Writing Mud Blood Bone (Concord) was good medicine for an emotionally bruised Cat Clyde after a failed romance.
“The songs helped me move through a huge transition period in my life,” says Clyde of the 11 tracks that align to form the rugged-yet-nuanced travelog of self on her revelatory fourth LP. “Love is entwined in these songs—my ideas of love, how love has changed me, my desire to love in healthier ways that align more deeply with who I am and how I want to live.”
Most of her adult life, the Canadian singer/songwriter has been inclined to keep moving. But it sounds like she’s found a soft place to land on Mud Blood Bone, comfortably and confidently shifting gears from her more familiar blues, rockabilly and old-time country touchpoints to sweeping balladry that’s as pained as it resolute. As she screened various producers for the new album, Clyde had a “strange” video call with Drew Vandenberg (Faye Webster, Of Montreal, S.G. Goodman)—so strange that, at first, she wasn’t sure he was the right fit.
“But after we talked on the phone and got to know each other, I realized Drew was the perfect person to help bring this collection to life,” she says. “When we got into Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Ga., it instantly felt right. I create from a place of instinct—and once we started to play, it felt like my feet were on solid ground.”
Time is a persistent thread that wends its way through Mud Blood Bone—its nature, how it moves. “These songs came like a message to my future self, alchemizing the emotions I was feeling to ground and release, to shed and renew,” she says. “The spiral winds on, as do I.”
Clyde offers some insights on each track.
—Hobart Rowland
1) “Where Is My Love”
“When I wrote this song, I’d just read the book All About Love by bell hooks and was trying to get a better understanding of what love meant to me. I was at a point in my life where I really didn’t feel love for myself or those closest to me, and I wanted to understand why. I was curious about finding meaning and purpose in love and finding what I felt was lost. I was reflecting on the natural world and how easy it was to find love there. It kind of felt like a prayer, asking my creator to help me understand my love, how I want to give love and a healthier way to give and receive love.”
2) “Man’s World”
“This song is an expression of the frustration I feel existing as a woman in a patriarchal world. I love and crave masculine energy when it’s strong, protective and emotionally aware. It’s been difficult and deeply disappointing to experience masculine energy that’s childish, cowardly and encroaching on the feminine space.”
3) “Wild One”
“The main verses of this song were penned in the summer of 2023 while living in my little ’73 Boler trailer on a farm outside Hamilton, Ontario. I was spending quiet time going on walks and hanging out in the woods and by the creeks. I was in a space of solitude. I spent my afternoons cooking meals on my propane stove, writing and playing guitar. In between my time alone, I played some festivals in the U.S. and traveled to the U.K. to play some more. When I landed in the U.K., it was morning, and I hadn’t slept on the flight as I’d hoped. By the early afternoon, I’d arrived at a friend’s flat feeling strange and tired but knowing I had to stay awake as long as I could to get on top of the jet lag. I wrote another song in that strange and sleepy sphere, which later that autumn came to be the chorus of this song. Pressing the two songs together, they became ‘Wild One.’ I was processing a lot of changes in my life. And in that summer, I came to know myself and my life more deeply. I connected with the wild parts of myself I’d forgotten—some unrealized—and passed through the changes that were rapidly unfolding within my heart.”
4) “Dark Back”
“I had a hard time deciding to put this song on the record. I knew it was good, but it brought up a lot of difficult emotions in me. It’s a song about feeling unaligned with my body, unclear in my boundaries and unable to express my needs. I wanted to be set free, and I didn’t know how—so I wrote this song.”
5) “Hold My Hand”
“I wrote this alongside ‘Wild One’ during my time living in the ’73 Boler trailer. Some new people came into my life who filled me with a lot of inspiration. I was feeling isolated and lost at sea when I decided to hold out my hand for new people to come into my life … And they did. One of those people is my good friend Boy Golden (Liam Duncan). We recorded six songs in a weekend, just the two of us in his studio playing all the instruments onto a tape machine. I had so much fun it should’ve been illegal. While in Winnipeg, I connected with another new friend Kai, one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. Their connection to the natural world inspired me to rekindle that same connection. Liam helped me fall in love with music again, and Kai helped me fall in love with nature and my Métis identity (mixed European and First Nations ancestry). The most important things in my life were given to me when I held out my hand.”
6) “I Am Now”
“This is the oldest song on the record. I wrote it while living in a cabin in Quebec during the pandemic. I’d started to dive into patterns and programs that were running my life. I wanted to become more aware of these patterns so I could change them and evolve. I’d just read The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which was inspiring. Writing ‘I Am Now’ felt like a prayer to remember myself, why I was here and how I could stay grounded. All that exists is now. Recording the song so long after writing it felt like a message to my future self. Somehow it makes more sense to me now than it did when I wrote it, and I feel it was meant to be on this album.”
7) “My Love”
“Hearing the original Marty Robbins version of this song in 2023 felt like a great clue in my search for meaning in love. It reminded me of the love that surrounds me in the natural world, and how it all lives within me as well. That love is accessible to me in every tree I touch, in every bird song I hear, in all the places I go, in the earth below me and the sky above me. It’s all a mirror to the love that lives within me, the love from my ancestors, from my past lives, my gods, my guides and beyond.”
8) “Wanna Ride”
“This song is an expression of freedom. It came to me in the fall of 2023 at a time when I felt very caged and restrained in my body, mind, spirit and life. The desire to be set free from the restraints of my woman body, from relationships that weren’t serving me and from the weight of who I was and who I wanted to be.”
9) “Night Eyes”
“This sprouted from a poem I wrote in November of 2024. It began while I was house-sitting for some friends up in Prince Edward County, Ontario—time I’d carved out to work on the songs for the record and write some new ones. The seeds began there, but it wasn’t until I took a trip to London, where I was living on a narrow boat with a dear friend, that I completed the song. I’d borrowed a Tascam 414 Mk cassette machine and was recording demos. Once I started to record the song and was able to listen back to the beginnings of it, it all unfolded quite easily.”
10) “Press Down”
“This came out of a writing session with Courtney Marie Andrews in 2024. I hadn’t done too many writing sessions previously, and I really enjoyed my time writing with her. I brought the song in, unfinished and in pieces. We sat and connected over tea in her lovely home and dug into the themes and realm of the song. The song contained answers to questions I’d been avoiding and truths I didn’t want to look at. It was beautiful to dive in with her. When we got into the studio, I’d been listening to a lot of rockabilly—and Drew also felt called to change it and heat it up. We made it fun and fast.”
11) “Another Time”
“By February 2025, I’d solidified plans to record my album in Athens. Still feeling I needed some more songs to add to the pile before heading into the studio, I carved out some time in my hometown of Stratford, Ontario, to write. I was pondering my experience of connection and intimacy, alongside the reality that life is constantly moving and changing. This song speaks to the grief and the joy of evolving constantly. Real love is a beam that echoes through all times, all spaces and all realms.”
See Cat Clyde live.
