We came out of the gate around the same time in the mid 70s. Phoebe actually had a solid hit with her Poetry Man while Kate and I showed with our slightly more schizoid offerings. I remember P. as being a very soulful talented woman and quite funny. Kate and I often ran into her in NYC, either in studios or venues catching other acts on their way up. Then life kicked in. Around the time Kate had Martha, Phoebe gave birth to a daughter with severe disabilities. There but for the grace of God..Phoebe retreated for a while, Kate moved back to Montreal and we weren’t really in touch anymore. In the words of Woody Guthrie ‘ this World was lucky to see her born.’
Nonesuch Records releases Tell My Sister, a special three-disc set comprising remastered versions of Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s beloved 1976 self-titled debut; its equally praised 1977 follow-up, Dancer with Bruised Knees; and a collection of previously unreleased songs, including solo and duo demos, on May 3, 2011. Joe Boyd, who produced the McGarrigles’ first two albums, assembled the material for the third disc in addition to serving as producer for the whole set. Tell My Sister is now available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store, along with an exclusive, limited-edition commemorative poster.
The release coincides with a two-night tribute to Kate McGarrigle—who died of sarcoma last year—May 12 and 13 at New York City’s Town Hall. Curated by Joe Boyd, the concerts will feature performances by Kate’s children, Martha and Rufus Wainwright, and her sister Anna, as well as Emmylou Harris, Antony Hegarty, Norah Jones, and Teddy Thompson, among others. Profits from the concerts will go toward creating the Kate McGarrigle Sarcoma Research Fund.
Raised in an artistic family in St. Sauveur, Quebec, Kate moved to New York in 1969 to pursue a singing career while Anna studied art in Montreal. Both wrote many songs during this period, including Anna’s “Heart Like a Wheel,” which eventually appeared on their debut album (and was made famous by Linda Ronstadt in 1974), and Kate’s “The Work Song,” which Maria Muldaur recorded in 1973. It was another Muldaur recording of a McGarrigle song that first brought the sisters to the attention of then–Warner Bros. Records President Lenny Waronker.
“Lenny and I loved ‘Cool River’ for Maria Muldaur’s second album. The tape came from Kate McGarrigle, so we assumed it was her song and her voice layering up those delicious harmonies,” recalls Joe Boyd. “The song turned out to be Anna’s; and those harmonies weren’t overdubbed, they were live, the sisters’ overtones vibrating in the air around the microphone, making two voices sound like a multitude. Warners gave them a contract; Greg [Prestopino] and I co-produced with my old pal John Wood (Nick Drake, etc.) engineering.”
Among many other critical accolades, Melody Maker named Kate & Anna McGarrigle Album of the Year and the New York Times named it to its 10 Favorite Disks list, saying “This folkish debut disk was the most charming, purely beautiful and sentimentally moving record of 1976.” The album’s 12 tracks were mostly written by the sisters, with the few exceptions including a track by Kate’s then-husband Loudon Wainwright III. Although the album did not achieve commercial success upon its release, it has come to be seen as a classic over the ensuing years.
The dozen tracks on Dancer with Bruised Knees, released the following year, are mainly by the McGarrigles, as well, with two traditional French songs. Longtime Village Voice critic Robert Christgau gave it an A, calling it “even better than the debut.” Boyd, who produced the record, says, “Its only problem was the album it had to follow.”
In approaching Tell My Sister’s third disc of previously unreleased material, Boyd says, “I was wary of listening to the demos, afraid they might expose our production as overdone compared to the wonder of the two sisters sitting side by side at the piano, harmonizing like goddesses. But plain and fancy both sound great to me 37 years on.”
Anna McGarrigle said of those first recordings: “Kate could easily have had a solo career, as is evident from her early song demos, but she told me, ‘I don’t want to do this by myself.’ So I put my puppet-making career on hold. To paraphrase her ‘Blues in D,’ I couldn’t let the poor girl down. Thank you for asking me, little sister.”
