Paco Cathcart Reflects on New Album Down on Them

Track By Track: The NYC underground musician tells Paste about each song on their new LP, which is out now via Wharf Cat.

By Matt Mitchell  |  May 2, 2025 | 1:00pm
Music Features Paco Cathcart
Paco Cathcart Reflects on New Album Down on Them
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You might be familiar with Paco Cathcart already, if you know about the couple-dozen albums they’ve recorded under the name The Cradle (a project with strong influence, one that’s touched artists like Water From Your Eyes and Palm). But Paco is switching things up, recording under their own name now for the first time and heralding a new era, one end-capped by an LP titled Down On Them—an album featuring the likes of Miriam Elhajli, Ellie Shannon, and fantasy of a broken heart’s Bailey Wollowitz.

It’s a joyous swirl of folk, from “Cry on Command” to “Invasive Species,” but I am returning always to lead single “Bottleneck Blues.” The track is powerfully intimate yet written in the stars, a song inspired by a bike ride from Rockaway Beach through a “brinier New York,” through Dead Horse Bay, Fort Tilden and “the bike paths winding through the marshes by Canarsie Park” and the beaches nearby, inspired the city-driven emptiness coloring Paco’s storytelling. A finger-picked guitar lopes across the melody of “Bottleneck Blues,” reversing the titular claustrophobia with airy, generous strides of serendipitous reeds, harmonies and pattering snare hits. I can’t quite describe it, but Paco’s use of “and” in their lyrics is especially charming. It’s never “or,” always “and.” When I think of “kaleidoscopic music,” I will think of Paco’s “Bottleneck Blues” indefinitely. But I’ll let them tell you all about it and everything else.

Your Reflection

This song takes place on the West side of Union Avenue, between Montrose and Broadway, facing South towards Broadway—just a couple blocks from where I grew up. This is the Los Sures area of Williamsburg, historically populated by Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Across Broadway, in South Williamsburg, there are large working-class Jewish and Puerto Rican communities, and to the North and East, Polish, Italian, and African-American communities.

Williamsburg, with its vast East River waterfront, had been a manufacturing hub until the outsourcing of factory jobs in the early seventies spelled poverty and neglect for the neighborhood. Artists and musicians, finding themselves priced out of even the grimiest Manhattan neighborhoods, made use of the ample cheap or free space in Williamsburg’s disused factory buildings and slaughterhouses. Little by little, the reputation of the neighborhood was shifted by real estate spin doctors from “crack epicenter of New York” to “hip up and coming neighborhood, safe—enough—for the middle class and the wealthy”.

Now, just a few decades later, the neighborhood is known as a textbook example of the disastrous results of rapid gentrification. This entailed the enactment of anti-working-class zoning and development policies; unchecked, corporate expansion leading to the massive shuttering of small businesses; and cultural white-washing, discussed euphemistically as “hipsterization”, which in reality was a cynical and racist redistribution of public space and real estate towards the whiter and wealthier, enacted with hand-in-glove precision by billionairist local government, predatory developers, and mega-corporations. As recently as 2016, 30% of the population of the neighborhood still applied for Section 8 housing, yet, after the Bloomberg-era incentives and abatements for developers, Williamsburg’s real estate is among the priciest in the city.

Somehow, after all this, my family still lives in the same building I grew up in, on Union Avenue. Despite the utterly changed landscape of the neighborhood, I maintain a great fondness for those blocks north of Broadway, South of Grand, where a neighborly, distinctly neoyorquino culture somehow survives. I still hang out there, and go back frequently to visit my family—back to the little part of south Williamsburg called Los Sures.

Bottleneck Blues

When I moved to Crown Heights in 2014 and found myself a 40-minute bike ride from Rockaway Beach, I learned a few things. One is that to the people in the neighborhoods on the city’s coasts, New York is still a maritime town- a swimming town, a fishing town, a town where you see seagulls among the pigeons and where the air tastes salty. Having grown up in Williamsburg- by the East River, but far from the Atlantic- my exposure to the ocean as a kid consisted of the occasional trip to the Coney Island boardwalk and visits to my Abuela’s house in Florida.

This shore-bound city-around-a-city, where I found a distinct, brinier New York, has fascinated me and drawn me back over and over to swim and explore for the last decade- Dead Horse Bay, Fort Tilden, Jamaica Bay, the bike paths winding through the marshes by Canarsie Park, the many beaches. The spots are myriad and deep. In these places I find a sense of emptiness and openness that is rare in the big city, where the claustrophobic bottleneck blues will get you every time.

