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 Interviewed exclusively for us by Keith Hadad
Cara BethSatalino: My dad is a musician, and he was always playing music in the house. He’d have his band over, and they'd jam at home a lot. He played a lot of folky roots music. He played fiddle, guitar and mandolin mostly. It was just a group of guys that got together weekly, so there was always music in the house. Other than that, I listened to the radio a lot. I'm 40, so at the time that's all there was. I was growing up in a rural area, so it wasn't like I was exposed to a lot of things beyond just the radio. So I used to tape the radio on a cassette tape, and that's how I got music a lot of the time. I would say my dad is a big influence, just seeing someone having instruments around the house and seeing someone making their own music. He played by ear mostly, so that made it seem so accessible to me. Neil Young is absolutely my favorite musician. I don't know what it is. He's got that something that I can never put my finger on. It’s more of a feeling, like a sincerity in his music. I'm really drawn to him. I would say REM was an early influence, like an immediate early childhood influence. Then later, I moved to Athens, Georgia, and oh, wow. So they sort of became even more of an influence on me then. I would say I am also really drawn to Tom Petty. He’s big for me. Of course, there are the classic songwriter-songwriters. The people that can just write a song and the song can be anything. It's less based around a style than it is about the actual songwriting. I don't know how else to explain it. Gillian Welch is somebody that I come back to a lot. When you came to Philadelphia, where you are now, did you find a music community or any like minded artists that were supportive of your work? CBS: I'm starting to. I’ve been coming here quite a lot for shows throughout my career as a musician. So I have a pretty solid group of friends and a lot of friends that I went to school with in New York have since left New York City and come here. So I have a pretty solid group of friends in the music world, but I still feel like a new kid in town. Pretty early on after moving here, I played in a Sandy Denny/Fairport Convention cover band, so I made some friends that are in the music scene that I didn't know already. That’s been really nice. I feel like everybody's been really welcoming and since the record came out, some people that I didn't know have messaged me. So I feel pretty excited about it. I don't get out much as a mom of a toddler, but it is nice to be in a bigger city where there's a lot of music happening and a lot of bands coming through often. How long ago did you write these songs, and how long ago did you record the album? CBS: I would say some of them were mostly formed in like 2019-ish. That's only maybe less than half of the songs. Then the other half was kind of like early 2020. So maybe five years ago, maybe even longer ago than that, because my other band that I was fronting, Outer Spaces, when we were having our last album come out, I was already kind of working on these songs a lot at home. I knew I didn't want them to be band songs, so I was kind of playing around with some things, but I hadn't fully flushed them out. Do you feel that the songs on Little Green are you processing or coming to terms with a lot of the upheaval you’ve experienced over the last several years? CBS: Yeah, definitely. I think that's also how most of my songwriting inherently is. Me just exploring personal feelings, but hopefully, in a way that is relatable to people. This album feels like a sort of metamorphosis-like situation, but it's still only cracking the surface of some things too. I think of it as starting off in this fearful sort of negative space and then finding my way out of that. There were a number of reasons for that, but in general, I feel like the album is sort of hopeful and, even though some of the more hopeful songs were kind of written in like a time where I was still very much not, it wasn't like I had overcome anything. It was like I needed to write myself a hopeful song or something, you know? To help me. I don't know. I think that's part of the album too. I think in the past, I tended to be a sort of a pessimistic person. So, actively trying to welcome optimism to get through a hard time was kind of a new thing for me. With these songs being so personal, does it ever feel difficult to perform them or does it feel empowering to revisit them again and again? CBS: It makes it easier. For me, I feel like writing music is my way of trying to explain myself to other people and present myself to other people and be like, do you get it now? I'm not so good with expressing myself in other ways, so to me it feels like, oh, I expressed myself through this thing, and now maybe you'll understand me. So it feels great to continually perform the music and hear it again and again because it feels like I expressed my feeling, which is a cathartic release for me. What do you want for the listener to walk away with after hearing the album? CBS: With this album, I would like for people to feel a sense of hopefulness. The world really sucks right now, in a lot of ways, and it's hard to find hope. I just hope it's something like a balm of some sort for somebody. How did the album end up coming out on Worried Songs? CBS: Through my friend Bob Keel, who is Small Sur. He sent Chaz Human the record because I had sent it to a few places with no real luck (but I also wasn't really trying that hard). I just put it on the back burner a bit. I had sent it to Bob a while back and he was listening to it and decided to send it to Chaz. I'm really glad he did, because I think that it's such a good label. I really like what Chaz is doing, and just everything about the label just seems so authentic and well curated, but I also love that he's doing it out of a love to do it. It felt like the right fit for me. Then Chaz liked it and got in touch with me. If that hadn't happened, I'm not sure that it would be out right now at all. I might have lost steam with it. What are you working on right now that you'd be able to tell us about? CBS:
I am working on songs for another record. I have a lot
of material that didn't make the album that I kind of
want to rework. We had 16 songs and then I pared it down
to 10, and that felt cohesive. Since then, I've written
a bunch of new songs, so I have another album's worth of
songs. So I'm just reworking them, and I'd like to
record them maybe at the end of this year, or maybe
sometime next year. Photo
credit: Justin Flythe Little Green by Cara Beth Satalino is an LP on Worried Songs and was originally released May 3rd, 2024 |
How
did your birthplace of Upstate New York introduce you
to music?
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