1974 JUNO Award Winner Cathy Young Was Here All Along, and Now She’s Back With the Most Personal Song of Her Life
Long before playlists and streaming numbers, before most of today’s music industry existed at all, Cathy Young was already a fixture of Toronto’s legendary Yorkville scene, standing shoulder to shoulder with the artists who built Canadian music history. She’s been credited as a Juno winner, immortalized on one of the tallest music murals in the world, and quietly worked alongside icons for decades. And now, with her deeply personal new single “I Don’t Want to Lose You,” Cathy Young proves she was never gone. She was simply waiting for the right story to tell.
Young first burst onto the scene when her debut album, ‘A Spoonful of Cathy Young,’ was named a Billboard Pick of the Week, an early signal of a talent that would soon become impossible to ignore. She won the Juno Award for Best New Artist in 1974 and returned the following year as a nominee for Best Female Vocalist, cementing her place among Canada’s brightest new stars at a moment when the Canadian music industry itself was still finding its footing. She performed as Mary Magdalene in Robert Stigwood’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar, lent her voice to award winning video games including entries in The Black Mirror series, and toured the world across the United States, Mexico, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Thailand, Australia, the Caribbean, and Hawaii. In 2017, she was honoured with a place on Toronto’s towering 22 storey mural of music icons along historic Yonge Street, a permanent tribute to the scene she helped define. Her story has since been documented in Music from Far and Wide: Celebrating 40 Years of the Juno Awards and in Bill King’s Talk: Conversations in All Keys, and she was inducted into the Friar’s Music Museum in Toronto.
For all of that history, Young has never been the kind of artist who simply rests on accolades. She has spent decades quietly recording, mentoring emerging talent, and staying connected to the music community that shaped her, even as the industry’s spotlight moved elsewhere. That makes her return now, with a song this personal, feel less like a comeback and more like an overdue arrival, a legend who never actually left, finally ready to share a story only she could tell.
“I Don’t Want to Lose You” was written by Young in 1974, though she says at the time it was written to no one in particular.
“Songs just come to me when they come,” she explains. “They come in a rush, and if I don’t stop whatever I’m doing, even sleep, and write, I will lose it forever.”
It would take 50 years for the song to find the person it was truly meant for.
That person was a fellow musician Young first met briefly at the Juno Awards decades earlier. Their paths crossed again years later when she recorded backing vocals for his band, then drifted apart until an unplanned social media post changed everything.
“One day, almost on a whim, I posted a photo of a horse drawn Cinderella carriage on Facebook and wrote, ‘Now all I need is a groom’,” Young recalls. “It wasn’t something I would normally post. In fact, I nearly deleted it, but something told me to leave it.”
He saw it. His reply was simple: “I’m here! I’m here!” What followed, Young says, was the beginning of a beautiful love story.
Not long after reconnecting, Young sang him the song she had written half a century earlier.
“When I finished, he looked into my eyes and quietly said, ‘How could I not love you,’” she says. “From that moment on, the song belonged to us.”
The lyrics themselves carry that same plainspoken devotion: “So come and put your arms around me, tell me you love me, tell me you need me, and no one else will ever do. I’ve given you my everything, and even more, I’ve opened up my heart and let you in.”
Young went on to join him on what would become his final tour before he passed away suddenly from a heart attack.
“In an instant, my world changed forever,” she says. “I truly believe he was my soulmate. This song is my tribute to him, to the extraordinary love we were blessed to share. I know that one day we will meet again. Until then, I will carry him in my heart and celebrate a once in a lifetime love that not even time can erase.”
Written by Young and produced by John Zych, Ann Hunter, and Dennis Nieves, “I Don’t Want to Lose You” is released through Bronte Road Music, with a new EP on the horizon. It arrives as both a deeply intimate tribute and a reminder that one of Canadian music’s true trailblazers, a woman who shared stages and studios with legends and helped shape an entire era of Yorkville’s music history, is still very much writing her story, one unforgettable chapter at a time.
Hi, Cathy! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Hi! I’m Cathy Young how wonderful to meet you, dear readers. I’m a proud Canadian born in Toronto, raised in Yorkville in the 60s living and loving life full of music and song. I consider that today is a gift. That’s why they call it the present. I am very proud and grateful to release my new song ‘I Don’t Want To Lose You’ And I hope it will resonate with your heart.
You wrote “I Don’t Want to Lose You” in 1974 with no one specific in mind. Fifty years later, when you finally sang it, did it feel like the same song, or had it quietly become a different one over all those decades?
it definitely felt like the same song it had just. found its home. If anything, it became enhanced and more profound because it finally fit someone.
Grief and love are both all over this song. Was there a point in writing or recording it now where you had to decide how much of the loss to let listeners hear versus how much to keep just for yourself?
that’s a good question. Indeed, there is a lot of grief and love in the song. When I recorded it, I didn’t need to decide how much of the last to let listeners hear, I actually didn’t think about it…I just sung it from my broken heart
One take and it was done!
You’ve spent decades in music without chasing the spotlight, mentoring other artists and staying close to the community. Was there ever a moment in those years where you thought your own recording story was finished?
I truly never felt that my own recording story was finished however, I recognized I had put it on hold and was really procrastinating. I probably would not have released this song if it wasn’t for PETER FOLDY, who heard it and declared it was a Great song and deserved to be heard. . He asked me the one question that changed everything. “ if not now, WHEN?” He put me on the path and I walked it gratefully.
The song is now his label Bronte Rd. Music distributed by Orchard.
This song predates almost your entire career arc, the Juno win, the mural, the world tours. What does it mean to have something you wrote as a young woman end up being the song that closes this particular chapter of your life?
It’s a testament to Love. Real love. Unconditional love. It needed a home and I find it profound to find someone to own it so many years later. It feels totally validated now. The song came from my heart as a deep emotion that I could attach to no one at the time…It is uncanny that it found its home, but it did and so it ever shall be.
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