St. Catherine’s Child is the pet project of transatlantic singer-songwriter Ilana Zsigmond. Born in England to musical parents, Ilana spent the majority of her childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, bouncing back and forth between continents as her parents toured. After settling back in the UK in 2015, she has formed a band that reflects the Americana aesthetic that surrounded her throughout her childhood with the articulation and dry-wit of her British sensibilities. Named for the patron saint of eloquent women, her vocal strength and poetic songwriting shines at the heart of St. Catherine’s Child.
Every Generation is an exploration of the things we inherit. It borrows from the long-standing American folk tradition of exploring ourselves through our hometowns, through our families – through the choices and the music and the pain.
“I come from a long line of immigrants and wanderers. My father grew up in Liverpool and spent his youth there making music, grappling with his complicated relationship to the town and to our family, and eventually leaving for America to raise his own. Three years ago I moved back, two streets over from the recording studio where he met my mother, and hoped that singing songs in the same few bars where he cut his teeth would help me find the part of myself I’d never managed to find in my own hometown. As my father battled with the cancer that would eventually take his life, I had the strange opportunity to get to know him through his home, and saw more of myself in his choices than I ever anticipated. Grieving him in the graveyard of his youth has taught me, more than anything else, that our lives are built into our bones, that we inherit the good and the bad, that we are all born this way.
Every generation, for better or worse, makes the same mistakes, but when I miss him, this town, this music, and everything he passed down to me in my blood, is the biggest comfort in the world.”
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