Cat Clyde & Dean Johnson

Where is my love? Cat Clyde howls, opening her new album ‘Mud Blood Bone’ with abandon. Can’t find my love? It’s not the somber lament of a longing woman, but a feral eruption, the roar of an animal on the edge. Her voice crumples with dismay, a swampy croon over romping keys. I got a hole in my chest  / I can’t take the emptiness / Where is my love? It’s the essential question of ‘Mud Blood Bone,’ a void eleven frenetic songs sizzle to fill.  The Canadian songwriter’s fourth full-length and first release with Concord Records finds her at a point of personal evolution. “I wrote these songs at the end of a big cycle,” she shares. “Love was not present in my life and I didn’t know where to find it or how to get it back.” Essential to the search, Clyde discovered, was relinquishing old notions. “In the past, I felt like love chained me, controlled me, put me in a cage.”  Produced with Drew Vandenberg (Toro Y Moi, Faye Webster, S.G. Goodman) and recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia, Clyde’s new collection exists in a sonic overlap; the rockabilly grit of contemporaries like Sierra Ferrell, The Deslondes, or Nick Shoulders, meets the vulnerable, folk rock volatility of Big Thief or Angel Olsen. “Drew was the perfect person to help me assemble the players and bring this collection to life,” says Clyde. “Everyone brought their own unique gift to the studio. I create from a place of instinct, and once we all locked in, it felt easy, and we were able to capture the songs live.” Liam Duncan of Boy Golden was another integral collaborator. “He was there from day one demos to the album’s finalization,” Clyde explains, “as a great friend, musician, and anchor to the original sentiment of each song.” Clyde’s foundational relationship with music began through a vent in the floor. “I’d lift the rug up to hear my grandfather playing his fiddle along to cassette tapes in the basement.” This was in North Ontario at summertime family gatherings, the best of which would culminate in impromptu family jam sessions. “I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t singing.” After a fleeting, childhood stint with the piano, Clyde took on the guitar around age thirteen. “When I discovered Blues music—well—that changed my life.” The riffs of Lead Belly and Robert Johnson were too complicated for her small, preteen hands to master, but they inspired Clyde to write her own songs.  She busked through adolescence, joined a punk band called Shit Bats in college, and recorded her first album in a friend’s basement before she graduated. Four full-lengths later, Clyde’s voice vibrates with that ferocious confidence of one who’s been doing this her whole life. ‘Mud Blood Bone’ exudes a nomadic independence. Clyde penned some of the songs in her 1973 Boler trailer, parked temporarily on a farm in Ontario, others on a narrow boat in England, and the rest in transit from one festival to another, letting lyrics stream freely from a jetlagged dream state.  “Constantly being on the move, having to navigate new environments, it forces me to be present, and to confront my own feelings,” Clyde says. “You can’t hide behind comforts. You have to know exactly who you are, and what you want.”  The result is uninhibited, raw, pure; it’s the sound of personal truth discovered in real time. Clyde is cracked wide open and what spills out—equal parts despair, invocation, discovery, and celebration—is the love she went looking for. “When I listen to this album, I know that my power belongs to me. Love lives inside of me. I can always find it.” ‘Mud Blood Bone’ was released on March 13, 2026. Dean Johnson I Hope We Can Still Be Friends By Erin Osmon With I Hope We Can Still Be Friends , his debut for Saddle Creek, Dean Johnson makes a pact with the listener: He will sing you his truth in the most heartfelt and charming way possible, if you promise to keep an open mind. The title partly stems from the playful way the Seattle-based singer, songwriter and guitarist communes with his audiences at concerts. “I hope you’re not afraid to talk to me after the show,” he’ll say, sweetly, before launching into “Death of the Party,” the album’s seventh song. Centered on the “energy vampire” archetype — the exasperating windbag we’ve all encountered at some point — its lyrics are at once intellectually biting and unmistakably hilarious. His tender voice rings out like the ghost of Roy Orbison or a misfit Everly brother.  “Words don’t come easily to me / I notice you don’t have that problem / It sounds to me you cannot stop them,” Johnson sings over acoustic guitar strumming, and gentle bass and drums, like the narrator in a dark comedy whose coming-of-age misadventures have made for an excellent film. Johnson spent years tending bar at Al’s Tavern in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. There, he encountered folks of all stripes; and regulars enthusiastically murmured about his budding musical greatness — There’s the best songwriter in town! Johnson was a kind of local lore, a long-held family secret, before the singer finally broke out in 2023 with his debut album, Nothing For Me Please , at age 50. “‘Death of the Party’ is a great example of that,” he says of the sociological experience of bartending. “Being in that environment, lyrics did solidify. If I was working on a song, it wasn’t unusual for some new aspect of it, or a line that was too vague, to suddenly come into focus.”      I Hope We Can Still Be Friends is essentially an anthology that bridges Johnson’s earliest days as a songwriter with his present-day outlook and abilities. There are songs that have been in his setlists for years, and others that will be new to fans. Each of its 11 tracks contains jocular social commentary or lovingly rendered affairs of the heart. The album’s songs about love and relationships offer another way to interpret its title: as a parting thought to an ex.  Like all of Johnson’s cable-knit writing, the title is a clever banner for the album’s dual nature, the thing that binds its tragedy and comedy masks. Johnson explains that he didn’t set out to make a concept album. It’s a coincidence that about half of the album’s songs are a bit sardonic, and the other half are more lighthearted. The singer playfully refers to the former as his “mean” songs, which is why the album’s back cover is adorned with a warning that says “Beware of Dean.” Like John Prine or Kris Kristofferson’s country-adjacent sound, devastating humor and economical profundity refracted through a barroom’s haze, the album is filled with easygoing twang, sad characters, universal truths and the absurdity of everyday life. “Carol” recounts the numb consumption and dissipating cultural attention that is besieging America. There’s a search for optimism amid meditations on dying in a plane crash in “Before You Hit the Ground.” Romance that is best forgotten steers “So Much Better” — only Johnson could weave electroconvulsive therapy into a gentle, chuckle-inducing missive on unbearable heartbreak. I Hope We Can Still Be Friends floats in a liminal plane between timely and timeless, its minimalist instrumentation elevating Johnson’s affecting voice to new heights. Recorded at Unknown Studio in Anacortes, Washington, the record was produced by Sera Cahoone — the Seattle-based singer-songwriter Johnson describes as a “soulmate sibling.” Overdubbing took place at Seattle’s Crackle & Pop! For the sessions, Johnson assembled a small band of friends including Abbey Blackwell (bass), multi-instrumentalist Sam Peterson and Cahoone (drums, backing vocals), who created a familial tone on the already intimate album. I Hope We Can Still Be Friends , with its sharp observations and stirring personal insights, holds space for both intense reflection and emotional release. You may laugh, or cry or both. In this sense, the album is powerful medicine — a way to both expose yourself to and inoculate yourself against the ugly, absurd, existential and heartbreaking. At its core rests a basic truth that is often difficult to remember or accept: Happiness wouldn’t exist without sadness as its counterpart. On his uncanny ability to so clearly see and then encapsulate humanity in all its messy glory, Johnson offers this core memory, drawn from his childhood on Camano Island in the Puget Sound. “I was raised on a bluff,” he says. “I’m not trying to make it sound dramatic, but I did have a sweeping view.”