Indulge Me: A Lifetime Tour of The Cat Empire
That my favorite band in the world should disband as the pandemic raged into its second Northern Hemisphere autumn; that it should offer a final livestream of its Melbourne concert ten days before I turn forty; that its livestream should start at 1:25 a.m. my time, instead of half past midnight, thanks to mysterious technical glitches, leaving me as always wanting more at the wee-est of wee hours in the morning (a call I answer by spending another hour revisiting my collection of their albums) — I’ll be honest, it’s enough to break a certain measure of me.
I’m just not Ready Now. I assumed I had a lifetime left of their concerts, chasing them back to the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver if ever the borders flow freely again, hoping as usual that they’ll find reason to play Seattle again, Portland again — please play the Doug Fir again! A tiny stage in a tiny basement with no air between the dancers and the singers. Who in their home country got to experience that? After they went big, international?
I did, though. It was 2013, and my future ex-husband pulled out his phone to text me across the table, I think Felix is sitting next to you. He was! I sat maybe twenty inches from the lead singer of my only favorite band while he dined solo at a tiny table with a long, shared bench on which we both sat. I swallowed myself whole and spoke to the Creature. My fiancé snapped a photo. And I understood nothing Felix said. Australian isn’t quite English except in song.
What if I’d known in March 2019, contending with the sticky floors at the Showbox in Seattle, that I was watching them play live, in-person for the very last time? In so many ways that night, I was seeing them — and myself — for the very first time. What irony. Four long years had passed since I’d made it to a show, and we’d all been through a lot. Not All Hell, but close. I’d divorced. It was bad. My career was lodged in all sorts of awful ways that were only worsening.
The band stepped onto the stage, and I realized with shock that we’re all middle-aged now. Those boys on stage were men. The crowd was Gen Y, not millennial. And none of us knew each other, but all of us knew every word to every song. We sang together, a chorus transported back to our collective youths — Still Young — sunnier, lighter versions of ourselves. We jumped and danced and sweated like we used to, and maybe tomorrow we’d hurt more for it, but damnit, we could still jump and dance and sweat! For hours! At one point, everyone put their arms around the shoulders next to them, row after row of beautiful, aging humans swaying together and singing back at the stage word-for-word, Who’s That?
I left that performance so very glad to be me, to be alive, and grateful to have a band to follow for life who could always bring me right back to the full measure of myself with the right line-up of songs. Who gets that? How was I so lucky?
My life changed quickly in the weeks that followed. I thawed a bit. I took new chances. None of them worked out, most particularly the career change. But I turned toward a version of myself who’s more ready for the rest of her life, On My Way to middle age.
The Cat Empire has been a major soundtrack to my life over the past sixteen years. Their music takes me back to Ecuador where I heard them for the first time while lying sick in bed from drinking water that hadn’t boiled the requisite five minutes. Whining and sweating, I drove my Australian roommate crazy, or maybe she was just being compassionate when she popped the headphones from her minidisc player into my ears and left their music to transport me away. A gift, out of All That Talking.
Their melodies send me back to law school in Rhode Island, where everything felt like it would collapse on me, pressures mounting, sanity waning, and I spent more money than I could then justify to ship the original The Cat Empire album from Australia. It doesn’t seem likely that I was their first American order, but I know for certain I was among the first several dozen. (I wonder how many of us there are now.) The album arrived and transported me away from the stress, brought me back to The Rhythm, myself, and ultimately back home to Idaho without a law degree, and good riddance. No looking back.
The tunes put me back in Boise, sitting at a stoplight late one night while blasting How to Explain for the two-hundred-thousandth time (I occasionally go long stretches during which How to Explain is the only song I listen to, looped), and my sunroof was open. I looked over; the guy in the next lane is rocking out too. He doesn’t know the music, but he seems to know good music when he hears it. And then the light turned green.
It takes me back to their second album, Two Shoes, and the piano solo I always hoped to hear in-person but never will, except here. It just isn’t the same — Sol Y Sambra.
It takes me back to their third album, Cities, the soundtrack to my wandering years in the thick of politics, reading too much Paulo Coelho, a trip to Denver where I visited my uncle. I’ve never heard any of those tracks played live, and never will.
