Kim Ruehl Talks Songwriting With Catie Curtis
Catie Curtis is one of those singer-songwriters whose work, if you let it, will quietly worm its way into your subconscious. There’s no overt production tricks or big guitar solos to pull it all forward. Her songs hang in a kind of dreamy half-awake state, where one’s perspective is most keen and honest, where the sounds are all soft and palatable, and where the truth has plenty of room to just come on out.
Even when she’s singing about heartbreaking life scenarios, as she does on her new album ‘Flying Dream,’ she does so with a sort of warm embrace of the inevitable opportunity of it all. Sadness and disappointment are implicit in love and happiness – two sides to the same coin, so to speak. Anyway, it’s all part of the big Life Experience we all share.
Her songs aren’t profound as much as they are just plain real and true. And, this time out, she teamed up with Sugarland co-founder Kristen Hall, for a collection of songs that wrestle with the unconscious understanding that major tectonic change is on its way. She got on the phone with me, from her New England home, and talked a bit about the songs, the collaboration, and where ‘Flying Dream’ began:
Kim Ruehl: Let’s start with your new record and where it came from for you. I know you wrote a lot of these songs with Kristen Hall. How did that come to be?
Catie Curtis: We’d get together for coffee and just shoot the breeze about life. We’d just connect about one line that one of us would say and that would be our song for the day.
KR: It was really that easy?
CC: Well, then all the painful cycle of enthusiasm and discouragement that is always songwriting. A lot of times, one of us would have a chord progression that we’d been playing around with over the last few days prior, so we’d take those chords with the one line we had. We may not keep any of that, but it would get us started. It would get a song going and that’s the hardest thing, just getting a song going.
KR: You’ve done mostly solo songwriting in the past. You’ve co-written a song here or there, but was it a different experience co-writing most of a whole album? Or did it just flow?
CC: It felt like it was perfect for the time that I was writing because at the time, it was sort of like, unbeknownst to me, it was a calm before the storm time of my life. It didn’t seem like much was happening. We wrote at a time when I wasn’t feeling like independently sitting down and writing. It helped me to get the creative juices flowing.
KR: And then you wound up having a lot of changes in your life in the process?
CC: Yeah, I haven’t been talking too much about it because it’s still in the midst of happening… my wife and I have separated and it looks like we’re getting a divorce. I think a lot of that stuff was brewing and, when I was singing the record, there was a lot of passion and I was beginning to feel changes coming.
KR: Some people have said before that when you’re in the middle of a difficult situation, it’s hard to have the perspective to write about it, whereas other people are able to find great fruit in that situation. Did you feel like what you were writing became prophetic? Or that there was some opportunity for healing in the songs you were writing as all this started to go down?
CC: I think prophetic may be too strong a way to put it, but I’d say it restores my belief that creativity comes from a place that’s unconscious. I think creative expressions… speak from a less conscious place. It’s almost frightening to think maybe I could have been more aware of what was happening. But, you’re only aware of what you’re ready to be aware of. Somehow your creative life, it’s possible to express what’s there even if you’re not ready to think about it.
KR: How has songwriting changed for you over the past 20 years? Do you feel like you know it better or is it something you’re still exploring?
CC: I trust myself more now than I used to. I trust that if I really wanted to write a song on a given day, I could. It might not be a song that I love. But, what brings about a really good song that I love… I feel like it came to me from somewhere else. I feel really confident in the craft of it, and feel like I can come up with something. But in terms of having those magical inspiration [moments] where something hits you that you know is going to be a good song, I don’t understand the timing of how that happens. Even with Kristen, we wrote several songs that didn’t make the record. We’d start something and never finish it. But I think ultimately, you start to understand that as long as you’re writing songs, some of them will turn out to be good.
KR: Do you revisit those [parts of songs] that you don’t use?
CC: I recorded a demo not released on a record, then two or three records later, the new version is on the record. I think it’s possible there are times when you just don’t have the answer yet. You don’t know what the song needs to say. You know part of it but not all of it. I respect the fact that there are songs that for some reason… sometimes events in our world come along and fill in. I had the chorus to a song once that went “The truth is bigger than these drops of rain.” I didn’t know what that song was going to be about, but then a few months later Hurricane Katrina happened and I wrote a song [with Mark Erelli] called “People Look Around” about it and it ended up being one of the songs I still play almost every night. If I’d pushed it and tried to finish it when I first started it, I don’t think I would have put those two ideas together.
