Although her upcoming album Mud Blood Bone serves as her first release for Concord Records, Canadian songwriter Cat Clyde has been knocking around the music industry long enough to know that it, like much of the broader culture surrounding it, is suffocatingly masculine. A decade into her career, the rootsy folk artist is calling out that power imbalance on her latest single from the new record, which sees Clyde resigned to shielding herself from the vampiric patriarchal presence of the world beyond her doorstep.
“This song is an expression of the frustration I feel existing as a woman in a patriarchal world,” she shares. “It sometimes feels difficult to be on a 24 hour clock rather than a 28 day cycle, and a 12 month year instead of a 13 month year. I love and crave masculine energy when it’s strong, protective, and emotionally aware. It has been difficult and deeply disappointing to have had experiences dealing with masculine energy that is childish, cowardly, and encroaching on the feminine space. ‘Man’s World’ touches on my own ideas of what being a woman means in this society and how dangerous and violent it can be for a woman’s heart.”
The music backing her doesn’t quite express that frustration, though—instead it’s a fairly jaunty folk tune that plays to the satirical quality of its music video. Directed by Lukas Hyrman, the clip sees Clyde as just one of the boys engaging in male-coded activities: boxing, gambling, arm wrestling, eating hamburgers, smoking two cigs at once, that sort of thing. Check it out below, and pre-order Mud Blood Bone ahead of its March 13 release here.