I’m back hearing their fourth album for their first time, So Many Nights, and they produced something better than their original album. I couldn’t get enough. But I entirely forgot the album because a week later, my brother died. My dad had cancer, and radiation left him too vulnerable and weak to attend his own son’s funeral, so there I was at the funeral home with my mom when she orders three burial plots at once — one for my brother, one for my father who was not long for this world no matter how hopeful the doctors wanted us to be, and one for herself — because she’s a planner like that. And it hit me hard, but I didn’t say so. No tears dropped until I drove back across the Idaho desert alone in my car. I was barely twenty-six years old. I should’ve been dealing in weddings and baby showers, not funerals and burial plots. Such Darkness.
A month or two after the funeral, I found the fourth album stashed in my bedroom and was shocked. What is this album? Where did it come from? I fed the CD into my Bose, and the music that poured out sounded familiar. I knew all the words, but I didn’t remember ordering the album. How have I not been listening to this every day? It takes many years to understand how grief and trauma work. Taken together, they package time and memories into tight little parcels and store them away or erase them entirely. Maybe in the case of that album, it was a gift, because today when I hear it, I don’t associate it with grief. I hear only Sunny Moon summertime and wide-open fields when I listen to it.
The first time I saw the band play live was November 2009. It was my first visit to Vancouver, BC, and my then-boyfriend drove us out from northern Idaho. The border guards didn’t understand why we’d cross into Canada just to see a band, and I said, But have you heard The Cat Empire? You’d understand, I promise! They searched the vehicle anyway.
The concert was pure joy. I was among the last to leave the Commodore Ballroom because the concert passed too quickly. It’s like they stepped onto stage and two minutes later, it ended. Time did not exist in that space, and I was so not ready to see them go. (I’m still not.) The boyfriend bought me a logoed hat then walked me back to the hotel. I stomped in puddles and sang loudly the whole way, probably The Wine Song.
The second time I saw them live was in Vancouver, too. Same place, but this time I stole away from work on a campaign in southwestern Washington to see the show. The car was not searched. The show was good, but I was worn down, tired. Campaigns do that. The crowd was intense that time too, as if everyone knew it would end too soon. I returned home remembering something that led me to download a Mumford and Sons album.
Their fifth album, Cinema, has two leaflets inside, one autographed by most of the band members. Their red markers have faded too fast — like the band itself, they’re almost gone eleven years later, Call[ed] Home by the passage of time.
Then came the concert at the Doug Fir. Portland, July 2013, and Harry was there with his wife, who opened the show with a voice that floats on air like dandelion seeds. I bought all her albums. Tinpan Orange. Her voice became my camping soundtrack for years; the essence of her songs ran beneath my wedding.
I returned to the Commodore for a fourth concert, but I didn’t dance that night. The second of what would be five fatal blows to my marriage had just been dealt when, in expressing serious anxieties about my brand-new job over dinner before the show, my husband in effect told me to just shut up about it. I went to the bathroom in tears and emerged smiling, Daggers Drawn and vowing to never confide anything job-related to my husband again. It’s a toxic vow, more toxic than I knew.
I tried enjoying the show that night, pretending to be utterly fine while mining an emotional canyon through the middle of my marriage. I told myself it’s okay to care less about this concert. There will be others to attend in the future, when life gets better. There will always be another concert. (Wrong.)
The sixth album came out during that marriage, Steal The Light, and it arrived with my name printed on a poster folded into the CD case — I’m listed among the original people who signed up for their mailing list, something to which I must’ve subscribed in 2006, maybe earlier. My stepdaughter was obsessed with the opening track, Brighter Than Gold. We made dance parties in the living room, and I bought her bright pink pumps so we could both stomp around on the wood floors and raise our hands in the air. Unfiltered joy, the closest I ever felt to that girl. And now she’s gone, because that’s how it goes in divorces where you’re only a transitory presence in a child’s long life.
Then came an album I still seldom remember but know all the words, caught once again by trauma, this time from the divorce. Rising with the Sun, another parcel packed away.
For too long afterward, I lived without the luxury of space to dance, and when I finally twirled to the tracks on that seventh album, their tribute to the Bataclan massacre sends me back to the parking lot of the crappy dentist office in Burien, Washington where — relieved to be done with an awful appointment and not quite wanting to drive home — I turned on the radio and heard the breaking news. Concert venue in France, streets on lockdown, terrorism suspected. I sat in my car, listening to NPR and the soundtrack of steady rain on the sunroof, while tears poured down my face. I dare anyone not to cry when they hear that track, the opening hymnal like a mass. A too-familiar trauma of our century: the risk of being shot in a crowd.
