Photo by Chelsea Balan/Courtesy of APG
Audio By Carbonatix
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Denver-reared Cate Downey co-wrote songs that wound up on the soundtracks of two recent hit films: Jessie Murph’s “Nothing Else Matters,” from 2023’s “Fast X,” and Quinn XCII’s “Best Day,” heard in this year’s animated Steph Curry offering “GOAT.” But while she’s got an Aug. 7 gig in the Mile High City (details below), she isn’t particularly interested in face-forward stardom.
“I don’t always enjoy being center-stage,” she admits. “But what’s super-fun about songwriting is that I can go anywhere. ‘Nothing Else Matters’ is a huge, dramatic ballad, and ‘Best Day’ is an up-tempo song sung by a rapper. I think if I was an artist, I’d have to pick a lane for which of those would be my thing. But being a songwriter, I can bounce into these different worlds.”
Downey began her journey toward a music career early. While a sixth grader at McAuliffe International School, she was selected to take part in a mentorship program that gave her the opportunity to shadow a professional in the field of her choice — and she picked Mercedes Campana of the Denver Children’s Choir.
A few short years later, Downey was performing in settings such as the Swallow Hill Music Hall and “Bohemian Nights” in Fort Collins, usually alongside her younger siblings, Ella and Meg. She crooned in the choir at East High School, too, and was planning upon graduation to attend the music school at Belmont University in Nashville when she learned about an opportunity to study at Norway’s Lillehammer Institute of Music Production and Industries. Shorthanded as LIMPI, the academy was created by Tor E. Hermansen and Mikkel S. Eriksen, a production duo known collectively as Stargate, whose credits include smashes such as Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” and Katy Perry’s “Firework.”
“I found the program in secret and applied my senior year,” Downey recalls. “I didn’t think I would get in and I didn’t think my parents would let me go even if I could get in. When I got to the interview round, I did it in my car when I had five minutes between classes. It was the only time I could do it with my schedule so my parents wouldn’t find out.”
She learned she’d made the cut on her last day at East, and fortunately, her folks were amenable to her putting Belmont on hold to spend a year in Scandanavia, and the experience was formative.
“It was really about learning how to collaborate and learning how to do songwriting sessions, which was perfect for me,” Downey enthuses. “They would put three of us in a room and the assignment was to collaborate and make a song, which is what I do every day now. It was a really great way to learn how to do that in a safe place. And being in Norway was the coolest thing ever.”
Lucky thing, because COVID struck while she was in Oslo, forcing her to extend her stay. She subsequently rode out the rest of the pandemic in Denver before moving to Los Angeles in October 2021. Even before arriving in L.A., she’d scored her first big music-biz success, providing the featured vocal on Audien’s “Wish It Was You,” which topped the Billboard dance chart; she also signed with APG, a major publishing group. Through the latter, she helped create “Drunk Text Me” with Lexi Jayde. “After Lexi posted it on TikTok, it went viral,” Downey points out.
To Downey, this burst of popularity was less an end unto itself than a launching pad. According to her, “TikTok gives viral moments, but it doesn’t give sustainable success. It’s amazing when you get some virality, but it’s up to you what you do with it and how you use it.”
In her case, Downey feels the attention increased her credibility in the music community writ large, and that led to a raft of additional collabs: “Angel Pt. 2” with Charlie Puth, Muni Long and Jimin of BTS, “Something to Remember” by Matt Hansen, TXT’s “Trust Fund Baby” and many more.
“Nothing Else Matters,” for its part, presented Downey with a chance to go behind the scenes. “APG had been a longtime partner of the ‘Fast & Furious’ series, and they’d been contracted to do the soundtrack on ‘Fast X.’ So they were able to give assignments to their writers to see if there were any of us who could crack the case for what they wanted.” As such, Downey got to see early cuts of scenes on which the producers wanted songs, underscored with temporary tracks, including one that used Adele’s ‘Skyfall‘ as a model.
According to Downey, “They wanted something super-dramatic, and they wanted the theme to be ‘nothing matters but family.’ Those were the two variables I was working with. I wrote the song by myself on the piano when I was at home visiting my family, and they ended up loving it” — so much so that she was even allowed to help select the vocalist who would tackle it. Rather than opting for an ultra-famous crooner, she went with Murph, because “she had a real rasp and emotion in her voice. It really sold the song.”
The process was much different for “Best Day.” The ditty, co-penned with Adam Friedman and Mike Temrowski, had been sitting around for a couple of years when the “GOAT” producers discovered it. Thanks to the surprise coup, Downey says, “I got to go to my first movie premiere in February. Steph Curry was there, and Jellyroll, and all these cool basketball players I don’t know the names of.”
Her Aug. 7 gig will be a lower-key affair, but one that promises to be just as memorable, since it will reunite Downey with her sisters: Ella, who’s currently a student at the University of Kansas, and Meg, an East grad bound for Elon University in North Carolina. “It was my mom’s idea,” Downey acknowledges. “She said that with my younger sister going to college, it’ll be harder to get all three of you together. So we said, ‘Okay, we’ll do one more.'”
Afterwards, Downey will return to southern California, where she’ll happily focus on facilitating stars rather than trying to become one herself. “When people hear that I’m a songwriter, they think, ‘She’s an artist,'” she allows. “But I make a distinction, because 90 percent of the time, I’m going into a room with an artist and saying, ‘What are you thinking about?’ I’m playing therapist and writing a song with their feelings and their story as opposed to it being my own. And I love it.”
See Cate Downey and the Downey Sisters at 7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 7, at Star Bar Denver, 2137 Larimer Street (720-328-2420). Admission is free, but you must be 21 or over to attend.
