The Comfort of Slow Repairs

**Long Road, Quiet Heart: Digging Into Caitlin Canty’s “Reckless Skyline”**

What makes an album linger inside you days after hearing it for the first time? I asked myself this, sitting in the late glow of a Tuesday, my brain running its old loops—restlessness, a furtive grief, a little hope. Digging through forgotten corners of country-Americana from the last decade, I found myself unexpectedly taken by Caitlin Canty’s 2015 album, “Reckless Skyline.” It’s not just country; it’s the quiet country of whispering reeds, of dawn seen after too many sleepless miles. I realized, by album’s end, that Canty was speaking to some tender, stitched-together place inside me—a place that remembered both promise and failure, and could hum along in the slow hours.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this album never truly found the wide audience it deserved. It slipped out in 2015, produced by Jeffrey Foucault, with a band featuring some of roots music’s brightest but least flashy players. Critics noticed, but it wasn’t a sensation—there were no viral TikTok challenges here, only a collection of songs as honest and hopeful as they were resigned. It’s been hiding in plain sight, the way pain sometimes does behind a smile. Listening to it feels like finding an old letter addressed to someone you used to be.

Take the opening track, “Birds of Chicago.” Canty’s voice—clear, smoky, sunlit—glides over acoustic guitar and upright bass. The first lines always catch me off guard:

“Looking out the window at a skyline of reckless dreams
Pigeons on the wire, rain clouds split at the seams,
What will I find beneath the thunder and the neon glow?
Broken streets, a little comfort, and a place to go.”

In those lines, I can see my own habit of searching for solace on the margins: in city lights on a walk home after too many hours at work, or in the muted dawn that follows a spell of insomnia. Canty’s skyline isn’t a place of triumph, but of possibility and dirt-smudged disappointment—a skyline for anyone who ever tried and failed and tried again, however quietly.

The album’s centerpiece for me is “I Never,” a song about regrets both colossal and minute. “I never should have left the keys under your front porch light / Never thought a kiss could keep me up all night.” It’s the economy of those lines that amazes me—the way she builds a world of bad decisions and longing around such everyday artifacts.

For those of us who catalog our regrets with the precision of an archivist, these lines are an invitation to forgive ourselves, just a little. I think about the years I spent mired in inertia, afraid to leap, and how often I left apologies unspoken, keys metaphorically under welcome mats. Canty’s sorrow isn’t heavy-handed; she’s not wailing, she’s remembering—and letting you remember too.

There’s kindness throughout “Reckless Skyline.” “Get Up,” for example, is a gentle exhortation—a sort of musical hand on your shoulder, coaxing you from bed when the world feels impossible. When she sings, “You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up,” it sounds like a friend who’s seen you wounded but knows you’re not done.

The instrumentation on the album feels spare and warm, like a favorite sweater. Dobro, pedal steel, upright bass, fiddle—they all serve Canty’s voice, which is lit from the inside with a deep, golden ache. There’s nothing flashy, nothing fighting for your attention. A song like “Southern Man” (not a Neil Young cover, despite the title) unspools a story of displacement and inheritance: “Southbound on a train just to feel the fire in my feet / Old stories I keep trying to rewrite.” It’s not just geographic southernness, but the longing to belong somewhere, to rewrite the family stories that shaped your sense of self.

I relate to this as someone who has always felt a little out of phase, neither fully at home in my past nor my present. There’s some therapy in Canty’s slow, steady strum—a sense that you can keep moving, even when you aren’t sure you belong.

But it’s “My Love for You Will Not Fade” that feels most psychoanalytical to me. The chorus repeats with a gentle ferocity, a mantra for loyalty in the face of distance, change, and disappointment:

“My love for you will not fade,
My love for you will not fade.
I may stumble, I may stray,
But my love for you will not fade.”

I grew up afraid of abandonment—cautious, watchful, learning early to take care of my own aches lest they inconvenience anyone. These lyrics, then, become softly defiant. Canty doesn’t promise perfection, she promises endurance—not unbreakable, but persistent, even in stumbling. It’s a subtle antidote to the transactional love and friendship of adulthood, a reminder that we can stay loyal even when we’re lost, even when we can’t explain ourselves.

The album closes with “No Matter the Wreckage,” a meditation on acceptance. By this point, I was a little teary, not because Canty had manipulated my emotions, but because she spoke to something unspoken: our ability to salvage hope, to find beauty “no matter the wreckage.” I thought about my own pile of failed dreams, shelved apologies, and the few truths I’ve managed to sing back to myself after the storms.

If I have a criticism of “Reckless Skyline,” it’s that its uniform gentleness can blur one song into the next. The emotional range is subtle rather than wide, and at times I wanted one track to take flight in a way the others did not. There is a risk, here, of comfort over challenge—a bit too much dusk, not quite enough blazing noon. But maybe this is by design: an album for the slow repairs, not the grand reinventions.

Caitlin Canty made an album that understands how people work through their pain in increments, in fits and starts. “Reckless Skyline” doesn’t shout, doesn’t scold, doesn’t demand. It opens its arms, and waits for you to lay your troubles down for a while. It’s music for the early riser, the midnight driver, for anyone who keeps going despite their own doubts. I wish more people would find it—maybe you will. Maybe you need to.

Kroes den Bock