“I can recall where we stood, way back in the mountains,” Caitlin Canty sings on “Hotter Than Hell,” the opening track of her latest record, Night Owl Envies the Mourning Dove. Her voice injects a devastating tenderness into the melody, as she continues, “Black cherry wood, hotter than hell / your heart in my hand, the thunder of blood drumming through the land / my body the land.”
Released last month, Canty’s fifth full-length album is the first the native Vermonter has released since returning to her home state. She’s spent the past two decades building a successful music career in New York City and Nashville. Recorded just after moving back to Vermont last year, and just before giving birth to her second child, Night Owl Envies the Mourning Dove is a record of transition, a snapshot of the artist as she eases into a new phase of her personal and professional lives, takes stock of her career, and revels in setting down roots after living most of her adult life like a troubadour.
“My Vermont upbringing was, like, children’s book-style idyllic,” the 43-year-old artist said in a recent phone call from the Midwest, where she was touring. “My parents were both teachers, and it felt like everyone in the community would come out to support each other. What more can you wish for your own children?”
Canty grew up in the small Rutland County town of Proctor. After attending Williams College, she moved to New York City, where she recorded her 2010 EP, Neon Streets, with the band Darlingside. She garnered critical acclaim in 2015 with Reckless Skyline before releasing her 2018 breakout, Motel Bouquet, a gritty Americana record that helped establish her as rising star in the world of indie folk. That album, recorded in Nashville, featured Crooked Still vocalist Aoife O’Donovan as well as Punch Brothers and Leftover Salmon banjo player Noam Pikelny, whom she later married.
Last year, while eight months pregnant, Canty recorded the songs for the new album at a studio in rural Maine. The record was created just as Canty and Pikelny left Nashville for Vermont, moving into a cabin with a view of Dorset Mountain — the cabin her mother grew up in.
As excited as Canty was to raise her two children in the Green Mountains, leaving the “Country Music Capital of the World” was no easy call. Staying would have better served the couple’s music careers, but their growing family had changed the way Canty thought about the future.
“Becoming a mother sharpens your intensity and focus because your time to be artistic is sort of limited,” she said. “It also made me question what the concept of ‘home’ even is.
“When you’re on tour, the van is your home. It’s all that exists in that moment,” she continued. “The stage can be your home, too. So home moves with you. We loved Nashville, but we realized it didn’t matter so much where we planted our flag, career-wise. It just wasn’t about that anymore.”
“There’s just this precious time for a song when it’s young and fresh, and you really want to capture that.”
Caitlin Canty
Night Owl Envies the Mourning Dove captures Canty right at that intersection, as a successful musician who has worked tirelessly to build a career in the heart of the country music world, then leaves it all to raise her young family in the Green Mountains. With her son’s due date approaching, the album was essentially recorded at the last possible moment. The deadline gave the recording process a sort of vibrant tension.
“We knew we had an exact amount of time to try and track the record,” she said. “And it sort of mirrored the songs’ creation as well. There’s just this precious time for a song when it’s young and fresh, and you really want to capture that. That desperation was so present, but I trusted my band and I trusted the songs. So in the end, it actually felt like one of the easiest records I’ve ever made.”
There’s a sense of arrival to the record, of someone finding her place and putting down roots in a very tangible way. On the album’s tender closing track, the folk-leaning ballad “Heartache Don’t Live Here,” Canty seems to look at her new surroundings and realize what she’s accomplished.
“For the first time in a long time, the sun shines and the shadows have nowhere to hide,” she sings over a glacially paced acoustic arrangement. “The old place … has a little more space than it used to … heartache don’t live here no more.”
While Canty is excited to call Vermont home once more, she hasn’t had a lot of time to reacquaint herself with the local music world. A newborn baby and the couple’s touring schedules have kept them from properly immersing themselves in the Green Mountain scene. That changes this week as she plays a homecoming show in Rutland and plans for a series of Vermont performances in the new year, including in Lincoln and at South Burlington’s Higher Ground.
“I used to play Vermont once a year, but now I’m doing four [shows] this winter alone,” Canty said with a laugh. “So it’ll be interesting to see what that looks like, if Vermont can handle that much of me!”
She’s particularly looking forward to her show at the Paramount Theatre in Rutland this Friday, November 21, a venue that helped start her career. Canty first played the Paramount when she was 18 years old, opening for Eric Burdon and the Animals.
“It was like getting shot out of a cannon,” she recalled. “But it was this beautiful moment and the first time I’d ever heard thunderous applause after I played. It totally sparked my desire to do this on a professional scale.”
With family and childhood friends coming out for the show, which features guest spots by Pikelny and others, the performance marks a big moment for Canty as she both comes full circle and transitions to the next chapter of her life.
“It all feels like I’m coming into a type of understanding and peace,” she said. “I’m a fortysomething mother of two. I’m not worried about suddenly blowing up or making or breaking my career. I’m exactly where I want to be.”
Caitlin Canty, Friday, November 21, 7 p.m. at Paramount Theatre in Rutland. $35/40. paramountvt.org.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Night Moves | After two decades away, singer-songwriter and Vermont native Caitlin Canty comes home”
This article appears in Nov 19-25 2025.
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