SPOTLIGHT: Kaia Kater on How Film Composing Focused Her Folk Songs

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kaia Kater is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for May 2024. Read more about her and her new album, Strange Medicine, in our interview, and don’t miss a video of her performing “Maker Taker” just for ND readers.

Before the pandemic shuttered the world in spring of 2020, I was experiencing an internal shutdown of my own. Winter of 2019 had marked a straight year of extensive and exhaustive perma-touring in support of my 2018 album Grenades. From the outside in, everything looked fabulous. I played Carnegie Hall (bucket list!) and traveled everywhere from Mexico to the northern isles of Scotland, meeting interesting and kind people (and a couple of Shetland ponies!) along the way. It was the first time I felt genuinely successful, mostly evidenced by extended periods of novel financial stability. However, behind the scenes, I was running on the toxic fumes of perfectionism, anxiety, and complex trauma.

By March 2020 my mental health had plummeted so severely that the pandemic lockdown came with a strange, if slightly guilt-ridden, wave of relief. Of course it also brought a whole new set of anxieties, namely financial and existential. Despite this, I quietly felt grateful that I no longer had to prioritize my career over my traumatized mind; the choice had been made for me.

Enter: film composing.

My earliest movie memory is watching the 1995 feel-good comedy Father of The Bride 2 and laughing along with Steve Martin’s character’s foibles and neuroses (maybe some part of me knew I’d eventually become a banjo playing comedian too?). To me, the true power of films is that they help people to empathize with themselves and others. To this day my favorite activity is to go to the cinema by myself. I love the surge of closeness I feel to a bunch of strangers when we all laugh together at a slapstick scene or cry at an onscreen death — or even when we collectively yell at the main character to TURN AROUND as the masked killer stalks up behind her.

By my late 20s, I wanted to get in on the action. At that point in time, I’d done some free scoring work for friends’ short films and had a few song placements in television shows and documentaries. A close friend and colleague suggested that I apply for a residency at the Canadian Film Centre’s Slaight Family Music Composer Lab. It was a long shot, but for all my fears, I’ve never really been afraid of going for long shots. I applied, and after a few rounds of interviews and scoring exercises, I was accepted into the program. Six months later, I also started therapy.

Being back in a dedicated learning environment for the first time since college was both refreshing and intimidating. I worked on filmmakers’ projects and learned to take direction. I loved the act of trying to support the picture with music. It was a thousand-piece puzzle to which the instructions were simple: Figure out how to amplify the director’s vision and interpret their words through my lens and skillset, and work to set aside my ego whenever I was off the mark. Usually when my film cues would get rejected, the directors would be correct in their desire for a rewrite. I often think of my mentor Tom Third’s words: “It’s their piece! They’ve been with the art the longest, so listen to their feedback.” Though it was frustrating at first, I grew to relish the opportunity to start a piece of music over and create something entirely new, like rebuilding a clay vase after the previous one collapses on the potter’s wheel. When my cues got approved, I felt a wash of pride come over me.

I didn’t listen to many songs during those pandemic years. Instead I dove headlong into instrumental music. I devoured everything from classical pieces by long-dead European composers to experimental jazz and electronic scores. I fell in love with Steve Reich’s catalog after hearing his 1979 piece Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards in the 2021 psychological drama feature The Humans. I listened repeatedly to Gustav Holst’s The Planets, imagining each planet as a differently tempered god — my favorite being Saturn, The Bringer of Old Age. And even more surprisingly, I wrote a two-minute film cue for an orchestration class that was recorded live by a small chamber orchestra, an act that felt completely out of my comfort zone as a self-described folksinger. And something a little closer to my wheelhouse: I got the opportunity to write songs for a few characters in a landmark Canadian Black-led television series called The Porter, and won my first Canadian Screen Award as a result.

And so it went that the writing for Strange Medicine was done in fits and starts between film projects. In retrospect, my own writing only began to flow when my role in the “Kaia Kater Career Enterprise LLC” felt less fraught and intimidating. I was now able to write with more honesty, joy, complexity, and freedom. It was like someone had turned a light on in a dark, windowless room. With the vantage point of film composition and songwriting for television characters, I was now much less precious about my own art. I scratched words out and started songs over. I took musical risks and detours that I’d previously been apprehensive about. I volunteered my songs for feedback in songwriting groups and welcomed critique of my work from my peers. When there was enough of a collection of songs to make an album, some wonderful collaborators and friends — Joe Grass, Dominic Mekky, Franky Rousseau, Allison Russell, Aoife O’Donovan, and Taj Mahal — helped me to enjoy the music-making and recording process again.

Film composition also had another powerful, if less obvious side effect: My voice is stronger now. I refer here to self-confidence. I thought of this record as a film, and me as one of the thousand puzzle pieces that make an album unique and interesting. I enlisted people who would challenge me musically and also respect my opinions in the studio. My co-producer Joe Grass (Elisapie, Barr Brothers) and I had a deeply collaborative relationship. I learned to trust the strengths of the people around me while also keeping my own perspective and strengths front of mind too. What resulted was a strange, cool, weird, cyclical, rhythmic, groovy, orchestral, electric guitar-less album, Strange Medicine. No shade to electric guitars, by the way, Joe and I just felt it was more of a challenge to see what we could replace electric guitars with. It turns out that woodwinds work pretty well!

As I prepare to step back into a cycle of touring that almost broke me five years ago, I still feel some significant apprehension. The questions bubble up: How will I stay healthy on the road? How will I make it all work financially? Is any of this even worth the stress? But in the moments I’m able to quiet my brain, I remind myself that I am no longer the person I was back then. I no longer exist in music as just a solo artist. I inhabit multiple roles (collaborator, bandmate in New Dangerfield, film composer/songwriter) that all bring me different challenges and joys. Even with a complex trauma diagnosis that sometimes feels like two steps forward and six steps back, I am much more supported and well-resourced with the help of a great therapist and a network of trusted friends. This is what I’d call turning poison into medicine.