Story via David Menconi, Down on Copperline, Orange County Arts Commission
Just about every musician has a mentor figure, someone who introduces them to formative music, often just by having it around. For Steph Stewart, singer/co-leader of Chapel Hill’s Blue Cactus, it was her grandfather. Growing up in the small North Carolina town of Catawba, she spent a lot of time with her grandparents – and her grandfather’s Patsy Cline and Johnny records.
“You could stack three records on his record player, play one after another,” Stewart remembers. “So I’d put them on, hang out in the upstairs guest room and listen. Fortunately, he was not too precious about it. I probably scratched up a few of his albums.”
Scratches aside, those records imprinted the beginnings of an artistic sensibility on Stewart to inspire her to carve out a distinctive identity and sound with Blue Cactus, the group she co-leads with guitarist Mario Arnez. Airy and deeply emotional, Blue Cactus sounds like ambient mood music from the film-noir honky tonk at the end of the universe. Small wonder that they call what they do “cosmic Americana,” because it evokes faraway places.
“It’s a struggle to come up with one genre to call the music we make because it spans a lot of different influences,” says Stewart. “So ‘cosmic Americana’ is a default, this big vast umbrella. Fleetwood Mac is a big influence, and also Flying Burrito Brothers – the way they sang together. The beginning of Blue Cactus was just me and Mario singing together, so we learned and covered a lot of Flying Burrito Brothers. That’s how our sound grew, learning to sing together from listening to others.”
The origins of Blue Cactus go back almost 15 years, to Stewart’s first group Steph Stewart & the Boyfriends. It was a group with a pedigree; her initial bandmates were bassist Don Raleigh, original bassist in 1990s hitmakers Squirrel Nut Zippers, and banjo player Tim Stambaugh.
Bandmates came and went over time, with Florida native Arnez entering the picture through mutual friends. Eventually he and Stewart became Blue Cactus, collaborating with a revolving cast of players including Kate Rhudy, Megafaun/Watchhouse drummer Joe Westerlund and various musicians from the Sleepy Cat Records orbit.
Blue Cactus debuted with a 2017 self-titled album that was more than promising if also just a tad gimmicky. It felt like a throwback to ’70s country with parenthetical punchlines to more than half its song titles – “So Right (You Got Left),” “I Can’t Remember (To Forget You),” “Forever (Never Happened for Me)” and so on.
The group took a major step forward on 2021’s “Stranger Again” (released on Sleepy Cat), with better-developed songwriting and vocals. Even better is Blue Cactus’ upcoming third album, “Believer.”
“I’m really proud of them and the way they’ve grown over the course of their records,” says Sleepy Cat Records co-founder Saman Khoujinian, one of their frequent collaborators and co-producer of the new album. “Between their last record and this one, it feels like a different band with a much more expansive sonic palette, which is inspiring. A lot of commercial contemporary country or even Americana tends to be formulaic, and they’re anything but.”
One major change over the course of Blue Cactus’ three records is Stewart’s growing prominence as full-time lead singer. Where Arnez sang lead on some of the first two albums’ songs, Stewart is primary singer on every “Believer” song with vocals.
“On this new album, in part it’s because I wrote all those songs,” Stewart says. “They’re all from a very personal place of lived experience, and it just worked out for me to sing them. Mario likes to sing, but his main interest really is playing guitar. So this lets him focus more on his primary interest.”
“Believer” probably won’t emerge until 2025. In the meantime, Blue Cactus is rolling out a song at a time from it, one per month, for subscribers to the group’s Patreon page.
Meanwhile, songwriting continues behind the scenes. Stewart says it helps her focus to have an assignment, like the “Song Confessional” from last year’s Raleigh Artsplosure, in which Blue Cactus was asked to turn someone’s anonymous confession into a song.
“It’s hard for me to bear down because there are so many things to do to run a band,” says Stewart. “It’s not just playing music, there’s all the not-fun stuff like booking shows, promoting shows, social media. But I do well when I’m given homework because otherwise, I’m a lazy songwriter. Give me an assignment, and I’ll have an overachiever focus to get it done.”
(story + images via Orange County Arts Commission)
Chapelboro.com has partnered with the Orange County Arts Commission to bring more arts-focused content to our readers through columns written by local people about some of the fantastic things happening in our local arts scene! Since 1985, the OCAC has worked to to promote and strengthen the artistic and cultural development of Orange County, North Carolina.
Comments on Chapelboro are moderated according to our Community Guidelines