Caitlin Cary, Thad Cockrell plant begonias

Tom Geddie, July 2005

One of the sweetest and most genuine-sounding country CDs of the year is "Begonias" by a couple of unlikely, in their own eyes, folks who both thought they'd be doing something else.

Caitlin Cary went to North Carolina State to get a graduate degree in literature and ended up singing and playing fiddle in the influential alt.-country band Whiskeytown.

Thad Cockrell went to Wake Forest to study religion at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and ended up sitting on Cary's front porch writing songs on Sunday afternoons until they both found time to go into the studio for a few days and record an album together.

"I had no earthly idea that I was going to be a musician," Cary says. "But there's a great scene in Raleigh, and I arrived at exactly the right time to change the course of my life."

She got a phone call from somebody she'd never met, but who'd heard she played fiddle and wanting to know if she wanted to come practice with a new band.

She did. During her undergrad days, she had played with a country cover band called the Garden Weasels. She'd played a little in Houston and Richmond, Va., before entering North Carolina State's Graduate Program in Creative Writing.

That was in 1994. The new band, fronted by a young rock musician named Ryan Adams, became Whiskeytown, which USA Today's Brian Mansfield called one of alt.-countries "deities."

"I got a call just out of the blue," Cary says, "and it was Ryan saying, 'I'm doing this band. We love Uncle Tupelo, and we're practicing tomorrow, can you come over?'"

Cary wasn't that familiar with Uncle Tupelo, but she decided to check it out.

"It was just a really strange confluence of events that made Whiskeytown a 'thing' rather than a local band that played on weekends. We just hit on something at the right time," she says. "I really didn't know what I was getting into and at every phase I kept feeling a sense of unreality and thinking 'What the hell am I doing here?'"

After Whiskeytown's sometime volatile life ended, Cary released solo albums "While You Weren't' Looking" in 2002 and "I'm Staying Out" in 2003. She also got together with Lynn Blakey of Glory Fountain and Tonya Lamm of Hazeldine to create the critically acclaimed Tres Chicas.

In 1997, Cary's husband, Skillet Gilmore, was playing drums with a young singer-songwriter named Thad Cockrell. Gilmore introduced the two. Or Cockrell introduced himself to Cary at a local bar. No one's sure anymore.

One day Cockrell brought some of his songs to Cary while she was working at a now defunct restaurant, Humble Pie.

"I've been sorta this somebody who people come to and give me CDs from their band," she says. "I try to listen to them. Thad came up to me and said, 'These are songs I wrote. Would you listen?'"

"His songs blew me away. He was a new guy in town and a budding musician. We developed this relationship immediately - not like big sister, little brother, but just making music - and it flowed and felt good. We liked the way our voices sounded together, and we'd sit in with each other on songs when we could."

Cockrell came to Raleigh to attend the seminary.

"It was just academically an amazing seminary," he says. "It's probably the most liberal education I've ever had in the sense that they really studied people's belief systems and had a firm grasp of what they believed and pushed the students to understand other people's thoughts. At the end of the semester, you'd have to defend a different point of view from yours."

Cockrell's tenor voice is modern, but his approach to country music is traditional.

"I've always loved the twang of hurt," he says. And, "There's no 'alt' in my country."

His father and two brothers are Baptist preachers. Growing up in Tampa, Fla., Cockrell heard lots of Southern gospel, but didn't hear much country music until local radio stations introduced him to the likes of Merle Haggard and George Jones.

In college, Cockrell spent many evenings playing for tips at a small coffeehouse near campus.

He recorded his first CD, "Stack of Dreams," in one day as a demo and released it through Miles of Music Recordings, an offshoot of the Los Angeles roots music mail order company. Cockrell and Cary did a version of the Buck Owens classic "Together Again," and Tift Merritt added backing vocals on "Why." His second, "Warmth and Beauty," graduated to the independent YepRoc label, which also released "Begonias."

Cary grew up in the small northern Ohio town of Seville, hoping to become a writer or maybe a veterinarian. As a young child in a musical family, she wrote songs that she performed on her dad's homemade harpsichord. When she was around six, she started studying the violin.

As a child, the music in her home classical and Irish, and folk icons like Doc Watson, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Cary and Cockrell fit together seamlessly on "Begonias," which they recorded in Nashville in, as the media material says, "real time," which is supposed to mean all the musicians played all the songs together at the same time to help create and preserve a natural sound and feel.

