Five years later, Cary and Daly are still pals, not to mention an estimable co-writing team. And Cary is still getting up in the morning to go to work. She lives a few miles south of downtown Raleigh in a well-kept house with her husband of 18 months, original Whiskeytown drummer Eric “Skillet” Gilmore, and their two dogs Dinah and Kotys (the latter is named for a little-known goddess of debauchery).
The house is stylishly appointed with Cary’s artwork on the walls — “crafty stuff,” she calls it, things she has embroidered, knit or wrought. Of particular interest is a combination mirror/shelf in a hall, made of wood and bottle caps.
They have a comfortable house and a comfortable life, albeit one that involves hard work. Gilmore builds houses and Cary holds down two jobs, working at a T-shirt company by day and a restaurant by night. Go to Raleigh’s Humble Pie restaurant/nightclub on a night when Cary is onstage performing, and you’re likely to hear her say something like, “If I waited on you in here earlier this evening, let’s just forget about that relationship right now.”
Where Cary’s erstwhile bandmate Adams seems to thrive on the rock ‘n’ roll gypsy lifestyle, she dreads the prospect of prolonged touring. But she’s steeling herself to do just that.
“I plan to do as much touring as I can stand,” she says. “I’ve set up my life to where it makes no sense to leave. I’ve got my garden, my dogs, I love to cook. So I’m not looking forward to throwing all my things into a suitcase and hitting the road. But I’m ready to go. I’ve found it’s different when it’s my own thing, easier to suck it up and make the sacrifices you have to.”
One such sacrifice will be time away from her husband. Although Gilmore played on the album, he is bowing out on most of the touring to stay home and work. “That bums me out, because he spoils me on the road,” Cary says. “But it makes no sense for both of us to leave and come back to two mad dogs, a stack of unpaid bills and a refrigerator full of rotten food.
“He got kinda sidetracked by this music dream, like we all did, and loves the job he has now. More than me, he’s defined by the work he does. He really seems to relish getting up at 5 a.m. and going to work every day.”
Cary grew up in Seville, Ohio, the youngest of seven children. She has six older siblings, all half-brothers — three on each side, from both parents’ previous marriages. She arrived a dozen years after her parents’ next-youngest child.
“They had me when they were 40, by mistake — which I didn’t find out until I was 25,” she says. “They’re a great model for me as a late bloomer, although I don’t think I’ll wait until I’m 40 to have kids. Close, though. I’m 33 and Skillet is 30, and he’s more ready for kids than I am.”
Her father’s picture appears on Cary’s album sleeve (with the lyrics to “Hold On To Me”). An acoustical engineer by trade, he spent the better part of his career making sound enclosures for industrial presses. He also played music on the periphery of the 1950s folk revival, and claims to have taught Phil Ochs to play guitar. In the 1970s, the elder Cary learned to play violin alongside his daughter, who took up the instrument at age 5.
“Yeah, I was a Suzuki Method kid,” she says. “Suzuki was a Japanese man who came up with this way of teaching young children to play stringed instruments. The first several years, it’s ear training. You’re not introduced to reading music until you’re fairly prolific by imitation. The method encourages parents to learn along with kids, and my dad learned along with me.”
Eventually, Cary came to a crossroads with the violin, and says she decided she “just wasn’t in love with classical music enough.” So she quit playing violin at age 16, moving on to boys, horses and life.
Cary later eased back into playing music socially while working on an English degree at the College of Wooster in Ohio. She joined a band called the Garden Weasels, though it wasn’t too serious; their repertoire consisted of such things as Patsy Cline covers and “King Of The Road”.
