CattSue — Heartstrings and Highways
There are records that document where an artist has been, and there are records that seem to carry the people who traveled there with them. CattSue’s Heartstrings and Highways belongs firmly in the latter category. Across 11 songs, the singer-songwriter turns family history, grief, motherhood, romantic devotion, survival and hard-earned hope into a collection that feels less like autobiography than a box of handwritten letters set to music.
Released September 23, Heartstrings and Highways is rooted in the kind of storytelling that has always been central to Americana: ordinary lives made meaningful through specific details. CattSue rarely reaches for abstraction when a memory will do. She writes about old hallways, rivers, Sunday football, photographs, childhood toys and voices that remain present long after the people themselves are gone.
That specificity gives “A Whisper on the Wind” much of its emotional weight. Written for the mother CattSue lost when she was only four and a half years old, the song revisits childhood in National Park, New Jersey, including the image of a young girl holding her Mrs. Beasley doll while trying to comprehend an absence too large for a child to understand. It is grief rendered through fragments, which is often how memory actually works.
“More Time” approaches loss from another direction. CattSue remembers her father through familiar places and seemingly small rituals, including sitting near the river and watching the Eagles on Sunday. What matters here is not dramatic mythology but the ache of wanting one more conversation, one more familiar story, one more ordinary afternoon.
Family runs throughout the record. “Little Man” follows a son from childhood footsteps in the hallway to adulthood, while “Mother’s Heart” examines parenting from the more difficult side: sacrifice, disappointment and the complicated truth that unconditional love does not guarantee an uncomplicated relationship.
Romantic love gets its own quieter space. “Come Home to Me” is less about fireworks than sanctuary. Its promise is simply that someone exhausted by the world can come home and put down the weight for a while. “Always Been You,” meanwhile, looks backward at a relationship that survived separation, time and circumstance.
But Heartstrings and Highways is not exclusively a nostalgia record. Its strongest moments often come when CattSue turns from remembrance toward survival.
“Broken” refuses to mistake healing for invulnerability. Its narrator is wounded but still moving, holding onto faith even when certainty is unavailable. “In the Light” pushes that idea further. Written with survivors in mind, particularly those affected by trafficking, abuse and exploitation, the song moves from an individual voice reclaiming identity into a broader declaration of solidarity. CattSue has spoken publicly about human trafficking after a family member and friends experienced it, giving the song a purpose beyond the boundaries of the album itself.
“Gold Star Heart” broadens the record’s concern with remembrance by honoring military sacrifice, while “Many Moods of the River” uses the changing water as a vessel for memory and continuing connection.
The closing “When the Clouds Come Home,” co-written with David Murphy, turns directly toward addiction. Its storm imagery—thunder, lightning, darkness returning—captures the recurring pull of dependency and the sense that old battles can come rolling back in without warning. But the song does not end in isolation. Instead, it reaches outward toward others fighting the same struggle, framing survival as something strengthened by solidarity, honesty and the decision to keep choosing freedom.
Nearly all of Heartstrings and Highways was written solely by CattSue, and that authorship matters. There is very little emotional distance between the writer and these songs.
Sometimes the writing is plainspoken, sometimes sentimental, but it rarely feels calculated.
That may be the album’s greatest strength. CattSue isn’t trying to turn her life into legend. She is trying to make sense of it.
On Heartstrings and Highways, the highways are the years that carry us forward. The heartstrings are everything—and everyone—we keep carrying with us.
Find more info here: http://www.instagram.com/cattsuemusic