Tell My Sister – Nonesuch 2011

Posted May 5th, 2011 by Anna

It’s officially out. The first 2 K&A recordings on Warner: Kate & Anna McGarrigle 1976, Dancer with Bruised Knees 1977, plus a 3rd disc of previously unreleased song demos from the time Kate was a solo act in 1971 augmented by some of the 2 of us from 1974 including a couple of tracks with Roma Baran with whom Kate first went to NYC in 1969 to suss out the folk scene. How I wish Kate could be here to see all the great press this is getting. She was beautiful and brilliant and now she’s come alive once more in her songs and she’s brought me back to life. Together again.

Here’s the Nonesuch link Tell My Sister

Here’s the itunes link Tell My Sister

12 Responses:

Campbell says:
May 24th, 2011 at 9:44 pm

Lord Knows I try commenting-nothing I, or anyone else, writes get through
Rich says:
May 26th, 2011 at 2:45 pm

I enjoyed your recent interview on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. Good Luck with the album.

-Rich
Peter says:
May 27th, 2011 at 5:51 am

I was amazed at the greater clarity of the remastered tapes. That was a bonus and I am hearing new elements for the first time in years! The demo tapes were my main focus and they are brilliant. I haven’t played anything else since my copy arrived. Great package …. looking forward to ‘The Songs of Roland’. Thanks for this … Peter
Louisa says:
May 27th, 2011 at 3:30 pm

Thank you, thank you for the amazing show in NYC. It was uplifting and heartbreaking and soul filling and mind expanding. Just great art. I was at the Friday night performance and picked up a copy of the CD there. I’ve been listening to it non-stop ever since. The remastered demos are so real and immediate, they feel like a splendid bridge across time.
David from London, UK says:
June 1st, 2011 at 5:28 pm

Any chance of Pronto Monto being released on CD?
Doreen says:
June 10th, 2011 at 9:43 pm

Just loving the CDs..Have to agree with the comments about the remastered demos..just gorgeous.
Kirk says:
June 22nd, 2011 at 5:34 pm

My daughter got me this for Father’s Day, and it has been a real joy to hear the first two albums, remastered, and the demos, on which I can hear lyrics I never could hear before. Beautiful music and terrific lyrics. You were famous for not touring (I was able to see you twice in NYC in the early ’80s), but would you consider taking a solo tour around the U.S. to highlight your sister’s work (and your own)? You have more fans down here than you might imagine.
Robert Laversuch says:
July 28th, 2011 at 3:41 pm

Got this set a few days ago and still feel overwhelmed. Thank you so much for this release. Sublime music, warm, heartfelt lyrics – a real gift!
Glenn Leahey says:
August 15th, 2011 at 7:28 am

Anna–I have almost all the McGarrigle 30+ year works as albums, but only have MATAPEDIA on CD,,and I think I may miss (a little bit) the near-memorized hisses and scratches, especially of DANCER WITH BRUISED KNEES. which I have mostly played as a cassette copy since 1977 (I was only 13 at the time!) when my older sister Linda and I traveled from Albuquerque back to New York on a LONG, slow, week and a half long journey, (including a 2 day sweatbath through the ULTRA humid Ozarks of Missouri)…which only included 3 other cassettes of music: 1. pieces of Stevie Wonder’s double album SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE/somewhat squished onto a 90 minute tape, 2. an ENCHANTMENT album of mostly folk/rock songs by then-contemporary New Mexico artists…a benefit album for the Santa Fe School for the deaf, and 3. a radio copy of a Pete Seeger concert from an Arizona Indian reservation from earlier that year that also MIRACULOUSLY still survives! When I think of ALL the cassette tapes that have been eaten by our various machines over the past 35+ years (less about 2 calendar weeks), especially my too numerous to count 80s/90s top 40 cassette “singles”, it kinda’ makes me think that I need to burn IN HONOR (or better: mulch) these 2 surviving bits of engineering marvel from the ’70s before I leave this Earth. We called your album “the BOOP” album, from the opening sounds, and even though I did not know ANY of the song’s meaning or inferences to adult relationships, and still know VERY little (seulement un petit peu) French, I dare claim that I LIVED that album back in the summer of 1977 and it helped foster (along with the other 3, but was KEY) an appreciation for UNIQUE music and especially songwriting that helped me get through, survive, and (arguably) thrive through a traumatic pre-teen to teen era, which included the death of my father from lung cancer. Thank you, and belatedly to Kate and also to Janie (who I saw perform with you at a terrific MIXED BAG concert at the Beacon Theater back in ’84) with a brand new Suzanne Vega opening the night and Chaim Tannenbaum complaining about the Christmas songs in September… I hope to catch one of your performances in the very near future and I promise not to EVER bootleg copy any of your recordings EVER AGAIN!!! Glenn from the Bronx.
Tony Smith from the UK says:
September 15th, 2011 at 1:42 pm

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE can we have an official DVD release of the McGarrigles in concert. The McGarrigle Hour and the Christmas DVD are all we’ve seen in recent years. There has been a bootleg circulating of your 1977 performance on the German Rockpalast TV show, but there must surely be good quality footage which could be used as a tribute to Kate….
Andrew de Salis says:
September 19th, 2011 at 8:57 am

Thank you for your wonderful music.
Rodney Williams says:
October 5th, 2011 at 11:38 am

Mendocino

Tanka prose, for Anna McGarrigle

At 55 years old, I’m in the habit of writing haiku and tanka – not fan letters. Yet the tears-to-the-eyes grief which I felt on reading of your sister Kate’s death can still overtake me, many months later.

A vinyl LP version of that first album you made together, which I bought – and adored – back in the mid-’70s, is now in my daughter’s music collection, down here in Melbourne: herself a university student these days, it still gets a regular spin; is still deeply cherished.

My own sister – Janet – likewise passed away much too soon, in middle-age, in San Francisco. A devotee of your friend Emmylou Harris, she and her family had lived over there for more than twenty years: “Tell my sister/ To tell my mother/ I’m coming home alone …”

Precisely twelve months ago, crossing the Pacific once more, I made my way – with Janet’s husband and children – up to northern California, to the seaside village of Mendocino.

Beforehand, I would not have thought that Kate’s greatest of songs could have stirred or haunted me any more than it had before. Yet of course I was wrong.

In the movie archive of my mind, Pacific surf will forever build, only to smash into those rugged cliffs on that rocky coast, before spraying spectacularly skywards. Always such footage of memory will have the same theme song as soundtrack, itself swelling and ebbing with a wave-like dynamic: “Talk to me of Mendocino/ Closing my eyes I hear the sea …”

last night
your sister
late
sang live once more …
such are dreams

Rodney Williams

Victoria, Australia

New Record: ODDiTTiES

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Tell My Sister – Nonesuch 2011

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