Former Whiskeytown mainstay Caitlin Cary has temporarily stepped aside from her solo career to concentrate on another project, the harmony-rich, all-female folk-rock trio Tres Chicas. The group's debut album, Sweetwater, arrives June 29th from North Carolina-based independent label, Yep Roc Records, home to Cary's three solo releases.
Joining Cary in Tres Chicas is Lynn Blakey, from Eighties college-rock group Let's Active and Oh-OK, and Tonya Lamm, from the late-Nineties alt-country outfit Hazeldine. The lineup also includes drummer Skillet Gilmore, Cary's husband and another former member of Whiskeytown, the defunct band fronted by Ryan Adams.
Cary calls Tres Chicas a "long work-in-progress." The loose confederation came to be four years ago and began recording a year later with veteran producer Chris Stamey and then sporadically since. Sessions were originally considered demos, but the group soon saw an album in the making.
"I've been lucky to have a few magic moments singing and some of those were with Ryan, and now it's with Tres Chicas," Cary says. "It's effortless for us to sing together. It's a really organic thing. Another thing that makes it special is that we're all trying really hard not to let it be precious, or sickly sweet."
Sweetwater features original compositions from all three women as well as covers of George Jones' "Take the Devil Out of Me," Lucinda Williams' "Am I Too Blue" and Loretta Lynn's "Deep as Your Pocket."
"It's an amazing vibe," Cary says. Although, she warns, "I don't know if I would recommend it to anybody to be in a band with a bunch of girls. Our practices are really inefficient because we wind up drinking a bunch of wine and dying each other's hair instead of practicing."
The only hitch, Cary admits, is the band name, coined in the eleventh hour four years ago to make an advertising deadline for an early gig. "I'm so not proud of the name of this band but it's just something that happened and stuck," she says. "It's so misleading. We're as white as we can be."
But perhaps a misleading name isn't such a bad thing. "I've made all my friends who live in big cities go to big record stores and put my solo record in the Mariah Carey section, hoping that people will buy it by mistake," Cary says, laughing. "Maybe we can do the same thing with the Tres Chicas. Maybe it will accidentally become a hit in the Latin market."
NEAL WEISS
(April 7, 2004)