Kaia Kater & Tray Wellington (Fri)

Even factoring in the down time from the pandemic, Strange Medicine had a long  gestation period. During lockdown she reached out to Montréal friend Joe Grass,  known for his work producing The Barr Brothers and Elisapie. “He’s a roots  musician, but with really big ears,” she says. Working together as producers they  kicked songs back and forth and went through demos. “We built it up slowly, “she  says. “It was a really different process from what I had previously done. ” With  other albums, like most artists, Kater had assembled a band and gone in over a  couple days to track the full album. Here the process carefully and thoughtfully  unrolled over a year and a half. Working with arrangers Franky Rousseau (Andrew  Bird, Chris Thile) and Dominic Mekky (Caroline Shaw, Sara Bareilles), Kater was  able to build soundscapes around each song. The strings on neo folk song “Often  as the Autumn” , as an example, unspool like a rolling field, mixing with electronics  and harmonics in a deeply beautiful way. Rob Moose (Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers,  Paul Simon) provided the strings on the album, while Robbie Kuster (Patrick  Watson) and Phil Melanson (Andy Shauf, Sam Gendel) brought an array of unusual  percussion instruments. 

It was a long road from the bedroom recordings on guitar and banjo that first  created these songs, but with such enveloping arrangements, Kaia Kater’s songs  on Strange Medicine ring out with personal truth. “Who’s the maker, and who’s the  taker?” she sings on the album’s second track, referencing the uncomfortable  nature of commodified art, the loneliness of being an artist today, and the  importance of creating as a life-giving compulsion. “In Montréal” is a meditation on the struggles of trying to make a home in the place you grew up.  Allison Russell also grew up in Montréal, another reason Kater asked her to sing on  the track, and has spoken about how the place you grow up can be like a dungeon and a refuge. Even on one of the least personal songs, “Fédon” –about an 18th  century Caribbean revolutionary, Julien Fédon–the personal aspect is still strong.  Inspired by the Haitian revolution, Fédon formed an army of enslaved and free  Black people in Grenada, the home island of Kater’s father and the subject of her  previous album. Taj Mahal was a key person to invite to sing on this song, given his  love of Caribbean music and his knowledge of the French language. 

On songs that are based on historical events (“Fédon”, “The Witch”), imagined  characters (“Often as the Autumn”, “Tiger”), or from Kater’s experience herself  (“Maker T aker” “Floodlights”, “History in Motion”) Kater pushed to give power and  control to the women and people of the global majority who have long been denied  this. She was inspired by a piece of advice from the author Whitney French, who  said “Give your characters the agency that you never had.” In some cases on the  album, this agency manifested as a language of violence.Tired of long-standing  tropes in Americana and country for insecure women in love songs, Kater looked  instead to what kind of language she’d been wanting to use in songs for a long  time but hadn’t felt was acceptable. “Women aren’t supposed to talk about  violence, because we’re considered to be peaceable,” she explains, “but the reality  is that we actually deal with violence all the time.” Her songs also go against long held stereotypes and clichés of women. “The Witch”, for example, is ostensibly  about Tituba, the first woman–an enslaved Caribbean–who was burned as a witch  in the Salem witch trials, but Kater’s also using the witch as a stand-in for the lingering sexist perceptions of modern women as harpies, sirens, shrews and  temptresses.  

For all the personal narratives of resistance on the album, ultimately the songs on  Strange Medicine are all about the stories for Kaia Kater. “The through line for me,”  she says, “is just stories. It was the story of my dad on Grenades, and on Strange  Medicine it’s the story of people in history who might not have had their proper  shrift. It’s also my chance to finally write about the times in my life when I didn’t  feel like I had a voice, in order to give myself one now.“ As an uncommonly gifted  songwriter, Kater excels at telling stories through song, drawing from her love of  poetry, literature, and composition to fold these stories into a larger narrative of  the people who have been left behind by history. She’s tapping into the full  kaleidoscope of her emotions to create a place for collective grief and celebration, inviting the ancestors to a place of honor at the table.

Banjo player Tray Wellington’s approach to the quintessential American instrument is all about looking forward. An International Bluegrass Music Association Award winner, Wellington is critically acclaimed not only for his technical prowess, but also for leveraging his unique point of view to craft a one-of-a-kind voice on the instrument. It’s a feat that’s all too rare in these roots genres that seem to value emulation and regurgitation over all else. Instead, Wellington has time and time again reasserted that his playing style, and all of the many varied and disparate parts that combine within it, is wholly his own – and it’s unconcerned with tradition.