And finally came the album they featured that night in Seattle, Stolen Diamonds. They dropped it one track at a time, on the first day of every month for a year. It’s the only album that I don’t physically own — no CD, only space taken up on my iPhone (for now). So much has changed. The music is radically accessible, friendly, sunny. I miss the complexity of the earlier music, but the utter dance-ability, sing-ability of this album earned my enthusiasm. I learned the term “ear worm” and forever associate it with Oscar Wilde.
When the image on the Stolen Diamonds track — a long, straight road through the forest on Kangaroo Island — was tweeted side-by-side in the aftermath of the Island’s unprecedented 2020 fires, my heart broke. I revisited the climate change track from their 2008 album, seemingly too pessimistic at the time, and it was freshly prescient, more prescient by the day. No Longer There.
A month later, the fires were no longer headlines, but no one was ready yet to pronounce the term pandemic. I met my midlife crisis in the form of a mental breakdown. And I’m lucky, because the virus soon shut down the world and granted me the longest healing period possible, months and months of self-isolation. Alone, single and childfree at thirty-eight, I stuck felt pads on the legs of my couch to easily slide it out of the way and make dance parties for myself.
I downloaded their twin live albums, Live On Earth, even though I burned copies of the CDs twelve years ago — it’s about time I paid for the privilege. I now understood the throat singing, thanks to The Hu. And I rode the pandemic’s isolation on the sounds of the crowds, imagining myself back at one of their concerts, at any concert, instead of drinking alone in my living room while hospitals and morgues filled with the pandemic’s victims. I mourned to this music. I bought myself a disco ball for Christmas.
But I held onto hope. Normalcy would return. Concerts would come back. In February this year, Australia was managing COVID well enough to allow big, open-air concerts — Summer Salt Festival — and they streamed one evening live for the world to see. I donned a summer hat, drank springtime IPAs, and stayed up very late to watch the show in real time. There, I met the The Teskey Brothers, the closing band, and downloaded all their albums.
The concert was magic. This is what normal would be like. And it would be all the sweeter having spent so much time Waiting — the music will move us, the crowds will be joyous. I could almost taste the end of the pandemic, and I vowed for the umpteenth time to travel to Australia and experience the band in a crowd of thousands instead of these Pacific Northwest clubs of maybe fifteen-hundred, usually less.
But the pandemic raged on. The Delta surge was just beginning when I got a text from my ex-husband, of all people. First I’d heard from him in a year (I’ve gone several years without responding), and he wrote to deliver news that The Cat Empire is disbanding? No. No way.
I checked my email and found the official announcement. I wrote everyone who might care to know — the guy who took me to that first show, the one who went with me to the second, the man I still love who went with me to that show at the Showbox in Seattle, anyone with whom I shared this music. One friend responded back, appropriately: Did they give a reason, or is it just like the rest of us — pressures of middle age, exhaustion and pandemic?
I cried All Night Loud. I devoured their music like an endless reel of my bygone youth. I mourned the loss of what could have been — how it might have felt to go to their concerts when we’re all in our fifties, in our sixties. Wouldn’t that have been lovely? Would we still try to jump and dance? Would we still know all the words?
I booked my ticket to their final virtual concert, who cares if it was the dead of night at Christmastime. I would nap in advance. I could take the full weekend to recover. But there was no way I could miss my last chance to join with voices from around the globe, isolated in our respective living rooms, to celebrate everything we’ve been, everything we’ve become. I pulled the couch aside, set up the disco ball, and once the music finally started, the pianist is alone on stage. For nearly half an hour, he sat at a grand piano and improvised key-by-key everything we all felt. Genius poured out of him, mournful textures rich with meaning and growth and reflection. I was a mess. It is everything, and it is like nothing he has ever played before, not that I’ve seen.
The music wrapped up at 4:17 a.m. It ended, as always, too soon — Sleep Won’t Sleep. But the memories go on because I streamed the show again the next day, and yesterday, when I finally finished writing my first novel, the only proper way to celebrate was to stream the concert a third time. It’s yet another milestone in my life cast to the soundtrack of The Cat Empire, a new memory to link to the songs, this time in their final reenactment.
And maybe this is what it will be like going forward. They say the band will continue on in a new iteration. If the recent releases are any indication of the new direction, I’m here for it. It won’t stop me from mourning what we’ve lost, but it will give me a new way to step into my next phase of life, to leave my thirties behind, and with it, so much pain. We will dance renewed, not quite the same but rooted where we’ve been planted, into the future whose contours we can’t yet imagine, nor should we. The adventure comes in the living of it.
