f38 B
ut you don’t have to have been close to Kate McGar- rigle to be moved by the poignancy of the record, by the harmonising on Over The Hill – and Heart Like A Wheel, the second to last track, breaks your heart all by itself: “Some say the heart is just like a wheel /
When you bend it, you can’t mend it / And my love for you is like a sinking ship / And my heart is on that ship out in the ocean.” It was the first song that Anna ever wrote.
“Kate phoned me from New York and said there were these
new singer- songwriter people taking over, it was in the air, it was OK to write songs. Kate started writing because she and Roma needed some more material, she said I should write my own too.” That would have been in about 1969, Anna remembers, and although she’d been performing by then for a while, Kate’s call gave her the kick she needed:
“There was a kind of folk revival in Montreal in the early 1960s. I used to be in a quartet called Mountain City 4. We were singing traditional American bluesy things, no-one dared to attempt to write a folk song! I knew people were writing, Peter in the band had a girl friend who was going out with the guy who was recording Dylan, so I’d heard that first Dylan record early on and we started incorporating Dylan into our repertoire. But for fear of writing something bad, we didn’t bother.”
“There’s a congruence in the sisters’ songwriting”, Boyd says, recalling when he first heard their demo tape. “No-one sat down and asked who did what. It was just like these two girls sounded amazing together, and they’ve written these great songs, but once you get familiar with them you realise how very different they are, particularly lyrically.”
Anna agrees. “I went to a religious French school, where there was a lot of hymn singing. Mine are tinged with religiosity, Kate’s are more blues, her style is more traditional, something like Gersh- win might’ve written (our mother liked to listen to Gershwin); my style is more immediate, art school taught me to be free, that everything good could be re-used.”
Boyd first met the sisters through Maria Muldaur, who’d recorded Kate’s Worksong on her eponymous 1973 debut album, co-produced by Boyd, which generated a big hit with Midnight At The Oasis. “Of course Warner Bothers said ‘let’s do another record’. So we were in the studio in 1974 working on Maria’s sec- ond record. Lenny [Waronker] and I started going over lists of songs and said ‘what about Kate McGarrigle, that great Work- song? Does she have any more songs?’ Maria got in touch with Kate who sent a cassette that had a few songs on it and I remem- ber hearing a song called Cool River, a beautiful ballad with beau- tiful harmonies on it. We kind of assumed that they were Kate double-tracked. I called her up and asked her if she would come to LA and sing harmony on it on Maria’s record.”
“I can’t remember if it was the first or second conversation about tickets and where they were going to stay, by this time Kate had Rufus, I think she and Loudon [Wainwright] had split up, or were in the process of splitting up, but she was a single mother with a baby and she said ‘can I bring my sister Anna?’ and I thought she wanted her to help look after Rufus. This was the ’70s when budgets were no worry, so I said, ‘Yeah sure, we’ll put you all up at the Chateau Marmont.’”
“They all came out to the studio and that’s when I discovered that the harmonies were not multi-tracked but were Kate and Anna singing together. They just stood around the piano and har- monised, those things we’d heard on the tape. And it just sounded unbelievable. It was incredible. I looked at Lenny and said, ‘Fuck, this is fantastic’”. And Warners’ signed them on the strength of a demo they made the following weekend with their friend Greg Prestopino, Boyd remembers. “We heard the tape the next week and went ‘wow!’ Mendocino, Heart Like A Wheel, how can you not make this deal!” And now seven or eight songs from this demo are on the third disc of Tell My Sister.
Harmony singing came naturally to Kate and Anna, who, along
with their elder sister Janey, used to stand around the piano singing from when they were small. Their father, who suffered from emphy- sema, was at home whilst they were growing up and was, Anna recalls, “always at the piano bench, he played everything by ear. We learnt to sing harmonies at an early age. The family was very musical, our mother sang and played violin in the Bell Telephone Orchestra in the 1920s and she’d play piano when she was alone in the house.”
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