11. Catherine IrwinCut Yourself A Switch

Catherine sings on two songs on my new record, she sang significantly on [2002’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy album] Ease Down The Road, and she’s been a huge force in Louisville, again, from before I started going to shows. She was in a band called The Dickbrains in the early 1980s, then she was in Freakwater, which centres around her and Janet Beveridge Bean, who’s also in Eleventh Dream Day and does other musical projects in Chicago. Catherine also went to the same high school I did, and she’s a painter as well.

This is a great record overall, but it’s on this list primarily due to it including the best song to come out of Louisville, and the best performance of it – Catherine’s song, ‘Hex’. No matter who I play it for, every time I listen to it, I get lost. I get chills and goosebumps. Not because of what it’s about or how it feels, because those are heavy, heavy things, but because  I feel uplifted by the quality of the song and by the joy of knowing that I live in proximity to such an amazing artist.