New York Songwriter Kate Schutt Turns an Imagined Letter Into a Haunting Farewell on “I’ve Got To Go”

Award-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer Kate Schutt releases “I’ve Got To Go,” a wistful and haunting Americana ballad inspired by the closing chapters of Austrian writer Christiane Ritter’s 1934 memoir A Woman in the Polar Night. Framed as an imagined letter from Ritter to her husband, the song inhabits the sorrowful space between wanting to remain in the Arctic wilderness that transformed her and knowing she must board a ship home to resume the conventional life she left behind.

After spending the long polar winter in a 10-by-10-foot hunter’s hut in a remote fjord of Svalbard with her husband and his hunting partner, Ritter watched darkness give way to an astonishingly bright Arctic spring. With that change came the knowledge that a ship would soon steam into the fjord to collect her. Her husband would remain for the summer and, presumably, another winter of hunting while Ritter would return to Austria, her child, her parents and the responsibilities of everyday life.

For Kate, the unanswered questions surrounding that departure became fertile ground for songwriting. Did Ritter truly want to leave? Did she and her husband ever seriously discuss her staying another year? What grief accompanied the realization that this extraordinary chapter was ending and that she might never again experience the stark beauty and freedom that had fundamentally changed her?

“Curiosity is what fuels my songwriting,” Kate explains. “If there is something I can’t figure out, I’ll write a song about it to understand it or feel deeper into my questions. In ‘I’ve Got To Go,’ I wonder what it felt like to be her, how she reckoned with leaving this land-, snow-, and sea-scape that had irrevocably changed her.”

Kate has traveled to the Arctic twice herself, spending approximately three weeks there on each occasion, and found both departures profoundly difficult. So affected by the landscape and icescape, she remembers wanting to deliberately miss her flight, disappear into the interior and remain long enough to watch the light and seasons change. Her own experience of reluctantly leaving Svalbard consequently runs alongside Ritter’s throughout the song.

That personal connection ultimately helped “I’ve Got To Go” become the final song Kate wrote in her cycle inspired by A Woman in the Polar Night. Co-producer and engineer Jay Newland suggested the collection needed one more piece, and as Kate repeatedly returned to the memoir, she found herself drawn to the chapters in which spring arrives, and Ritter realizes her departure is approaching. Questions about what was left unsaid between husband and wife, combined with Kate’s own homesickness for the Arctic, became the foundation for a “leaving” song.

The imagined letter at its centre also connects “I’ve Got To Go” to one of Kate’s lifelong creative practices. A devoted letter writer, she often begins her songwriting sessions by sitting at her desk and writing to someone before reaching for her guitar. The song opens with “I’m leaving you this letter, so maybe you’ll understand.” It’s a moment Kate invented rather than one found in Ritter’s memoir, imagining the letter as a place where Ritter could express feelings she might have struggled to say directly to her husband.