Cat Ridgeway

Cat Ridgeway fronts an indie band out of Orlando and spent the past year touring most of the country.

Ridgeway joined the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast remotely, with Gina Boykin of Live Music Junkiez sitting in as co host. Gina had seen her play at least four times and had been trying to get the two of them in the same room since the year before, when they missed her. The timing worked out. Ridgeway was two days from playing Serenity Cellars up near Cleveland, Georgia, then the Wildflower Festival that weekend, then closing out Matilda's season on October 25.

Melody drives everything for her, and a lyric can come off a piece of graffiti, a conversation or a YouTube comment. She was still missing the bridge for Giving You Up when the band won a contest to open a stage at Okeechobee Music Festival, on a bill with Arcade Fire and Leon Bridges. She told the band she would finish the words before the show and then did not. She sang whatever arrived on stage that day, asked a friend at the show for his video afterward, and learned what she had sung. In the studio she rewrote that lyric twice and recorded both versions, and neither sat right, so the accident stayed on the record.

The hustle started early. A place called the Chef's Table in Winter Garden, Florida booked her from six to nine while she was still in high school, three hours of material she did not have. She came home from class and learned five songs a day for a month, then made a rule that anything requested more than three times went into the set, which is why she knows all the Janis Joplin she knows. The road has taken more from her. Her brother Mitch plays with her around the Southeast, but when the runs stretched to weeks and then a couple of months he had a nine to five and could not go. One recent stretch was four shows in a row in cities hours apart, with the single off day spent driving the fourteen hours from Philadelphia to Chicago.

Chicago has been her biggest market all year, ahead of her hometown, which she did not see coming. Her mother works the merch table and her father, who came up in a musical house, keeps joking about driving the bus. The first person to join her team was Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead's publicist through their peak, who met her father backstage after a show she played in high school. Her father held onto the card for about ten years before deciding the time was right to call. Last month she finally stayed at McNally's house in San Francisco and heard the stories he says nobody has written down.