Katrina Cain: No Hometown
Acccording to this week's song from Katrina Cain, I should have thought more of my hometown, instead of ditching it at the earliest chance.
The idea of home is more nuanced and complex than the place itself. Is home a town or a building? Is it family, the people themselves, or the streets and sidewalks that you remember so clearly because you were a lot closer to them than you are now?
According to this week's song from Katrina Cain, I should have thought more of my hometown, instead of ditching it at the earliest chance. The singer of No Hometown feels rudderless in a state so enormous (over twice the size of Britain) that you can barely drive it in a day.
I didn't know any of this when I saw Katrina in London. What I saw and heard was amazing. You can read all about that below, but all I saw was a brilliant singer-songwriter who was lucky enough to be able to tour with her patient husband, a man I would later see in a clip from her timeless blind audition on The Voice, footage from nearly ten years ago.
Any Fleetwood Mac fan who has seen her version of Rhiannon could not forget it, and of course the judges turned around when she hit that note. And before we move away from covers, you simply must catch her singing Dancing in the Dark, a song I played on repeat when I first lived alone in London.
Paul Dettmann
One thing I know is that teenage Paul, pounding the streets of his hometown, first on foot, then on bike, then in a classic powder blue Mini Cooper GT owned by his friend, could not have imagined a world in which someone like Katrina Cain, Queen of Austin, would ask him to listen to her new song.
I don’t got a hometown
No place I can hang around
I keep rolling out the map
I’m here and then I’m back
In motion
I'm sitting next to Paul Heaton, a more famous Paul who settled in my hometown, in a pub that no longer exists. Behind me is a guy I don't know called Roland. A few years from now he will start a band called Fine Young Cannibals. Somewhere over there, playing near the fire, is a little girl called Hannah. I don't know her, but she will star in a Marvel movie thirty years in the future.
Port cities in England used to be the centre of the the universe. Not necessarily for nice reasons, you could hop on a boat sailing west from Liverpool to America, or from Hull you could head to Sweden or Holland. Dover was best for France in a world without aeroplanes. Because it is such an otherwise out of the way place, the literal end of the land, I felt my hometown to be a burden, a weight to be shifted. I did not know any of those people in the next road who would have amazing careers in showbusiness. I resented my hometown and wanted rid of it, and left at the first opportunity. So did they, of course. Only Philip Larkin performed the reverse journey.
Katrina Cain is a determined, tough pocket rocket who has weathered all the storms she has faced. She's an old soul, of course, recently posting about how disillusioned she has become with modern technology, not least social media and music streaming. I am listening to No Hometown alongside her EP, Gold, in MP3, actually downloaded to a device. And I am writing this on a travel keyboard that looks like something from the 1980s but does exactly what I need and nothing more. It captures text. That's it.
The song itself, which you can listen to from today, is fun and jaunty, with a little of the glissando I remember from that night in London. She references Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde, a couple I have written about at length elsewhere. They were always a doomed, tragic couple. But Bonnie without Clyde? I always think of the outlaw as being an exciting figure but here she is not.
Now I don’t know how to answer when they ask where I come from
Oh it’s like I’m just an outlaw, Bonnie Parker on the run
If it helps, I always thought the Texas cap fitted. I've recently been writing about Kitty Coen, another KC from Texas, and there's something fabulous in the air, or the water. Or the oil.
Katrina knows the land well, born in Dallas, even though her family were not living there at the time. That raises questions I do not have answers for. I watched her interview on Austin Downbeat when she appeared with Johnny Goudie and she appeared as she always does: calm, assured, confident. She sang one of my favourites, New Mercedes, and Johnny looked seriously impressed.
What this experience has reminded me is that creative types rarely feel truly at home anywhere. Katrina is wrong about not having a hometown. Even if she had one, she would not feel all that settled. She has music and therefore travel in her bones: an incurable, life-long condition. There is nothing more exciting in this world than waking up in a new place at dawn, especially when you have no memory of how you got there. This is a wonderful single... give it a listen this minute!
Katrina Cain has her own website and is slightly reluctantly available on Instagram and TikTok. My personal preference is always the email list.
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