Song Premiere: Caitlin Canty, "Wild Heart"

Caitlin Canty’s haunting dreamscape opens with Paul Kowert’s somber, bowed bass notes, drawing down a curtain of darkness that awakens the spirit of wildness that resides in our hearts. The cover of night can be terrifying and lonely, but guided by the shine of the moon and the scent of the breeze, we find others like us also in search of company to assuage their anxiety. We utter our yearnings like a “forgotten prayer,” an illuminating image of a visceral connection for which we have been searching and with whose presence we become one.

The song spirals upward, ascending Canty’s and Sarah Jarosz’s harmonies, and floating on Jarosz’s layered mandolin strums and Brittany Haas’s softly wheeling violin strokes on the instrumental bridge. As the night falls away, Haas’s and Howert’s strings mimic the sounds of birds as the sun rises.

According to Canty, she’s been “holding onto this song, co-written with Annie Lynch, for many years and tried it out on various live shows and albums, but it truly came into view when Paul Kowert (bass) and Brittany Haas (fiddle) interpreted the song with their strings.”

“Wild Heart,” the newest single from Canty’s upcoming album Quiet Flame, due out June 23, 2023, “tells of living a dream that fades away as the sun comes up, and the bowed bass and fiddle duetting evoke the hunger at night and become the birdsong in the morning.”

Says Canty, “We shot this video in the high heat of the afternoon at our beloved festival Green Mountain Bluegrass and Roots in Manchester, VT, this past summer. Brian Carroll set us up in this white shed and captured this video in one take. The song has a clear division between night and day scenes, and I love how Brittany Haas and Paul Kowert interpret the birdsong in the morning lyrics with their strings, lifting the dark song to a sublime ending.”

Quiet Flame is due June 23; you can pre-order/pre-save it HERE.