Cait Brennan Releases New Album

To say Cait Brennan has lived many lives is truly an understatement. She's been a schoolteacher, a working screenwriter, a dyed-in-the-wool indie record store clerk, a newspaper reporter, a printing plant grunt. She's changed her name more times than she remembers and has occupied more genders than there are on the map. But one thing, above all, has burned bright at the center of everything: her music.�

Cait has never been your basic folkie singer-songwriter; she's always been more Bowie or St Vincent than Bon Iver. A singer with a powerful, singular five-octave rock voice, a prolific songwriter, and a multi-instrumentalist who plays every note on her own home recordings, Brennan worked for years in secret, creating gorgeous, otherworldly rock sounds that have never seen the light of day -- until now. Discovered and championed by musician and production wunderkind Fernando Perdomo (who's worked with Linda Perhacs, Emitt Rhodes, Beck, Fiona Apple and Jakob Dylan among many others), Cait Brennan's debut album is here at last. �

Raised as a boy, she rebelled against her assigned gender in her teens, causing a minor uproar in her conservative '80s school. She worked up the nerve to play a few live shows, but rural Arizona was not exactly ready for gender diversity -- or her unusual sounds, which were miles away from the hair-metal of the day. Cait's uncanny gift for melody combines with a dark, wry humor that cuts through everything she does.

Her lyrics can be merciless. Her love songs are starkly beautiful, but devoid of treacle. She approaches each moment, each imperfect character with unflinching honesty, with a lyrical, poetic flow and a microscopic attention to detail, and sneaky, dense jokes and references to culture both high and low.�

In Los Angeles, she met a young indie pop wunderkind named Fernando Perdomo. Perdomo immediately recognized the need to record Cait Brennan's music and get it out to the world. Brennan had long dismissed recording a "real" album as something that was out of her reach, financially and otherwise. But Perdomo's persistence is the stuff of legend: with Chris Price, he helped bring Laurel Canyon psych-folk legend Linda Perhacs back to music after four decades, and had a hand in helping the titanic Emitt Rhodes breathe life back into his music after an equally long hiatus.

What followed was a whirlwind. In the sweltering July heat, Brennan and Perdomo ripped twelve of her best songs from her extensive songbook and recorded them in just five inspired, manic days and nights -- in a week when both were playing multiple shows in the LA area. A thirteenth song was spontaneously written and recorded during the mixing process.

Brennan sang every vocal, from the darkest-night depths of "Black Diamond" to the stacked, soaring high harmonies of "Madame Pompadour" and "Father McKenzie." The duo split production and instrumental duties, with Perdomo taking the lead and playing what Brennan calls "the badass virtuoso stuff," like the Brian May-tribute guitar solo on "Harmony Lies" and the titanic four-horseman drumming of "Black Diamond."

For more information, visit www.planetcait.com