Caitlin Cary and the NC Music Love Army

Ryan Adams hasn’t lived in his native state of North Carolina in more than a decade, but his old Whiskeytown bandmate Caitlin Cary is still very much a part of the local music community. And she’s a key player behind the NC Music Love Army, a group of local musicians protesting the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly (which has passed numerous controversial measures about hot-button issues including abortion, unemployment and Medicaid this session).

There’s an NCMLA mini-album in the works and the group played a pre-recording open rehearsal Saturday afternoon in Durham. Cary was one of the main ringleaders, tending to the thousand-and-one details such a project involves. “I can no longer speak English, but I’m fine,” she said when I asked how it was going. But it was a pretty cool event, and BJ Barham from the very Whiskeytown-influenced band American Aquarium was one of the stars of the show; the five songs I heard the group work on were all quite good. I wrote a story about it for Monday’s News & Observer, which you’ll find linked from here.