Down and Out in Denver

Kate McGarrigle (photo by Dane Lanken)

I grew up listening to Kate & Anna McGarrigle, the Canadian folk-singing duo from Montréal, particularly the album, “Love Over and Over” (1982), whose title track is an exuberant and funny musing about the meaning of love (with special reference to the Brontës):

You ask me how I feel

I said my heart was like a wheel

Why don’t you listen to it sometime

I’ve walked upon the moors

On many misguided tours

Where Emily, Anne and Charlotte

Poured their hearts out

And what did they know

What could they know about love

Or anyone know about love

When I got to college I bought more of their albums, including their eponymously titled debut (1976) that Rolling Stone named one of the best of the year and that was lauded by almost all critics.  Their songs are variously serious and whimsical and sad, filled with the music of so many instruments: fiddles and mandolins, pianos and accordions, guitars and violins. And always there are their voices, haunting and somber and beautiful.  They released ten albums in total.

Kate McGarrigle died last month at age 63 of clear-cell sarcoma at her home in Montréal and I’ve been listening to their albums a lot in the weeks since her death.  They’re just as wonderful as ever.  The McGarrigle sisters sing in both French and English (their father was Anglophone, their mother Francophone) and every album has a bit of both, with the exception of “French Record” (1980). They sing traditional French Canadian folk songs (“Blanche Comme La Neige”); plaintive songs about love lost (“I Cried For Us,” above without video); explorations about childhood (“Sun, Son (Shining on the Water)”); and funny ditties that cast the making of salt as a love story between sodium and chloride – “think of the love that you eat when you salt your meat.” (“NaCl”)

Many of their albums feature a whole cast of McGarrigle relatives singing and playing piano and fiddles and guitars and accordions, including their organist sister, Jane; Anna’s husband, Dane Lanken; Kate’s ex-husband, the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III; and Kate’s two kids with him, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright, accomplished singers in their own right whose albums I also love (including Martha’s brilliantly titled “I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too”).  They are also joined by friends like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, who have taken some of their songs to even greater fame.  A 1981 version of their “Complainte Pour Sainte Catherine” is below (Kate is standing with accordion and Anna is on piano and lead vocals):