The delicate mix of Cockrell's clear tenor and Cary's mid-range soprano is traditional enough - without losing freshness - to make this a country album; the consistently solid lyrics often explore the universal themes of the crud that accumulates around, and suffocates, love.

The duo's pleading interpretation of the Percy Sledge hit "(let me wrap you in my) Warm & Tender Love" is one of the CD's highlights, turning the old R&B song into pure country soul.

"Please Break My Heart," which Cary recorded on her most recent solo CD, becomes a more complex song as a duet. Cary said it's done "the way that Ray Charles and Betty Carter might have recorded it: plainly spoken, but with a lot of stylistic details that come straight out of the early Sixties."

Caitlin said the song originated in a barroom conversation.

"Thad came into the bar where I was bartending, and we got into a conversation about how it's really hard to write songs when you're happy. I think I said something like, 'I wish somebody would break my heart, just for a minute, so I could get five good songs out of it, and then I'd be okay again,'" she says. "Thad said that sounded like a great idea for a song. He went home, wrote it and brought it to me for tweaking."

The two pretty much split the CD's creative work down the middle, one taking the lead on this song, the other on that one.

"Some songs Thad had much more finished, and I contributed a word here or there or maybe added a bridge," Cary says. "Other songs, Thad had a line, and we wrote back and forth together. Other songs were more whole for me, and Thad has the guitar in his hands, and he's really great at catching the feel of the song if you throw out a few lines and a melody."

Cary typically writes in her head and wants the lyrics to be "of a piece" before she adds instrumentals.

Cockrell's simple, straightforward writing complements Cary's literary style.

"Saying 'I love you baby' is a perfectly viable thing in a song, and if you put it with the right music it's beautiful," Cary says. "I strive to remember to write like a kid when I write songs. That's why I like to work with Thad; he can say things in plainspoken language and he has this beautiful voice with so much passion. I can get in touch with some of that. When I write for my own records or by myself, I tend to think, 'uh oh, here comes the big concept, what are we going to do with this?'"

Cockrell is conscious of his simple approach.

"I mostly write country songs, and the brilliance of country songs is in how plainspoken they are," says Cockrell, an undergraduate public relations and journalism student.

"What's clever to me about great country songs like Willie Nelson's is that they don't filter or try to reword their thoughts. Now, with so much of country music today, it seems like the punch line at the end of a knock-knock joke. To me, what's brilliant is you can't believe they said it so plain."

Cockrell "writes his mind," he says, rather than trying to spend much time trying to figure out what people want to hear.

"I try to make the music I make and to be as kind as possible to the people who come out to support my music," he says.

Cary frequently co-writes and loves the duet approach, which she says adds an extra level of "artistic sympathy when you know you're going to be singing the song together.

"I value the fact that music is between people," she says. "There's total give and take between you and the people making it."

From time to time, she admits, she'd rather keep a song for herself to keep it whole, "but maybe 7 times out of 10 somebody I trust can come in and help."

Cockrell is more likely to write alone, except for the good fit with Cary.

"We just wrote the songs and went in and recorded them without a whole lot of fuss," Cockrell says of "Begonias." "I love things like Bob Dylan's 'Nashville Skyline' and Willie Nelson's 'Phases and Stages,' where they just went in and played them."

Cockrell suggested that Brad Jones produce "Begonias," which came out of those Sunday porch sessions. Jones worked with Josh Rouse, Jill Sobule and Butterfly Boucher. More important to Cary was that Jones worked with Dolly Varden, whose CD "very seldom leaves my CD player."

Cockrell said he trusted Jones for several reasons. "I'd heard him with Josh Rouse, and everything just sounded good," he says. "It didn't sound throwback, and it didn't sound completely here and now. It was timeless sounding stuff."

With the duet album added to their basket, the two friends continue to move forward.

Cockrell, who has relocated to Nashville to keep writing songs for his solo work, says he can't wait to make another duet CD.

Cary just got back from a "fairy tale trip" to Europe with Tres Chicas, where they worked with keyboard player Geraint Watkins (who worked with Nick Lowe and Paul McCartney).

"Geraint and his producer liked Tres Chicas, and we went and recorded a CD," she says. "Lot of people from the English rock scene from the late 1950s and early 1960s came to play on it."

The still-unnamed CD is due from YepRoc in the fall.

"I'm just trying to figure out who I am becoming for the next phase of my life," Cary says.



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