January 19: My Memories of Kate

I was saddened and shocked to hear about Kate McGarrigle passing away. I knew she had been ill but thought she had been in recovery.

Kate rented SWO and me the first floor of her home when I lived in Montreal from 2002-2004. Despite the fact we shared her house, I didn't know her very well. She did help put a grand piano on our floor (her sister Jane's) and when I was away on tour a lot she would split a bottle of wine and spend long hours chatting with SWO. She never minded when I'd play the piano at all hours and said she never noticed or was bothered by any noise we made, though I'm sure she did notice.

I would go off and do whatever I did on weekends and she'd always come back from somewhere fabulous just having had dinner somewhere metropolitan with Bjork or Bob Dylan and she always said it like it was no big deal. She never boasted about things and she just made her music and did it with lots of heart and humour.

When I was making "Songs of Love and Death" she generously played banjo on a track, even though i was just recording it in a little room on an 8-track mini-disc. She took her time to work out the part and added a beautiful flavour to a Virgin Prunes cover.

One night when we were both playing in Peterborough (she and her sister at the theatre and me at the dingy club nearby) she put me on her guest list and I put her on mine. She said afterwards I sounded like Alanis Morissette and she wasn't trying to be mean. She was just sayin'.

She seemed, whenever we would talk, "over" the trials of the music business and entrenched in the hard work of putting out records with her sister Anna, but Kate was equally full of passion and zest for life, and always full of laughter. She was always super-proud of Martha and Rufus, it was an inspiration to me then that she had children and made her music and made it all work.

You could sometimes hear the odd practice session coming from upstairs, or the grand piano being played and to my mainstream-music-drenched ears the sounds were always so wonderfully French-Canadian and rhythmic and musical. That's why when I recorded in Montreal I called my studio Sous-Royale, because I always felt like I was living on the first floor, beneath Canadian music royalty.

She will without a doubt, be missed.