FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| MUSIC Kate and Anna McGarrigle Ah, families. They can be so... well, dysfunctional. Put 'em together in a room over the Thanksgiving weekend or a family reunion and you can bet your mortgage money there's gonna be some tears, accusations and maybe even fisticuffs or torn out hunks of hair. Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Canada's folky songstresses, and a class act in general, obviously come from the one documented functional family in the whole country. They managed to bring together husbands, ex-husbands, children, siblings and even outsiders - who are often mutely frozen spectators to the politics of family, or even worse, catalysts for bad show-off behavior - and live to sing about it. The precarious assortment came together for a week - in the same studio in the Laurentians favored by the Police and the Rolling Stones - to record The McGarrigle Hour, 21 songs that run the gamut from traditional French-Canadian tunes to country flavored ballads and barn-burning fiddle stompers. Joined by Kate's ex-husband Loudon Wainwright and both artists' grown children, as well as Linda Rondstadt and Emmylou Harris (who seems to be turning up everywhere these days), the McGarrigle sisters tempted fate without incident. The trick was, everybody had a task. "It was fine actually," the soft-spoken Anna explains into the phone. "It was a fun experience. No animosity. Maybe if we were there for a bit longer than we were it would have gotten bad. We were there for about a week. We mixed it a couple of months later. Everybody sort of had time to shine and to sing together and be part of the group and get rid of the egos." The other key was to offer very little free time. "We were in the studio all of the time, all our waking hours. Kate's kids, who are in their 20s, and my kids, who are just a bit younger, all grew up together so they get along, so it was very easy for them to just sort of shoot pool. It gave a chance for Kate's ex-husband to hang out with my husband and with Chaim (Tannenbaum, another musician), so the three old guys sat on a couch and chatted about soccer or whatever." Adding Emmylou Harris to the mix created a calming effect as well. "She was there for the first three days. That was fun, even though we don't know her well, we've come to know her a lot better from working on that record. She's almost like an old friend right away - very warm and accommodating." Working with family caused McGarrigle to reflect on the contrast between youth's enthusiasm and experience's wisdom in music. It also brought back memories of her own start in the music industry. "Kate went off with some friends to New York. I think she got bitten (by the music bug), but I was still living in Montreal, and she would call and say people are writing songs, and I think we could do as well. We hadn't written anything at that point, but someone puts an idea in your head and you try it and the next thing you know you've made a demo tape and then somebody's singing it. Kate had made a few contacts from hanging out in New York. This was in the early '70s." So when the time came for her own kids and Kate's kids to add to the mix, McGarrigle was very open-minded. "One nice thing is when youth and middle age come together, each one brings something different, although it's difficult to define what it is. The kids have brought some things because Rufus (Wainwright) is sort of a singer in his own right now and is self-assured, and he was sort of organizing things, where as we used to tell the kids what to do, now they're sort of directing us. Young people hear differently, they're onto something else, not just the vitality, but another way of doing things, which I noticed partly afterwards while listening to the stuff, the way they phrase, a kind of minimalist thing they do that I really like." So there's the recipe for harmony at your next family gathering. Give everyone a job to do, let the kids call the shots and, for diversion, invite Emmylou Harris. |