Her name is Cassidy Catanzaro, but she's always gone by Cassidy. Except Cassidy, who's known, too, as the dynamic former lead singer and primary songwriter for acclaimed New York female rock group Antigone Rising, is also going now by Bohème, the name attached to her solo debut album Follow The Freedom.
Cutting through the confusion, Cassidy invokes the Puccini opera La bohème in explaining that Bohème represents an "alter ego" character she created, "as I'm starring in this new role of my life." But the new name also serves as a means of distinguishing her, not only from Antigone Rising, for which she fronted from late 1999 to early 2008, but from the hit rapper Cassidy, who emerged while she was in Antigone Rising, and "kind of cornered the market on the moniker."
"He became really popular, and it became an issue when I went solo," says Cassidy. "I'd get calls to play parties in Vegas, and halfway through the negotiations they'd realize I wasn't Cassidy the rapper! But because of the opera, the name Bohème has been seen often--and it's certainly a part of Cassidy, and who I've been my whole life. It's the name of the project, but it's also me: who I am and how I feel—a gypsy, a free spirit. It philosophically answers what I and the music are about."
Follow The Freedom, then, is a departure from her eight-year stint as the powerful, soul-inflected frontwoman of Antigone Rising.
"They had a certain direction they were going in when I joined, and I tried to bring them a more mainstream audience," Cassidy notes. "We got some high-profile publicity and a deal with Starbucks and Atlantic, and it was an amazing period of discovery and growth."
After four indie albums, Antigone Rising signed with Lava/Atlantic, and was heavily supported in the original Starbucks Hear Music campaign. They appeared in concert with the likes of The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Dave Mathews Band, and Rob Thomas, who considered Cassidy "a born star.”
But after taking leave of the group, Cassidy went through a period of uncertainty. Though she had been singing in local New Jersey bands as a teenager, she had become disenchanted and uninspired, due somewhat to the nature of commercial music.
"I didn't know if I had it in me for corporate game playing," she says. "I wasn't being fulfilled artistically any more. As an artist I loved many genres of music my whole life, and didn’t want to be held back by genre boundaries. Like The Doobie Brothers: If 'Takin' It to the Streets' is all you’ve ever heard, you have a distinct impression—but ‘Black Water’ is different. The point is to listen to all of it and come to an understanding based on all the information.”
Regarding Follow The Freedom, Cassidy says, “You can’t just hear one track to get the full picture.”
Co-produced by Cassidy with longtime collaborator Don Boyette (a top session bassist who’s worked with the likes of Michael Jackson, Lionel Ritchie, and Steve Nicks), the album satisfied her expressed need to expand her creative output and “experiment with different genres” while putting forth a hopeful message corresponding with her sense of creative rebirth. "Even the mistakes are gonna be great!" she sings, in the album track "Even The Mistakes."
"I needed to go back to the beginning, to who I was before the band," she explains. "As soon as I started to be creative without having to prove anything, the songs started to come, and it was like the floodgates opened."
Other Follow The Freedom songs, like the mid-tempo "Everything Sunshine," reflect her newly upbeat outlook. The titletrack, which features spontaneously-contributed backing vocals from studio visitor Steve Perry ("I'm a huge fan, and he massively influenced me vocally and melodically!" gushes Cassidy), is about "confronting and removing the obstacles I put up--like we all do--that keep me from getting what I want," she says.
Musically, the songs showed the cross between "blue-eyed soul ditties and arena-rock sensibilities" that marked her songwriting as a product of the pop radio of her youth in New Jersey.
But they also use melodies "to deliver this message about being lost and having an identity crisis--and figuring out where to fit in," she relates. "It's timely--and not a unique predicament--because many Americans are going through it, trying to figure out new ways to see themselves and their lives, because the world about us is changing. Do we crawl under our beds, or stand up and move on? That's the point of the album, essentially."
That and the concept of "likeminded, unconventional people coming together and trading unconventional ideas through art and music--and not laying roots in one place," she says. "That's what Bohème symbolizes--travelers, wanderers and seekers--and why I put in the definition of Bohème in the CD package. I hope it resonates with that type of person."
Cassidy is initially releasing Bohème's Follow The Freedom on her own Band and Mountain label.
"They're the two constants in my life!" says the wandering musician, now based in the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, explaining the significance of the latter half of the label's name. "I grew up on a mountain in Northeast New Jersey, and have always ended up in places where I could be near them. When I lived in Manhattan, it was the one thing that was missing!"
Subscribe to my examiner.com pages and follow me on Twitter!
Comments