Cry on Command

He doesn’t ask for her opinion because it might be right

He doesn’t ask for her help because he might need it

He doesn’t ask what is in her mind because it might be useful

He doesn’t ask what she makes because it might be great

He doesn’t ask what she wants because it might be important

He calls her beautiful to remind himself who he is

Oh, Joy

It’s easy to waste time and become confused and bummed out trying to mend a relationship that is not ready to be mended. On the other hand, it takes a particular effort to remain ready to mend it, to keep the door open, so to speak. Grace and forgiveness are such subtle things- you can’t force them on yourself or anyone else. But patience and presence, you can at least try and cultivate those on your own, so that you’re ready when they are.

Ella Vive Sola

This song is a portrait of someone living out her days in the family house after everyone else in the family is gone or dead. She’s from a different country and she never learned the language very well. She spends most of her time inside watching the television, or talking on the telephone. She mostly loves talking with her sister, who still lives back in the country where she is from.

TM Joint

I wrote this song after reading about the case of Ajay Kumar, an Indian asylum seeker who was detained in the Otero Processing Center in New Mexico, and in the El Paso Service Processing Center (an ICE jail) for almost a year, often in solitary confinement, after handing himself over to border patrol in 2018. Eventually, Kumar, along with others, staged a hunger strike to protest their indefinite, baseless, detention, and was force-fed by authorities with a tube through his nose, a practice that amounts to torture.

Gender Neutral

A creature that can’t remember who defined it. Did I actually feel this, or did I just order the sentiment online and forget? Made strong and self-confident on a diet of pre-chewed data, seen and sanctified, I walk this landscape utterly free and baffled, making $27 an hour, making millions an hour, making war. Free to serve, I zip on intelligent legs to point B, my androgeneity recognized officially so I can work two jobs at once—so free.

Can’t Recall My Dreams

Out deep into the broth of the city, just to be alone finally. Walking like a fiend, watching people do their thing, getting an inarticulate reminder of something. Up all night vaguely wondering. Watching Next Generation, smoking corner store weed, crying. Another song about a certain kind of blues, like you missed something, and now you just can’t get back on board the train.

Something Moving in the Dark

It’s better than it was when I was younger. At some point I learned some trust. There was always the sense before that you and I just weren’t reading from the same page in the first place, so how could I trust anything between us? I don’t know what it was that changed exactly. A lot of people showed me, over time—my whole idea about the one page—it was messing me up from the jump. The song’s got something to do with this, with this not feeling so separate from you anymore.

Pale Blue Light

I met Yo Yo one day when we were practicing in the basement. He was slamming on the window demanding to be let in. “You playing music? Let me in, man!” He was a harmonica player and a singer, a storyteller, a preacher, a kinda wild and very wise man. He would ride the streets of Crown Heights on his white low rider bicycle, immaculately dressed in all white, his locks wrapped up high above his thin face, bumping Marvin Gaye on a portable speaker, saying what’s up to everyone on his way to deal a little of the weed he grew in his backyard. Him and his partner Zion lived on Prospect Place with their dog Kujo and their cat Minnie. I loved them so much.

Just Love You

This is a simple song. Could be something you told someone, or something someone told you once. Why are we afraid to be loved in the ways that we really want to be?

Invasive Species

In the great bay area of the Atlantic coast now called New York City, Lenape people lived and flourished for generations. In the 1500s, Europeans began colonizing the continent, setting off a 400 year process of genocide and forced displacement that finds the remaining Lenape currently living scattered, largely in what are now the territories of Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario, Canada.

In the 1980s, Jennifer Williams, born in Georgia, U.S.A., 1967, and James Cathcart, born in Medellín, Colombia, 1962, separately immigrated to New York City. There they met and had one child together: Paco Cathcart, born 1992, in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Manaháhtaan.

In the summer of 2020, the call went out in New York to kill Spotted Lantern Flies on site. The objectively beautiful red and black spotted insect was an “invasive species” from Asia, and was damaging the east coast U.S. ecosystems. Children across the city gleefully stomped out these red-winged creatures from the other side of the world, leaving little spots of crushed legs and wings all over the sidewalks like a new kind of gum-stain.

Down on Them is out now via Wharf Cat. 

 
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