Long Night's Journey

CATIE CURTIS explores family, infidelity, desire and happiness on her lush new album

Catie Curtis is a modern folk singer whose latest recording is a perfect reflection of our troubled times. From Compass Records, Long Night Moon is filled with songs of hope and troubles that come from our emotions and the world at large. It is an unusually rich record. The sound is big and lush sound, if you're lucky enough to have a good stereo. But Long Night Moon is also a record with lyrics that don't shrink from turmoil.

ASCAP Audio Portrait producer Steven Rosenfeld recently talked to Catie Curtis about the recording and her creative process.

What was going on in your life that brought forth these songs?
Well the main thing going on, or the obvious thing going on, was that I was deeply becoming a member of a family. My partner and I have two daughters and they are ages four and two now, so when I was writing this record they were like two and just born. We adopted Celia, who is now two, around the time I was writing this record. And actually the title track, "Long Night Moon," is in reference to the suffering we were waiting for her to come home to us. The long night moon is the full moon in December. Somehow that image of the huge bright enormous moon in the darkest month of all, to me that summed up the way that I am trying to approach life.

So "Find You Now" is a song about a daughter, not a romantic relationship?
Like a lot of songs that come out, there's different levels that they work on. When I wrote that song, it was the same month as I wrote "Long Night Moon." I was just finishing up a book called Reading Lolita in Tehran, and that's a book about a woman's book club in Tehran, in Iran. They are part of this Islamic Republic, and are very repressed in terms of what that are allowed to read, who they are allowed to hang out with, and to imagine having so much desire for freedom, and to be disallowed to express it, in terms if how you dress or who you love, it just gave me this really intense feeling about desire. So for me, it's really about many things.

These songs have many emotional moments and ah-hah reflections. Is that new?
I think I did take a risk with the material on this album and perhaps allowed a little more of the "a-ha." In "Strange" I was playing with the whole concept of infidelity, which is kind of risky to put on a record that's clearly from the point of view of someone who is married, or partnered, and settled. But we look around at our community and our world, there's infidelity, there's confusion, there's all kinds of things going on – breaking up. For me, it was important to write a song that expands on a thought, or a small experience, that I've had and sort of imagined it all the way through. How would that play out, and how would we be thinking about it?

I think that's very realistic, that sometimes life isn't so neat and tidy.
I think it is a theme of this record. I was just listening to the song, "Innocent," because it's been getting a bunch of airplay. I never thought it would, because it's just a little ballad. It's the quietest song on the record, probably. But that's the one that's about the shadows on us that we become aware of in the middle of the night when we're scared, or we're freaking out, or we can't sleep. Or the times when it's the deep dark of winter and you forget all about what was hopeful about some other season. I think that that kind of realistic sense of what life can be like, along side of some of these happier songs, that are full of joy, that feels like a new thing for me to admit to and accept that range… I do think it captures a sort of shadowy essence I haven't put out very much in the past.

I have to ask you about the sound of this record. It's unusually lush.
That's working with Lorne Entress as the producer. The reason that I chose Lorne was he had two or three months to devote to this and he was happy to just tweak and tweak and edit and build this up artistically without any rush. It seemed like everyone else that I talked to said let's go in the studio and bang it out. It's best when it's live and fresh, and there's something to be said for that. But what we ended up doing was a combination of live and then a lot of hours trying different ideas. Together we poured over it for a really long time to get every little beautiful thing out of it that we could.

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