Stage: Caitlin Canty Croons

Photo by DavidMcClister

Caitlin Canty is at home in Danby, VT, her newborn son asleep on her  lap, only a week old. “It’s a sweet change from Nashville,” she says,  her soft voice lucid, illuminating. “I’ve always loved being here.”

Canty grew up 30 minutes down the road in Proctor where her parents (retired teachers and house painters) still live. They surprised her with an acoustic guitar at age 17 and she played ’til her fingers bled. Then, a flash of reverberant magic inside a “church-turned-coffee-shop” for the final performance of a songwriting class at Williams College in Williamstown, MA lit a creative fire inside her.

“The moment still gives me chills,” she says. “I was nervous, but I fell in love with singing my own songs. I knew I was good, but I was a work in progress.”

Canty moved to New York City for a decade, where she worked as an environmental consultant in a gray cubicle while moonlighting as a folk singer on the Lower East Side. Eventually, she quit her job, hit the road and never looked back.

She recalls the time she drove to Arkansas and back for a 45-minute opening set. 

“What a beautiful night and it was my job,” she says. “I could’ve spent it on the computer. Instead, I was driving through countryside I’ve never seen and playing for people I’ve never met… I don’t complain about the same things as other musicians. I still feel like an apple-cheeked kid who got the day off to do this.”

“Casually devastating,” “fraught tranquility,” “dreamy and daring”—those are the ways her music has been described since her debut album Reckless Skyline. Next came Motel Bouquet in 2018 and Quiet Flame in 2023 featuring the massively talented musicians, mandolinist Sarah Jarosz and fiddler Brittany Haas. 

Above all else, Canty’s songs are plaintively urgent, deeply honest and penetratingly true.

“I love to explore the mystery of songs that deeply affect me,” she says. “How do they do that? How can it be so simple, yet so powerful? It feels like a letter straight to the heart.”

Canty moved to Nashville in 2015 where she met her husband, banjo player Noam Pikelny. The couple relocated to Vermont after the birth of their first child.

“Being surrounded by nature, I feel so much more connected to life,” says Canty. “When we have a windy day, there’s a bank of maple trees at the end of our field. They look like clouds billowing in the wind… People often ask what inspires a song. I think it’s the same thing you’d take a picture of. I simply want to remember something that’s interesting or beautiful.”

From her earliest performances at classic folk dens such as Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, NY Canty has been known for her innate ability to mesmerize an audience with nothing more than her careworn voice and beat-up, old guitar.

“It’s all about the song,” she says. “It moved me. Does it move you? You can feel the truth of what’s working whether there’s one person or a thousand in the room.”

Canty recently recorded her fourth album in Maine at seven months pregnant. One song—“Don’t Worry About Nothing”—is sung from a mother’s point of view.

“You turn the tables on your perspective, you see the world differently. That’s where that song came from.”

A son gently stirs and a mother laughs. The music is clearly inside of her.

Canty performs Sept. 20 at FreshGrass Festival at MASS MoCA in North Adams and Oct. 19 at Sparkletown II at The Stone Church in Brattleboro. For full tour dates and album release updates, visit caitlincanty.com.