"Writing", says Canteri, "(great, average or terrible) is therapy. It’s creation." The Australian singer-songwriter, who has released two solo albums, When We Were Young and Late At Night, in addition to three stellar records with the Alt. Country band The Stillsons, is currently at work on a new album with Jeff Lang. "Sometimes I feel it’s hard to quantify just how much of my life and relationships revolve around music," Canteri says. "Playing music definitely keeps you humble… one month you’re playing to an amazing huge crowd at a festival, next month you’ll be playing to one man and the bar tender." Canteri's songs bear incredible depth, range and eclecticism, an arresting array of  bluesy folk, rock and roll, alt. country grit and tender introspection, songs that scratch beneath the surface and linger in your head long after you've heard them. After a decade in music I think it is safe to say that Cat Canteri has secured a unique and enduring place for herself in music. And to those on a similar path who are being swallowed by doubt, it's important to remember: "Be compassionate to yourself. Be kind to yourself," and most importantly, "Never give up. Never give in."


AHC: What has this journey in music, so far, been like for you, the highs and the lows, and what life lessons do you feel you've picked up along the way?

Cat: Playing music became an integral part of my life when I was around 14 years of age when I gave up skateboarding after several bad injuries. I’d been playing drums since aged 12, but once I gave skateboarding the flick, music became really central to my identity. Sometimes I feel it’s hard to quantify just how much of my life and relationships revolve around music. Playing music definitely keeps you humble… one month you’re playing to an amazing huge crowd at a festival, next month you’ll be playing to one man and the bar tender…. 


AHC: What first drew you to music and what was your early musical environment like growing up? Were there pivotal songs for you then that just floored you the moment you heard them?

Cat: I always loved to sing as a young kid and I have an early memory of being at a family friends house who had a drum kit and an electric guitar and I was transfixed. Hanson’s (the band) huge popularity in the late 90’s is what attracted me to playing the drums and writing my own songs. I think more than anything the fact that the drummer was only a few years older than me made me believe that playing drums was totally something within my grasp. Really, Hanson was my first exposure to rock n roll. People still scoff when I attribute my desire to play drums as coming from that band, but their influences were really soul and RnB and coming from a house hold that didn’t listen to commercial or popular music (at all) the music from Hanson really set off a crazy musical spark for me… I was obsessed for years with the drums. It took 3 years of nagging before my parents they conceded to let me get lessons.
 
AHC: Do you remember the first song that you ever wrote or played? Or that first moment when you picked up a pen and realized that you could create whole worlds just by putting it to paper? 

Cat: Ohhhh yeah! I think everyone remembers their first song, generally cause it’s so awful, well it was for me anyway. I started learning guitar and trying to write songs when I was about 14. I’d obsessively write everything down, diary entries, people’s conversations…. Gossip… It took about two years before wrote an actually song, front to back, with an actual melody, structure and (half) decent lyrics. I was playing drums in a rock band at the time, and the singer wrote amazing songs, he was a few years younger than me and I was so perplexed with how he somehow knew how to put a song together.
 
AHC: Which musicians have you learned the most from? Or writers, artists, filmmakers, teachers/mentors etc? 

Cat: My early teachers were really important. Simon Chiodo my high school drum teacher, and Margi Gibb who taught me guitar, piano and really mentored me through my desire to write songs and sing. I learnt drums from Gerry Pantazis after high school and he completely changed my technique and practice routine which really paved the way to me being the drummer I am today. There are so many people who gave me their time and support as I was trying to make my way through the world as a young musician, they’ve all had had a huge impact on my life and the person, and musician I am today.
 
AHC: What do you think makes for a good song, as you're writing and composing, is there a sudden moment when you know you've found the right mix, that perfect angle of light, so to speak? 

Cat: That’s a really hard question to answer because the answer is different for every song. A good song can be many things. Primarily I think good song makes you ‘feel’ something. I don’t think it matters what that is. It’s about human connection at the end of the day.

I definitely write better when I have an intention, story, arc, emotion in mind, rather than searching for a meaning/direction whist writing. 


