Since she moved to London five years ago, Cate Canning has taken a few trips home. Sometimes, she even brings her friends from London’s music scene with her to the rural Canadian town where she grew up. What’s most surprising to her English friends about her hometown, Canning says through a Zoom screen, is not the single shopping street, methodist churches on every corner, or tractors barrelling down the highway — although those things tie for second — “It’s probably the smell of shit when you drive in from the airport,” she says, throwing her head back, her laugh chiming through the Zoom screen.
As we chat, Canning is sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment in Nashville, Tennessee, where she recently moved to finish her debut album after spending five years in England’s capital. She enters the call apologetically (even though she’s not actually late) and says she’s been swamped with “life admin”. Canning pulls a handful of voluminous platinum blonde hair over one shoulder. ‘Life admin’ is just one of many glamorous perks of being an independent artist, Canning says, smiling. After two years of writing the album by herself – feeling “a bit crazy” obsessing over songwriting – she’s frantically preparing for “the light at the end of the tunnel”: the launch of her first album, Bottle Blonde.
Now, though, Canning has just released her third and final single for the album, ‘How Am I Gonna Tell My Friends’, a sparkling, anthemic country-pop song that she wrote with a concert crowd in mind. She wrote the demo with friends and frequent collaborators Elle Campbell and Nick Hahn two years ago, a few days after getting back together with her ex. “It was that classic, ‘No, we’re never getting back together’. And then two weeks later, you’re like, ‘Well, guys, guess what!” The song is decidedly lighthearted. “I just wanted it to be fun,” Canning says. Fittingly, following her first show in London since announcing Bottle Blonde, she tells me the single’s live debut was “more of a performance than I’ve ever done”.
Naming the album Bottle Blonde, she explains, was also a way of tapping into the less serious side of music. The confessional ballads that paved her way into the industry, Canning admits, began to feel limiting to her growth as a performer. “Now that I’m getting older, [and] in some of the most intense relationships of my life, I realised I couldn’t write only those songs anymore,” she says. “There’s an ongoing bit with my friends that I’m a bit insane. For this song, and this record, I just had to let myself go there.” Canning is herself a proud “bottle blonde”, and has been since she was 16. “I have a different persona when my hair is teased and dyed really blonde,” she says. “This album is the most extreme parts of my personality, and the hair colour really lets me do that.”
For all Canning’s excitement about her first album coming out on 1 May, she’s no newcomer to the music scene. She released her first single, a pop ballad with an R&B undercurrent called ‘Sad Song’, in 2019. Since then, she’s released dozens of singles and two EPs, amassed 255,000 followers and over seven million likes on TikTok, and has opened for artists like British popstar Maisie Peters — her longtime roommate — and her childhood hero, Shania Twain. But it was a hail Mary throw that got her there, Canning explains. Growing up, she says, pursuing a career in music never felt possible. Even her backup plan to be a songwriter felt like a pipe dream. “I remember in high school telling teachers I wanted to be a singer, and they said, ‘Oh, I don’t know…’,” she recalls. “They were supportive — they’d let me skip class to do gigs, but as a career, the arts never felt like an option.”
As is often the case with small-town dreamers, Canning’s environment made her feel like something of a black sheep. “It’s quite a religious town,” she says. “I loved growing up there, but that was something I had to learn to navigate.” She continues: “Now, I’m like, ‘It all worked out. My friends who got married young got married young, and I’m able to do my thing, and those two things can exist at once. But at the time, it put pressure on me.”
While the music world felt far away from Abbotsford, British Columbia, listening to her favourite artists brought it that bit closer. Since she can remember, Canning has been a fan of Shania Twain and Kacey Musgraves, and she’s also a “big Dolly Parton girl”. Growing up taking singing lessons, she wrote original songs for her school plays, and even made some pocket money performing at festivals as a country band’s stand-in singer. But, if she wanted to pursue a music career for real, she knew those small-town shows had an end date. “Growing up in a place like Abbotsford, I always knew I was going to have to leave,” she says.
The grief of being away from her family and the comforts of her hometown, which she calls “the most beautiful place on earth”, still follows her. “You just feel like a part of you is always somewhere else,” she says. When she moved to London in February 2020, she thought she’d be there for a year at most, to see what the city had to offer. But when lockdown happened, she completed her first EP with musician roommates and signed on to their distributor. From there, she says, “it all just started happening”.
It’s no coincidence that these ‘happenings’ aligned with one of the biggest social media booms to date: the lockdown obsession with TikTok. “In Covid, TikTok was huge for me,” Canning says. “Gross, but,” she shrugs, “I’m lucky to live in a time when I can be independent, and a video can do well, and I can immediately see how that improves my life.” In 2022, a TikTok of Canning singing her diaristic ballad ‘Can’t Wait to Be Pretty’ garnered nearly four million views and catapulted her into the public eye. Although, she’s quick to point out that the app is both a barrier-breaking gift and a rumination trap for the independent artists who must so often rely on it these days.
Fast forward to one year ago and Canning had completed what she thought would be her first album. But when it came time for her sessions with Nashville producer Andrew Pacheco, she says, “I listened to it top to bottom and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is exactly it.’” It was a risk to return to the drawing board and indefinitely postpone the release of her debut record, but it was more important to Canning that she introduced herself to the world in a way she could feel proud of. Plus, she adds, as an independent artist, she simply couldn’t afford to invest in producing songs she wasn’t totally enamoured with.
The problem with the line-up of songs, Canning says through a smile, was that “they just weren’t very silly”. So, when she returned to the studio, Canning brought her best friends with her. Her dream team included Peters, Thomas Daniels, Madison Kozak and Rory Adams — and occasionally, an all-star addition like Liz Rose, the country songwriter whose credits on Taylor Swift songs have won her multiple Grammys. The second time round, the results were much different. ‘Touch Grass’, ‘Leave Your Man at Home’ and ‘How Am I Gonna Tell My Friends?’ — the pre-released singles from her upcoming album — are effervescent, sharp-tongued and laugh-out-loud fun. They’re ’70s-infused cowboy disco, as promised, but perhaps most importantly, they’re oh so her.
“When it comes to being low budget, you have to really believe in all the songs you put out,” Canning concludes. Before investing, she says, “I had to think about, ‘Do I love this? Do I believe in it?’” And luckily, her answer to herself is now in the affirmative: “I really, really do.”
- WriterSydney Lobe
- Image CreditsSophie Scott