To reserve your copy of Tell My Sister with the limited-edition poster, head to the Nonesuch Store now.
When folk icon Kate McGarrigle passed away over a year ago after battling a rare cancer, not only did Rufus and Martha Wainwright lose their mother, but music lost one of its most unique singer-songwriting voices.
McGarrigle inspired a host of high-profile musicians throughout her four-decade career, and EW can now exclusively reveal that jazz songstress Norah Jones will be joining an all-star roster of artists paying tribute to her in New York’s Town Hall this May.
The nine-time Grammy-winner Jones will join an all-star roster of artists for a two-day concert event, which is set to include performances by Rufus and Martha, Emmylou Harris, Jimmy Fallon (appearing in a musical capacity), Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), as well as Anna McGarrigle, Kate’s sister and musical partner.
The Canadian folk duo Kate & Anna McGarrigle came to prominence when their song “Heart Like a Wheel” was used by Linda Ronstadt as the title track of her most-celebrated album. The sisters’ self-titled debut soon followed in 1975 to rave reviews and over the years the duo’s unerring sense of composition earned Kate an eclectic fan club including Elvis Costello, Richard and Linda Thompson (whose son Teddy will perform at the tribute as well), Nick Cave and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.
Norah Jones and the rest of McGarrigle’s musical family and friends will play Town Hall on May 12 and 13th, with proceeds from both of the nights going toward finding a cure for sarcoma. Check out Kate McGarrigle singing the folk standard “Willie Moore” with her son Rufus on the British TV series Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… and enjoy her timeless talent.
A number of people have asked about the Saratoga Summer Song after hearing Teddy Thompson sing it at the Celebration of Kate McGarrigle in London, June 2010. He killed it. Kate wrote it around 1970 after she and Roma Baran had migrated from Montreal to Saratoga Springs NY, home of the Caffe Lena. Kate’s version of it exists on a solo demo of her songs from 1971. The demo was presented to Warner Bros and though she was not signed at that time a copy of the tape remained in their vault. We’re very happy to say that Nonesuch will soon be releasing our first 2 Warner recordings, ‘Kate & Anna McGarrigle’ and ‘Dancer with Bruised Knees,’ all beautifully remastered by Joe Boyd and John Wood. Also included in this deluxe edition will be the great Kate solo demo from 1971 and some songs by the 2 of us from 1974 just prior to being signed and a couple of them also have Roma Baran playing guitar and singing. There will be short pieces written by Joe, Greg Prestopino and myself. In the meantime I’ve posted this video of Teddy from last June. Thank you Studio 54 for filming it.
Saratoga Summer Song – Teddy Thompson, RFH June 2010
Bruce Driscoll aka The King of Nowhere sent me the link to his sweet version of HLW. Not sure there’s an actual recording. Here’s KofN facebook page.
Heart Like a Wheel – The King of Nowhere 2011
New Cover! Heart Like a Wheel – Katie Moore from her album Montebello. This week, I was a guest on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi and Katie Moore who was the musical guest sang HLW with her band. I was knocked out. She is beatific.
Featuring Anna McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha Wainwright and Guests
NEW YORK, Feb. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Two shows will be held in honor of the late Kate McGarrigle at Town Hall on May 12 and 13. A tribute to the iconic and influential singer/songwriter, the shows, curated by Joe Boyd, will showcase performances by Kate’s children, Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Kate’s sister, Anna McGarrigle, Jimmy Fallon, Emmylou Harris, Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons), Krystle Warren, Teddy Thompson, Justin Bond, and more. In conjunction with the shows, Nonesuch Records will release a new edition of the first two Kate & Anna McGarrigle albums.