AHC: Do you consider music to be a type of healing art, the perfect vehicle through which to translate a feeling, a state of rupture/rapture, hope lost and regained? Does the writing and creating of the song save you in the kinds of ways that it saves us, the listener?

Cat: Writing a song can save the writer in the same way it saves the audience. Likewise, what a song means to a listener can be far deeper and more profound than what it meant to the writer, and visa versa. Writing (great, average or terrible) is therapy. It’s creation. The need and urge to create is a powerful thing, and creative people tend to find each other and stick together… because there is strength, understanding and comfort for us in numbers. 


AHC: What are your fondest musical memories? In your house? In your neighborhood or town? On-tour, on-the-road?

Cat: My fondest memories don’t translate to amazing stories on paper, but they’re mostly when I’ve been playing music with friends and hanging out in a really easy and care free way. Just being.

                        Photo by Lilli Waters. Camp Eureka, June '11


AHC: When you set out to write a song, how much does ‘where the world is’ in its current moment, culturally, politically, otherwise, influence the kinds of stories you set out to tell?

Cat: That’s the great question. The answer for me is, that changes all the time. These days I would say I’m really interested in telling human stories from the more narrow time and place setting… trying to set a really strong scene, and sense of time and place. I’m trying to work on writing songs that have strong characters that engage the listener which turn into human interest stories rather than the listener literally injecting their own experience onto the lyrics. 


AHC: Do you have any words of advice or encouragement for other musicians and singer-songwriters out there who are just starting out and trying to find their voice and their way in this world? What are the kinds of things that you tell yourself when you begin to have doubts or are struggling with the creative process? Or what kinds of things have others told you that have helped push you past moments of self doubt/creative blocks?

Cat: a) Always strive to improve at everything you do. You can always develop and you can always improve. There’s more than one way to do/play/sing everything, and there is no right or wrong, just aesthetic choices. There is always more to learn and experience in music. Once you delve in there is no end, it’s a life long pursuit.

b) Be compassionate to yourself. Be kind to yourself. Development as an artist takes time, energy, focus and determination. I would say TIME, and FOCUS are the main ones. Development is a process. Every step, every new milestone is as important as the next… try to remind yourself to ENJOY the steps. There is no ‘END GAME’ to being an artist. It goes on until you die. You may as well try to get some pleasure and satisfaction from it each step of the way.

c) Doubt. Everyone has doubt. Never give up. Never give in. Never listen to anyone who says your creative pursuit will never make you money or is a “hobby”. Those people will never understand your art/vision/dream so don’t waste your breath on them, and don’t waste your headspace dwelling on their options.

AHC: Your latest release, 2016's Late At Night, came out of working with a new band and playing sometimes up to three hours a night in the bar circuit, did the overall energy of this record feel different from When We Were Young and how did you channel the energy of those nights into the songwriting process for this album, were some of the songs written after shows, etc? 
 
Cat: Actually none of the songs were written on tour. All the songs on Late At Night are songs Justin Bernasconi and I had written and recorded previously with our band The Stillsons... 

                      The Stillsons - Photo by Lilli Waters. Warehouse in Brunswick, Melbourne - April '13


So they were all old songs that had been floating around for years. We were heading out on tour and needed extra material, essentially what we did was ‘cover’ our own songs. There was a definite sense of throwing caution to the wind, the premise behind the recording was actually to capture this particular group of songs the way the band (Justin Bernasconi, Justin Olsson and Daniel Hobson) had being playing them on the road. The whole thing was done in three days, six songs tracked live on the first day, second day I overdubbed a few guitar solos, third day mix.
 
When We Were Young was very considered and planned, Late At Night is totally unconsidered and on the fly. They’re worlds apart.
 
 
AHC: Do you have any new projects in the works or musical ideas percolating for the future?

Cat: Yes! I’m currently recording my new album with Jeff Lang. It'll be out in 2018!

