Emotional Rescue

Kate Reid owes her life to music. It lifted her from chronic despair into an outrageously funny and utterly engaging performer feted by tugboat hands and critics like Tim Readman. He supplies the superlatives.

Kate Reid is, quite simply, one of the best quite simply, one of the best songwriters to emerge from the Canadian folk roots scene since David Francey. Songs such as The Only Dyke at the Open Mic, Ex-Junkie Boyfriend and No More Missing Daughters showcase her ability to write compelling, often funny, sometimes tragic songs that make listeners sit up and take notice.

For many, songwriting is a hobby, for some it is a profession, but for Kate it is literally a matter of life and death. “Growing up, I was afraid of success, afraid of failure, afraid of just about everything. I had a lot of grief, sadness and anger, and I hadn’t really uncovered a lot of stuff about my childhood that was sitting inside, stuff that I couldn’t articulate. I always say that music saved my life and it truly did. It helped me rise up out of situations of despair.

“I was extremely terrified about doing music but even more frightened of not doing it. I knew I’d have to get over it if I wanted to do anything with music. Now I have to keep my songwriting at a level that is deep and not shut myself off. I don’t want to have that feeling of being dead ever again, because that’s what it felt like in my early life.”

Her music started with singing at camp and in school choir. “The sound of everyone’s voices coming together was so powerful. I knew then that I could sing and it made me feel good.”

She picked up the guitar at 17 years old and played covers of Joni, Neil, Ferron and the Indigo Girls. She soon realized that she wanted to write her own songs, wanted to write about her life.

“I was too nervous, so I wouldn’t play in front of people. I had no sense of myself as a musician. Then I played for a couple of friends, and they encouraged me to go to open mics. I moved to Midway, BC, and then I wrote a couple I thought were half-decent.”

One of those songs is Small Town, which appeared on her first CD, named, appropriately enough, Coming Alive. It is about her time in that rather red-neck community and it features the deliciously funny lines:

And in an effort of self-preservation / I took to shaving my legs / Cuz I didn’t want to get confused with an animal / And end up in my neighbour’s deep freeze / Freezing.

“By then I really liked how it felt to sing my songs. It was a good way to get all that stuff, all that turmoil out of my body. I needed to know who I was and songwriting was a way to find out. With music I came alive. I came alive when I sang. I discovered I had a voice I had never heard before inside myself.”

She got more and more positive feedback, and realized she was touching on stuff that was meaningful to others, especially when they laughed because of her words. “I realized, ‘Oh I’m funny!’ I didn’t know! I could see myself in other people’s reactions. It helped me to have a sense of self.”

Coming out as a lesbian was difficult. “I was learning another part about myself that I was trying to hide, that I was really scared of. I was really worried about what people would think. I had a lot of internalized homophobia. Because of being empowered through my music, I can own that part of myself and feel proud of it.”

Now people are always asking her, ‘Do you really have to go on about being a dyke all the time?’ She replies: “There are road blocks whenever I talk about my sexuality. Look at the paper. We just had two guys in London who were gay bashed. We have gay marriage and stuff but there’s still a lot happening out there that are hate crimes. A lot of people make the mistake of saying we’ve won the fight. I remember listening to music that got me through hard stuff and I want to write music like that because it’s really important.

“We live in a culture where the mainstream is so straight and narrow, and I want to throw a wrench in there somewhere. I am not a spokeswoman. I don’t know if I can be the voice of the lesbian community. I am a white middle class woman who happens to be a lesbian. All I can do is speak about my experience and if people resonate with that, that’s great. The lesbian community is so diverse. I’m not the IT girl, I just sing the songs.”

Her latest CD, I’m Only Warming Up, is a testament to her growing maturity as an artist. It is brilliantly written, beautifully sung, packed with diverse emotions and extremely musical.

“Being in the studio is a really good lesson in listening to oneself. I know when something is right and not right. It’s one of the few times I am very sure about what I like and what I don’t like. In the studio I am very clear.”

She is excited about her next project. Originally it was to be called Songs for Kids with 2 Mums, but then she realized, “There’s gay and lesbian joint parenting, insemination, adoption, step parenting—all these different possibilities of families I never thought about.”

She already has more than 20 interviews lined up. She plans to take it into schools as an educational tool for promoting diversity, inclusion and acceptance. As she wryly observes, “I know what it’s like to be a bit different.”

These days she writes constantly, often about the people she meets. Like the bloke in a bar on Vancouver Island who looked like an average guy. “He came and told me he drives a tug boat, he loves my songs and that he’s a total cross-dresser. His nickname is Captain Cupcake. How can you not write a song about that?”