Hat Fitz & Cara – After The Rain
EXCLUSIVE STREAM
A unique combination of hill-style Gospel blues with old timey flavourings and stripped down to just voices, guitar and vintage drums, Hat Fitz & Cara’s fourth album draws from their very different backgrounds growing up in rural Australia and the streets of Belfast respectively. Listen now!
Engineered by Govinda Doyle, the man behind Angus & Julia Stone’s No. 1 “Big Jet Plane” and mastered by Graeme Durham (Grace Jones, Sandy Denny, The Prodigy, Seasick Steve and Kitty, Daisy & Lewis) at The Exchange in London, ‘After The Rain’ is an album with soul and stomp. Robinson’s soulful and belting vocal beautifully counteracts Fitzy’s gravelly growl and the pair drive and dance their way through the album.
Hat Fitz shares tales and characters from his life on the road in the outback with his father, country singer Colin Fitzpatrick. Sharing the not-so-glamorous road trains with the likes of Fred Brophy’s Boxing Troupe, Ladies of the Night and a mechanical bull, the travelling minstrels brought live music to the dust bowl towns way out west and met plenty of colourful characters along the way. Cara also delves deep into her past, exploring her childhood growing up in Belfast in Northern Ireland. She remembers what it was like to work on both sides of the ten feet walls that made up the ‘peace lines’ separating Catholic and Protestant communities and during recent performances at the Abbey Theatre last year in Dublin she was able to draw heavily from what only a local would know of Ireland’s history. Together their stories tell a tale of colourful personalities, hard work and hard times. And of course, the record explores love and human relationships.
Their first single ‘Doing it Again’ was born from one of those ‘heat of the moments’ in which couples find themselves from time to time. When your musical partner is also your romantic partner, sometimes art can imitate life and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can get a ripper song out of a little frustration.
‘After The Rain’ is out in Australia via MGM on Friday 4 November. With their national tour soon to be announced Hat Fitz & Cara will be travelling the country and reaching out to gospel and contemporary choirs around Australia to join them on stage along the way.