​
For More visit www.catcanteri.com/
The Stillsons: www.thestillsons.com/

Cat Canteri catalog available via catcanteri.bandcamp.com/music
The Stillsons catalog available via thestillsons.bandcamp.com/music

​Poetry, in the Fluorescence


when your song plays
leave your boy/beast/man behind, get out on the hot pink concrete

sweat off the bile that piles in your throat like nights filled with
forgotten memories of times you'd rather not remember 

you twirl and find yourself on the ground
on another dirty bathroom floor, nettle-haired and dreaming

there's an ache between your knees and a longing in your eyes
for something more

there is no god, just your dirty fingers
caressing yourself in the flashing lights

you wait for whatever salvation a basement and fluorescence can bring

because you are suspended somewhere in-between, a tasting menu of different colors of beautiful, woke ghosts

because in the end, when the kodak black, the j cole, the boogie wit da hoodie plays

you'll become a doe mid leap, twerk, dream, die.





Summer


know what is gone
and what is beyond the dandelion veil

know what is just out of
reach, something you can just barely taste on the 

tip of your aching 
tongue

you're a whole-headed nightmare
some rare birdlike enigma 

flapping through the warm night
like godspeed, glory, send us away to some place we've never known

once, you told me my poetry was too sad
and if you were just there for me

maybe we wouldn't be a fire
of burning feathers

your bones
are my bones

and isn't that enough?
​

You Are Here: A Meditation on Phenomenology and Spiritualism 
(with a Side of Jalapeños and Mezcal)
for Michael Morales
 
 
Whereas 
                        I’m not so much
             a full-on, absolute denier, 
                            but really more of what you might call a 
                                                  methodological
                                                                                         naturalist / 
                          soft-hearted atheist /
              hard-nosed agnostic (with gnostically
                                                                       paganish proclivities 
                                             and a soft spot
              for the weird, fanciful and mysterious)
                               when it comes to matters concerning
       supernatural phenomena / spirit worlds /
                                                                higher powers / etc., etc., 
                                                 but if I were more
                      hard-wired that way (if not exactly
         a full-on true believer) 
                                                      and if my ratio
                                    of wiring to whatever quantifiable level
           of good old fashioned 
                                                      common credulity
                                 were to extend to the idea of actually
       communing with and / or summoning
                     said supernatural phenomena / 
                                                                                               spirit worlds /
                           higher powers / etc., etc., then I’d have to say
         that two men of (otherwise) 
                                                                          sound mind
                                    sitting across a table from one another
         (mano a mano, as if locked in a fierce war of wills
                  on the psychic plain),
consuming raw slices 
                                                 of jalapeños and
                                              washing them down with shots of
                         mezcal (con gusano, by the way, 
                if that makes any difference, though I don’t
                                                know why it would) would
   probably be as effective a deus ex machina
                 as any for calling down the weird lightning
 of mystic visions 
                                                      and prophetic dreams
                           and very possibly setting the cosmic        
               revolving door (that is rumored to exist),
                                    between this world and who knows
        how many others, 
                                                           to spinning like
                                                                       a roulette wheel on which 
            the little black ball of the mind 
                                                                                          (the black pearl
                                   of all potential and / or accumulated
       human knowledge and wisdom)
                 must eventually, 
                                                        inevitably come to a rest
 
                                                                         (if but for 
                                                                                                the moment).
 





What Is It, This Time?
 
 
What is it, this time?
 
It’s a set of elevator doors,
endlessly and randomly opening and closing
on all our various levels of perception / 
consciousness / awareness / etc.
 
It’s a slippery gateway drug
down a long helical flight
of ever-expanding co-dependencies.
 
It’s an attic window lit with a mysterious glow
in a house where no one has lived for years
(where many a secret passageway
is rumored to silently serpentine).
 
What is it, this time!?
 
It’s a hairpin turn in an already labyrinthine path
through the Garden of Earthly Delights.
 
It’s an epic poem
folded into a leaky haiku of a boat
then set afloat on a lazy, meandering meme-stream
that runs (mostly unnoticed) through all our lives.
 
It’s a deep, drunken mid-day nap,
ended suddenly by a dream of wind 
and thunder and a violent knocking 
at the back door (to which you stumble
clumsily and frantically 
only to find no one there).
 
What is it, this time!!?
 
It’s a midnight rendezvous
with Fate, Karma, Kismet and Assoc.
 
It’s a June Bug struggling 
on the floor of a bath tub
in an abandoned motel
by the side of a road you really, 
really don’t want to go down.
 
