepped into her own little corner of the spotlight with this charming little five-song EP. Three of the five tunes, including the cover of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Withered and Died,” are waltzes, hence the title.
Waltzie has a real homemade feel to it, and that seems to reflect the way it was created. Cary and Chris Stamey, a fixture in the Chapel Hill, N.C., music scene, are the guiding hands behind it, with major assistance from Whiskeytown guitarist Mike Daley and drummer Skillet Gilmore. A handful of other musicians including Adams helped out. As Cary and Stamey tell it in the minimal liner notes, a lot of these recordings grew out of informal sessions in the recording studio. On the one hand, that gives some of them a welcome air of spontaneity; on the other hand, some of them don’t quite feel finished.
Most of the songs are fairly standard singer-songwriter fare, with a strong country bent to them and a decided air of melancholy. The instrumentation and production are warm and earthy, a good foil to Cary’s rather cool and earthy voice.
“Sorry,” the opening track, is a metaphor-rich ballad of a co-dependent relationship. “Big Town” is an Irish-type ballad with country overtones, heavy with reverb on the guitar and vocals. “Rosemary Moore” is a Kate Wolf-style song about an elderly widow, warmed by Cary’s melodic fiddling and accordion accents. “Nursery Lie” is a shambling waltz full of rackety percussion and sweet fiddle fills. This one more than the others feels like a work in progress, with elliptical lyrics that use schoolyard imagery to depict a bad relationship.
Cary’s cover of “Withered and Died” is slow and stately, perhaps too reverential of the original. Her voice has roughly the same range as Linda Thompson’s, but the final result doesn’t quite capture the emotional depths of the original. But it’s a gutsy move just to attempt it, and the song speaks strongly for itself.
Cary has made a respectable debut recording that shows a lot of promise.
(Yep Roc, 2000)
