Photo by Janice Reid
EDITOR’S NOTE: Kaia Kater is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for May 2024. Look for more about her and her new album, Strange Medicine (out May 17 on Free Dirt Records), all month long.
There’s a video clip of the great pianist Herbie Hancock in which he shares a memory of one night when he was playing in Miles Davis’ band. They were onstage, in the middle of “So What,” when Hancock hit the wrong chord.
“Miles took a breath,” Hancock remembers, “and he played some notes, and he made my chord right.”
This story was ringing in singer-songwriter — and major Herbie Hancock fan — Kaia Kater’s mind when she found herself stuck in a Montreal apartment during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than any other city in Canada, Montreal had particularly strict lockdown rules. Like so many artists around the world, Kater was cut off from a worldwide community of artists and fans that she’d spent years fostering.
Over the phone recently, Kater recalled, “I had previously inhabited a world that was so big … All of a sudden, it was me and my partner and our instruments. So it was really like, how do I go to places in my head? … How can I write something compelling from one place, from a kind of messy apartment, [about something like] a beautiful tropical island?”
She thought about the lesson Herbie Hancock credited to the night he thought he ruined Miles Davis’ set. “I judged what I had played,” Hancock recalled. “Miles didn’t. Miles just accepted it as something new that happened. And he did what any jazz musician should always do, and that’s: Try to make anything that happens into something of value.”
And so, on that wave of inspiration, Kater’s Strange Medicine washes ashore on Free Dirt Records on May 17. The album is packed with songs about beautiful tropical islands as well as the city where Kater spent months inside. There’s an ode to the internet (“The Internet”) — that beloved and cursed, necessary and unnecessary thing that kept her connected to her community as the world moved through its bizarre trauma.
I spilled my drink onto the internet
Everything twitched and was gone
Who am I now without the internet?
But Strange Medicine is not just about islands and internet. Kater explains that it is also a rumination on the numerous mistakes and traumas passed down across generations. How is one to make medicine of centuries of “colonialism, sexism, racism, and misogyny,” she asks. Though Strange Medicine doesn’t offer solutions, like Kater’s previous work it holds and jostles and compels the listener a little bit closer to some semblance of revelation.
Finding the Groove
Six years have lapsed since Kater’s 2018 album, Grenades, swept like a banjo-shaped tropical storm through the Americana world. To write that one, Kater had traveled to Grenada to ruminate on her family line through the twin vehicles of her imagination and her art-song aesthetic.
Grenades was widely praised by critics and earned Kater attention from high-profile critics at outlets like Rolling Stone and NPR. An extensive tour followed and, when Kater came off it, she was tired.
“I wasn’t even sure if I would put out more Kaia Kater records,” she says. “… I had — and have — a lovely team with me but it was just a lot to be, like, the one onstage doing all the things.”
She turned to her community for support and says it was commiseration from her friend, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Kyshona, that helped her understand her feelings.
“Kyshona said that it’s a lot of work every night to carry and harness the energy of a room of people. And when she said it like that, I felt, like, just this weight. … It is draining. Having her say that was so freeing. I think I was drained and I didn’t want to be the center of the story anymore. I just wanted to work on other people’s projects.”
Kaia Kater (photo by Janice Reid)
To pull away from the recording industry, Kater enrolled in a film composition course, thinking it might restore her soul for a while to use her musical gifts to help other artists’ works come to fruition.
Instead of driving an entire project from concept to completion, she says, “film composing was a way of coming in at the end of a project. [The filmmakers are] the ones who tell you, ‘This is what I’m hearing; this is what I want.’”
Suddenly, having so little control over an artistic statement was liberating, if creatively challenging in a way she wasn’t sure she wanted to engage in forever. She spent a year with the program before returning to her own songs. But the experience of studying composition gave her a taste of being amid such fully imagined arrangements.
When she started writing her own songs again for Strange Medicine, Kater knew she wanted to stretch beyond the occasionally confining expectations of Americana. “The songs needed to have a pulse,” she says. “It needed to be groovy.”
She enlisted the help of the arranging team of Franky Rousseau (Chris Thile, Andrew Bird) and Dominic Mekky — both, she notes, live a few subway stops from her apartment in Brooklyn.
“I would go over to Franky’s house pretty much every week for a really long time,” Kater explains. “We would just try stuff. … It was a really intimate process. … It’s corny but they put their heart into it. They were trying to figure out the songs just as much as I was.”
With Rousseau and Mekky’s arrangements, Kater and her co-producer Joe Grass layered Kater’s banjo and vocals amid various other strings, atmospheric percussion, and jazz-inflected woodwinds. The result offers Kater’s audience more of a sonic vibe than a well-defined genre. Her other collaborators on the album — Taj Mahal, Allison Russell, and Aoife O’Donovan — may be artists with undeniable folk-roots bona fides, but fans would be mistaken to pin Kater’s new vibe down to any specific category.
“I love her voice,” O’Donovan gushes over email. “The way she plays, and how she tells a story. [Her music feels] wholly unique, yet with deep and scrambling roots, spreading in many directions.”
Hope and History
With Strange Medicine, listeners are welcomed into a world where heartbreak, rumination, and a quest for catharsis are gates through which one passes into history. Kater takes her audience from the Salem witch trials to an 18th-century Haitian uprising to Canada’s most populous city in the present day. The journey is occasionally arduous, but there is always room for hope and wonder — and poetry.
Even when Kater explores the exhaustion she felt at the end of her last tour, she does so with curiosity and perspective. The closing verse of “Maker Taker” — one of the album’s many stunners — offers a sort of summation:
Maybe I just like
The adrenaline spike
Maybe I’m just done
Trying to please everyone
This lyric echoes Lucille Clifton’s poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” which Kater cites as another of Strange Medicine’s important influences. (“won’t you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life,” Clifton writes in one of her most-quoted verses.) Halfway through the poem comes a line that perhaps feels most closely connected to Kater’s journey on Strange Medicine: “what did I see to be except myself?” Indeed, the album is a strong statement about one artist’s relationship with self and all the moments through time that have led her to this one. One might call it ambitious if she hadn’t made it look so easy.