It’s a long, deep sigh let loose
like the last leaf of a dead tree
on to the frozen surface of a kiddie pool.
 
It’s a rotting tree limb finally cracking
and falling from the accumulated weight and misery 
of an ancient hangman’s noose in a forest 
of tall, creaking skeletons and perpetual fog 
in which too many people have been hung.
 
What is it, this time!!!?
 
It’s the lone gypsy prince of coyotes
calling up the spirits of his dead ancestors
for one last suicidal reunion tour
before the Big Bad Ragnarok*
of so many late-night campfire tales
inevitably comes rumbling, tumbling down.
 
It’s a train broke down in a tunnel
with no light at the end.
 
What is it, this time!!!!?
 
Let me tell you what it is, cha-cha,
on the house and country simple,
so listen up and get it straight.
 
It’s a priest crying with laughter
at a joke his friend the rabbi has told him
about a priest, a rabbi and a donkey
who walk into a Bar Mitzvah.
 
That’s what it is.
 
Asshole.





Sitting in the Rain, Tit-Deep
in the Gasconade River,
Passing a Pint-Bottle of Evan Williams
Back and Forth
For Jeanette Powers
 
 
The river has been stirred-up a bit
by this low-level, end-of-summer shower
and keeps attempting to sweep us
and our bottle away downstream
to wash up who-knows-where.
 
But our butts are too firmly planted
in the rocks, here, our conversation
too deeply delved into for us
to surrender so easily, now.
 
Leaves and sticks float by.
 
A lone Blue Heron skips across
the river and over the trees.
 
Dragonflies dance their crazy
electric calligraphy across
the water’s surface.
 
The bottle goes back and forth.
 
Rain continues
to fall.

​

                                                                        The Sum of Outrage
 
                                                                        A man has been taken into custody in connection with a
                                                                        road rage incident that left a 4- year-old girl dead, police in
                                                                        Albuquerque, New Mexico, said Wednesday.
                                                                        ⎯ CNN, Wed October 21, 2015
 
 
 
One       highway         one car            one lane     one      exit                   one truck
 
                one        man               one      father                       one child        a daughter
 
one gun               one    bullet               one           shot                       one                 head
 
 
               one                     brain                       one    instant                             one      death
 
 
Add      them     up
    
                               to a      total     
                                                             loss
 
                                                             we     
                                                                                can    not     
 
 
                                                                                                               compute.     ​




Recovery Rounder
 
 
When he was twelve, the headmaster expelled him
and his mom threw him out in the maritime snow.
 
He took to bumming rides on the Trans-Canada Highway,
his thumb frozen stiff, poised in the wind waiting
 
for strangers. Sometimes cars stopped, a rig, or pick up,
Where ya going, eh? They asked. Wherever, he said
 
but they dropped him off to root through dumpsters
and when he was older,  strong-arm convenience stores
 
in Saskatoon, Banff, or Kamloops. Sometimes women
took him home, patting his head like a puppy they found
 
on the side of the road. There was Wendy, Susie, Jessie,
and Fran, but he resisted commitment so all kicked
 
him out. Then he slept on benches in parks or bus stations
and sold his body to men in washroom stalls. When he quit
 
drinking, he married a nurse and they lived in a travel trailer
and he preached the Big Book in AA meetings all over. I met
 
him in Tucson while he changed his oil, draining brownish
sludge on the Arizona sand. That’s illegal, I said, and he laughed.
 
Are you fuckin’ kidding me, Kid? And the desert drank
the forty weight inkblot, soiled the color of bathroom tiles.

​


Haunting Mom
 
My mom is haunted. She walks
with ghosts I call woulda, coulda,
and shoulda but she calls them regrets.
 
I tell her there’s nothing
she could or should have done,
I tell her there’s nothing
that would have made
 
a difference. But you know
moms, they worry. She wants
to know the last thing I thought
 
before the gun went off and lead
pierced my skull and scattered
my brain. She thinks about the bullet
boring through my head.
 
She’s obsessed with knowing
if I suffered so I told her:
 
It was  ⎯ Crack ⎯Bang
no time for my ears to ring⎯
just exploded light all around.

​