Caitlyn Shadbolt finds recording at home a cure for ‘red light fever’
Like Kylie Minogue, the country musician recorded much of her new album from her home: “a real introvert recording process”, said Caitlyn Shadbolt.
After co-hosting the Golden Guitar Awards in Tamworth in January, country singer-songwriter Caitlyn Shadbolt performed alongside Daryl Braithwaite at a Queensland festival named Big Summer Blow Out — and then the pandemic blew out the rest of her gig bookings, too.
On Friday night she will return to the stage for the first time in nine months at a Sunshine Coast pub, followed by shows on the Gold Coast and at a country music festival held on Great Keppel Island.
“I’ll be playing in front of actual, real people,” said Shadbolt with a laugh of relief. “Prior to this I’ve played some live-streamed gigs, but you finish the song and no-one applauds — there’s just this weird silence. It’s going to be good to have some energy in the room.”
Shadbolt has made the most of her time away from her fans by pressing ahead with the recording of her second album, Stages, which is released on Friday.
Although the national lockdown meant that she couldn’t visit Brisbane in April as planned, she instead got busy recording herself at home in Gympie and working with producer Stuart Stuart remotely.
“I’m pretty impatient; I feel like I’d been waiting long enough, so I was like, ‘Nah, stuff this — we need to come up with a plan B’,” said Shadbolt. “Stuart gave me a microphone and compression unit, and I worked out how to use [recording software] Logic for the first time, and tracked all my own vocals and acoustic guitar.”
As well, her drummer tracked his parts from home in Sydney, while Stuart stitched it all together from Brisbane.
“We’d just go back and forth like that; it was a real introvert recording process,” said Shadbolt. “Once I got in the groove of it I really loved it, because I could take my time and there was a lot less pressure.”
In this sense the Queensland musician shares a kinship with pop icon Kylie Minogue, who this year recorded most of the vocals for her 15th album Disco at her home in London, too.
One potential upside from the pandemic for recording artists is the realisation that perhaps they don’t need to spend thousands of dollars hiring studios for weeks on end while battling the performance anxiety of ‘red light fever’.
“The only downside was that if my partner wanted to watch the footy or something, and I was tracking vocals, we certainly couldn’t do both at the same time,” said Shadbolt.
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