Videos by American Songwriter
Red Tail Ring may sound like a southern folk duo, but the Michigan natives take inspiration from their home, too, rolling the state’s lush summers and long, melancholy winters into a rootsy, acoustic sound that’s lonely one minute and lovely the next. On “Katy Came Breezing,” they trade harmonies over fingerplucked guitar and understated fiddle.
“It’s interesting what can stick in your mind over the long haul — the half stories burned in your notebook that keep coming to the forefront,” says Michael Beauchamp, who formed the band with Laurel Bremo in 2009. “In Red Tail Ring, traditional writing and forms influence a lot of what we do, and “Katy Came Breezing” is a good example of this in its makeup, where each verse has a different speaker in a conversation between lovers.”
The song took months to write. Beauchamp came up with a number of verses, but finding a good chorus proved to be more difficult. After half a year, “Katy Came Breezing” was still unfinished. Red Tail Ring had already booked some recording time at a local studio, so they put “Katy Came Breezing” on the back burner, focusing on their other songs in the meantime.
“Then,” he adds, “the week before we were going in to do the final session for The Heart’s Swift Foot, we were playing the song for fun in the wee hours, and on a whim Laurel and I decided to switch instruments. Since I’m an awful fiddle player, the song devolved into Laurel playing guitar and me singing. And from a place of extreme fatigue, coupled with Laurel reconfiguring the verse chords and weaving the perfect harmony, a mournful chorus emerged to tie the whole song together: “Oh, love, when will we be together?” A simple line by itself, but the best one to encapsulate the questioning and the longing expressed by the two lovers. We recorded the version you hear a few days later.”
