Catherine Feeny
Biography
Catherine Feeny is sitting in a corner of the Charlotte Street Hotel. The Philadelphia-born singer and lyricist left her LA home for a sojourn in sunny Norfolk and is enjoying a working break in the smoke.The 29-year-old is on the edge of serious success. Feeny’s jaunty, dream-soaked ‘Mr Blue’ has now appeared on not only the soundtrack of TV’s finest hit-predictor, The OC, but the recent Gwyneth Paltrow flick Running With Scissors and a documentary on New York guerrilla artist Stuart Ross. This exposure has now prompted over 20,000 people to buy the song on American iTunes " causing the song to take on a life of it’s own stateside. Oh, and she’s about to release a sophomore album which fuses milk and honey soaked songs with a bittersweet, smoky accessibility. In short, these songs sound massive.
It’s something Rough Trade noticed: they made Hurricane Glass their album of the week when it first came out on indie label Tallgrass and liked it so much they ordered 500 copies " no small deal for a previously unknown artist. And it was this groundswell of independently generated fans, a rapidly growing fan base in both the UK and U.S, and support slots for the likes of Martha Wainwright and Suzanne Vega that alerted EMI to her potential.
Hurricane Glass was written and recorded in Europe and America, with songs coming to life in her Glendale home in north Hollywood, at a friend’s sun-lit apartment in Brussels, and the Mill Studio, near Diss, Norfolk. The follow-up to her eponymous, self-released debut is an assured, perfectly-crafted piece of work which carves out Feeny as a name to file next to Cat Power, fellow LA resident Ray LaMontagne and a more folk-soaked, less quirky version of Joanna Newsom.
Take the understated tragedy of opener and single Touch Back Down, the luscious pop of Mr Blue or her next hit-in-waiting, the summery, soul-drummin’ Always Tonight. You can also hear subliminal echoes of her musical touchstones: country singers like Lucinda Williams, her current favourite listen, Midlake’s awesome Trials Of Van Occupanther LP and of course, Joni Mitchell. “I fell in love with Joni when I heard Blue. The way she doesn’t go straight for the heart of the matter " she circles around it and somehow ends up exactly where she should be.”
You’ll hear touches of folk, pop, country and blues throughout Hurricane Glass, all heard through the prism of Feeny’s gorgeous voice. Mostly she writes on guitar, although Mr Blue " written as a musical note to an ex-boyfriend " came about after a session sitting by the piano in her LA home.
It also features slide guitar don BJ Cole, who also provided the inspiration for the album title. “He was playing in London in a Tiki bar,” explains Feeny, “and I went to meet him. I ordered one of those drinks which came in this weird receptacle called a hurricane glass. It was just one of those words, so I wrote it in my notebook.” Back in LA, Feeny began writing the song that would become the titular track and kept coming back to the hurricane glass. “The words ended up in the chorus,” she says, “and that was that.”
The pre-teen Feeny grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. “We did a lot of driving around, hanging out at 7/11, the usual teenage suburban stuff.” Then her cousins down in Florida sent her oldest sister a mixtape of English bands which included The Smiths and The Cure. “I became a big fan”. Her musical family ensured she learned how to play, taking on violin, guitar and piano and classical training for her voice. Eventually she moved to LA, to write about film FX for a movie trade magazine, but spent most of her time hanging out and playing at her own musical hub, The Hotel Cafe. “Everyone was in everyone else’s band. It’s a really creative place.”
It was, however, time to move on. Hooking up with producer Sebastian Rogers after he saw her playing in LA, Rogers persuaded her to cross the Atlantic to record at his Norfolk studio. She enjoyed the experience so much that she moved there. She’s finding England’s flat eastern edge strangely inspirational: “recently I took a week’s trip to Great Yarmouth " that place is so weird! " and holed myself up in a hotel room. It got me in the right place to write songs for the next album.”
Feeny’s music is emotionally generated. “Generally people operate in a very trying-to-get-by kind of way,” she says. “There’s so much that goes on in our lives that we don’t express. When I looked back over the songs I realised they were predominately about truth " telling the truth, or hiding and lying.”
Catherine Feeny has created her own special relationship between Britain and America. Watch out as she rides the back of a perfectly-shaped hurricane through music 2007.
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