From the release of that eponymous album in 1976, Kate and Anna McGarrigle defined a sophisticated yet traditional branch of North American song. Their rich harmonies, rooted in the Irish and Quebecois music of their upbringing, drew listeners into a personal world of songs about romance, heartbreak, chemistry, solitude, ageing and adventure. This concert will reveal an artist who possessed an extraordinary gift for the craft of composition, showcased in such songs as Go Leave, (Talk to Me of) Mendocino, Kiss and Say Goodbye, and Tell My Sister, to name a few.
Kate McGarrigle was diagnosed in 2006 with a rare form of cancer known as Sarcoma, which affects connective tissue such as bone, muscle, nerves and cartilage. She lost her battle in January of 2010, age 63, surrounded by a singing group of family and friends at her home in Montreal. All profits from these shows will go toward the creation of the Kate McGarrigle Sarcoma Research Fund in association with the Sarcoma Foundation of America (SFA).
The performers will be accompanied by a band very familiar with Kate’s catalog, including Thomas Bartlett on piano, Jane McGarrigle on piano, Calum MacColl on guitar, Anna McGarrigle on piano and accordion, Brad Albetta on bass, Bryan Devendorf on drums, Michel Pepin on guitar, Chaim Tannenbaum on mandolin and banjo and Joel Zifkin on violin (the last three regular members of Kate & Anna’s touring group).
Last June the first Kate McGarrigle celebration was staged at the Royal Festival Hall in London and sold out within hours. Six national British publications reviewed the show with all awarding it an unprecedented 5 stars. The evening was perhaps best summed up by one journalist calling it “…a heartfelt and fitting tribute to a remarkable woman.”
Tickets go on sale Monday, February 7 at noon by calling Ticketmaster at 800-745-3000 or online at Ticketmaster.com.
Box Office sales begin on April 21 at the Town Hall box office; $40.00 – $75.00
This concert is presented by Absolutely Live Entertainment in association with Joe Boyd and Catherine Steinmann.
For more information visit http://www.absolutelylive.net
Thursday and Friday, May 12 and 13
8:00 pm
TOWN HALL
123 West 43rd Street
New York, NY
In one of her more obscure songs, Kate likened herself to an amaryllis and I can’t look at one without thinking of her. Anyone who ever met Kate knew she was a woman of substance.
❀Of course this song was written long before little Arcangelo and little Viva came along. The sweet breath from these babies would have surely turned her around.
HEART SONGS
After a broken marriage, she wrote music of love and loss.
By NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF
IN THE LATE 1980S, if you were lying in bed one weekend morning, reading an article dedicated to the best rock ’n’ roll albums of all time, toward the back, long past “Born to Run,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Exile on Main Street,” there were quieter masterpieces, maybe even one that a fairly dedicated participant in the age of record shops had never heard of, like Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s self-titled 1976 debut. Part of the pleasure of hurrying off to buy and then play it was the special frisson that comes with listening to a great album that you sense a relatively small number of people know about; it feels more yours. This is especially true when the music is as intimate and vulnerable as the five songs Kate wrote for that album. She was not yet 30 when “Kate and Anna McGarrigle” was produced, but she described the stages of an unhappy marriage so vividly that they took on transcendent qualities; she seemed somehow to be thinking back across an entire life she had still to live.
McGarrigle was making music out of her own youthful disappointments. In 1969, after studying engineering at McGill University, she left her home in Montreal for New York City to become, says her sister Anna, “the character she wanted to be.” She, Anna and a third sister, Jane, had spent most of their childhood in what Kate’s son, Rufus Wainwright, calls “a very odd, out of the way place” — the Quebec mountain village of St. Sauveur. Raised by older parents and schooled in choral masses by French Catholic nuns, Kate had a yester year quality even in girlhood. She learned traditional American “heart songs” out of a book she found around the house and taught herself to play banjo by plucking along with Appalachian string-band records. Displaced persons who left Europe after World War II also lived in St. Sauveur, some of them bohemians wearing berets, others with concentration-camp tattoos on their arms, and Anna says that because of them, Kate developed an outsider’s sense that the heat of life was happening elsewhere. “She saw herself as one of those people who had to move on, to get out,” Anna says.
