With Cat Ridgeway, it’s hard to get around that voice. Raw, malleable yet beautiful, larger than life. But there’s more to the Orlando-based artist than those impressive pipes—and the new Sprinter (CEN/The Orchard) makes the strongest case yet for her emergence as a potent songwriter.
For her third LP, Ridgeway further distances herself from her Americana past with a muscular mix of punk, pop and folk steered by the more authentic and assertive POV that’s come with more than a decade of industry twists and turns. Ridgeway was assisted by Mike Savino (Tall Tall Trees), who joined her in playing multiple instruments on Sprinter at his basement recording studio in Asheville, N.C. Other guests include Claude Coleman Jr. (Ween) and Josiah Wolf (WHY?) on drums and Adam Schatz (Sylvan Esso, Japanese Breakfast) on sax.
Ridgeway walks us through Sprinter below.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Sprinter”
“I lost a good friend to a battle with mental health a couple years ago, and I was so shocked when I got the news. Most everyone who’s lost a loved one in this way will tell you they never saw it coming. The best metaphor for that sentiment I could think of was how there’s never a convenient time to deal with a ‘check engine’ light, so people just try to ignore it … But you can’t. I started playing this song live, and one night after I got offstage, another friend of mine told me about his own struggles. He said that so many people wait until after something happens to say, ‘I wish you reached out,’ In reality, the person who needs you ‘wishes you would reach in.’ I was so floored that I went home and added a bridge.”
2) “Blessed Be The Beast”
“Have you ever become so consumed by the thought of losing the people you love most someday that you forget to actually enjoy them while they’re here? Yeah, me neither. I’ll be eternally grateful to my co-producer, Mike, for being the only person willing to look me in the eyes and say, ‘You can do better’ … not once, not twice, but four times when I was workshopping these lyrics. He was right.”
3) “Cursive”
“A few years ago, I played a music festival in Florida, and they put up the artists together in these beautiful beach houses. One of my roommates ended up being Lucy Dacus, who’s absolutely as lovely as you’d think. I showed her the beginnings of this song—mainly the chorus, which has never changed. When she told me she thought the melody was beautiful, I felt like I was really onto something. When Mike and I got going in the studio, this was the song we started with. He made this very ethereal loop with a banjola, and everything spun out from there in the most effortless, natural way.”
4) “Look Ma, No Plans!”
“The craft of songwriting really does feel like a puzzle sometimes. I legitimately can’t believe where this song started, where we took it and where we reigned it back to. There was a moment where the rhythm section was completely electronic and reminiscent of NIN. Truth be told, I almost gave up on this song multiple times—and now it’s probably a single.”
5) “Restless Leg Syndrome”
“Originally titled ‘Home,’ this was written while I was studying abroad in Australia. During that time, I realized how much peace traveling and constant movement brings me. So why the name change? When I told Mike the old title, he showed me how many songs came up on streaming platforms when you searched ‘Home.’ He told me to pick something cooler. Thanks, Mike.”
6) “Epilogue”
“When I was in middle school, my brother showed me ‘Talk On Indolence’ by the Avett Brothers, and I loved the seamless blend of folk and punk they achieved. I also found the whole ‘yelling really, really, really fast’ thing super fun, so we started covering it as a band. I got pretty attached to the dynamic high we hit playing that tune, so I wanted to create a song of my own that scratched the same itch. This is one of the few songs I’ve written that started with just a lyric alone. Setting it to music proved to be quite the feat, and it’s the only song I’ve ever fully recorded remotely. Mike ironed it all out and dressed it up in Asheville.”
7) “What If”
“Last year, I went on a short tour and met the lovely folks at Cochran Gallery in LaGrange, Ga. They offered to host me in their cabin as part of their artist-in-residence experience. One day, I was really hitting some writer’s block, so I took two gummies to try and get in a more creative headspace. Shortly after that brilliant idea, I went for a walk in the woods alone on the one day the gallery folks weren’t on the property. I got completely lost. I was lucky enough to find a telephone tower so I could call the gallery owners, and they were able to guide me back to the cabin. Once I saw it, I realized I hadn’t been more than 50 yards away the entire time. Oops. I kept thinking, ‘If parallel universes exist, I definitely died in those woods in at least five of them.’ That really freaked me out … But then I remembered your brain can barely tell the difference between anxiety and excitement. I wanted to reframe my experience to be fun. That’s how this song came to be.”
8) “Go Long (So Long)”
“This is a shoutout to everyone who’s ever dated someone all your friends hated. My dear friend and bandmate Nevin (Scott Zink) saw the writing on the wall with this one and made me rename the song to include ‘So Long.’”
9) “Get Well Soon”
“I started writing ‘Get Well Soon’ eight years ago. As many of my songs start off, I wrote around a set of placeholder lyrics I’d always intended to replace. When Mike and I really started digging into this one, I decided it was time to make the lyric more meaningful. I wrote two or three different versions before we mutually decided the placeholder was the one with all the mojo. Sometimes the sound of what you’re singing really does carry more weight than what it means. I did go back and rewrite the bridge, though. I once heard somebody describe a panic attack as the feeling of when you lean too far back in a chair and you’re about to fall, but you stay there. I thought that was incredibly accurate and poetic, so I reworked the bridge to represent that idea.”
10) “Forced Actor”
“I started writing this when I was a freshman in college (at the University of Central Florida). I had an old voice memo of the bridge idea tucked away in a Dropbox archive. I dug it out and showed it to Mike, and he was intensely invested in me finishing it. When I was lucky enough to be an artist in residence in LaGrange, I recorded most of the guitar parts that made it onto the final recording alone in a cabin in the middle of 5,000 acres of woodlands.”
11) “Posture”
“I’m obsessed with this song. It’s one of my favorite works of art I’ve ever created in any medium. I had this demo—one I actually remember recording on my bed by myself with a crappy mic when I was in high school. I showed it to Mike, and I was expecting to rebuild the track part by part. Instead, he just imported the 10-year-old demo, and we added a bunch of stuff on top of it. I’m singing with myself from 10 years ago on this track. It’s like a love letter to my younger self.”