On her own in her early 20s in New York, Kate began to sing in Greenwich Village clubs, where she cut an ethereal figure, a puckish black-haired beauty with a striking mark above her lip and a singing voice that, with its melodic French-tinged intonation and absence of vibrato, conveyed an effortless emotion. Among the smitten was the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, who described Kate as “a wild and crazy swingin’ folk chick.” They wed in 1971, had Rufus and a daughter, Martha, and then Kate sent word to Canada that the marriage was ending and she and the children were coming home. Rufus’s first memory is his mother packing the U-Haul by herself for the long drive to Montreal.
‘God knows I love songs about mothers.’
“She was one way when she went down, and she came back almost a broken woman,” Anna says. “She came back in the summer of 1976, two months after her daughter was born. I think Kate got blinded by the whatever it was and got burnt. She had written songs before that. Cheerful, romantic songs. Not about life. She got a big taste of life.”
As the marriage unraveled, Kate, in New York, and Anna, in Montreal, had become recording partners, sending tapes back and forth. “Kate and Anna McGarrigle” is a musical conversation between sisters. There are wry lyrics sung in French; a traditional spiritual that counsels caution about whom you trust; Anna’s love-wrecked classic “Heart Like a Wheel”; a black-and-white cover photograph that looks like something borrowed from their mother’s dresser top; and Kate’s song cycle. It begins with the intoxicating early stages of wanting “to kiss you till my mouth gets numb” in “Kiss and Say Goodbye”; through the he-loves-me-not, he-wants-me-back confusion of “Blues in D”; “(Talk to Me of) Mendocino,” Kate’s wistful evocation of someone in uncertain motion yearning for stability; and the bitter end in “Tell My Sister” and “Go Leave.” There’s the feeling of a private person letting you in on something. Kate’s devastating portrait of a vibrant young woman who has come to feel prematurely old is the fullness of experience distilled as only a virtuoso songwriter can.
The critic Robert Christgau called this debut “a folkie apotheosis.” Popular singers, including Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur and Emmylou Harris, covered early McGarrigle songs. There was the possibility of big American careers for the sisters. They did make several more excellent albums over the years and often sang in Carnegie Hall, but there was always an elusive element to Kate’s relationship with ambition, the wariness of again getting close to anything too bright.
Part of it was life as a single parent. “When you’re a woman,” Anna says, “what happens when you have children to raise and feed is you have 10 minutes while the potatoes are boiling to run to the piano and turn on the cassette tape.” Martha Wainwright recalls a dedicated mother who strictly monitored math homework and, despite modest means, “was always on time with her credit-card payments.” Kate’s singular sense of style was such that her children always believed their mother wore couture — until after her death when they cleaned out her closet and discovered all the discount labels.
Another reason for Kate’s intermittent musical career was the way competing artistic inspirations would “possess her,” Rufus says, “almost to a point of mania.” If she was baking cookies, Kate made hundreds of gingerbread skis that replicated, right down to the intricately sugared bindings, those she learned on as a girl in the Laurentian Mountains. If Kate was knitting Norwegian sweaters, these, too, were produced in profusion, with the traditional snowflakes whimsically arrayed across woolen skies all her own. People close to Kate McGarrigle describe a woman radiant and blunt, and you can see it in those sweaters. “Today people prefer soft wools,” Martha says. “She liked only scratchy Quebec wool. She liked the pain of it. She was always slightly dubious about people who wouldn’t wear scratchy sweaters.”
![Kate & Anna McGarrigle: "Tell My Sister" [cover]](http://www.nonesuch.com/sites/nonesuch/files/imagecache/section-artists-image/media/images/mcgarrigle-tell-my-sister.jpg "Kate & Anna McGarrigle: \"Tell My Sister\" [cover]")
When folk icon Kate McGarrigle 
