Kaïa Kater and the Creative Power of Letting Go

Kaïa Kater is a gifted storyteller. Drawn to history, the Montreal-based musician and composer strings together tales that marry the elusive past with an ever-shifting present. From a young age, Kater, who studied cello and piano as a child, found refuge in songwriting. “I didn’t understand that it could be an artistic practice, beyond spending a fun afternoon making up songs for myself,” she says. “When my music teachers started emphasizing exams and post-collegiate studies and auditions over the actual content of the music, I felt like it was getting too restrictive. So I drifted toward something freer, like songwriting and [playing] the banjo.

 

“When I became a teenager and started analyzing songs, I wanted to try out songwriting in earnest.”

 

Kater was still a teenager when her debut recording, the EP Old Soul (2013), came out. In 2015, her eleven-track full-length album debut Sorrow Bound—four originals, the rest traditional songs arranged by Kater—merged her Canadian-Grenadian heritage with her immersion in the Appalachian clawhammer banjo tradition. Her banjo practice began in her early teens with wide-ranging formal and informal studies and continued at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia, where she was in the inaugural class of the school’s four-year Appalachian Studies program. Kater’s graduation from college in May 2016 coincided with the release of her second album, the fifteen-track Nine Pin, which included several original songs.

 

By her third album, Grenades (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2018), Kater was telling stories about Grenada, where her father is from, drawn from the island nation’s history. Nominated for a Juno Award and making the Polaris Music Prize long list, the album revealed a deep-diving artist who had the ability to synthesize her inspirations, which spanned far and wide, into cohesive and compelling music. Though it was revelatory in many ways, the album was distanced from the woman she was becoming. “I loved that dialogue with my dad,” Kater says. “In retrospect, I wonder if I may not have been quite ready to talk completely about myself. The conversation with my dad was a way for me to start that process.” Six years later, her fourth album, Strange Medicine, does exactly that. “[It] is much more personal than my previous records,” she says.

 

In a conversation during her tour of Canada and Europe in 2024, Kater discusses the changes that have led her to new musical spaces, including a successful foray into the world of film and the practice of nurturing, celebrating, and incorporating the new sides of herself as a woman, artist, and business woman.

 

In 2020, Kater was not sure when and how she would proceed with her music career. As the pandemic blazed a path around the world, she isolated at home and ceased production on the album she had been working on. She was officially tired of the hustle. She had been there before, in her teens, and didn’t want to be there again. Music had morphed from a safe place into a business where the numbers, the brand, and the next success drove her more than the love of her craft.

“I had blinders on,” she says. “If something didn’t relate to my solo career, if it didn’t relate to the advancement of this marriage of music and commerce that I’d embarked on, then it was ‘a waste of time.’ I felt pressure to advance this solo career of Kaïa Kater to the point that she was separate from me, and I was working for her. There was an internal fracturing that took a long time to heal—to a certain extent, a betrayal of self for the needs and the wants of others, and I was just so lost in that soup.”

 

Kater pulled away from making music. For a couple of years she wrote very little, but in 2021 she was accepted into the Canadian Film Centre’s Slaight Music Residency (described on the CFC website as providing “mentorship, workshops and industry sessions that are designed to expand the skills, onscreen confidence, and career and marketplace opportunities for participating music creators”). During this time, she was hired to write some music for The Porter, the 1920s-set CBC and BET+ series which tells the story of the first Black labour union in North America, which earned her a 2023 Canadian Screen Award for Best Original Song in a Drama Series.

 

No longer concerned about the Kaïa Kater brand, she was able to focus her creativity on other people’s visions. “I felt kind of like a baby again,” she says, “just watching other people and wondering, ‘How does this person relate to their art?’ Just observing and learning. I found admiration for things again. I didn’t just see everything as a zero-sum game, which is something I remember feeling—‘Well, they got this festival. Why didn’t I get this festival?’ Those creeping vines started to slowly throttle me.”

 

Enlivened by this new endeavour, Kater began writing Strange Medicine (Acronym Records), a collection of songs inspired by the life of Julien Fédon, whom she learned about from her mother, a veteran organizer in the folk music world. “Fédon” was a song that “brought everything out” for Kater, in terms of writing the album. “He was a Black man originally from Martinique, inspired by the French Revolution in the late 1700s and then the Haitian revolution that was bubbling under the surface in the Caribbean at the time,” she says. “He went to Grenada and started an uprising with enslaved people and some free mixed Black people to abolish slavery on the island. It lasted for about a year. They were able to hold off the British, and then the British took the capital back and eventually retook the island, and Fédon was never found.” [Editor’s note: Fédon’s rebellion, an important event in Grenadian history, took place in 1795–96.]

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Folklore around Fédon is integral to the history and people of the island, even today.

 

“He lived on [as a] folk hero, kind of like John Henry,” Kater continues. “He rode a white stallion, and there were rumours that he would put its horseshoes on backward to fool British soldiers trying to track him. And that he would swim through underground tunnels across the island, a network of tunnels—this idea that he could live on land and under the sea. As far as I know, there aren’t any underground tunnels. He’s known as a symbol of resistance. Later, like I wrote on Grenades, Morris Bishop started a Black socialist revolution in Grenada. So who’s to say that that legacy didn’t live on quietly?”

 

From there, Kater wrote alone, focusing on creating a tight number of tracks. “[For] each song, I’m determined to draw out its full potential before I look at it and say yes or no. I am definitely a slow writer, and I’m learning to be OK with that. Everything I write has to have some sort of point or purpose, and I did actually write one more song that we took pretty far into production before letting it go. We zoomed out and looked at the collection of ten songs and felt the eleventh song wasn't fitting into the group. Even if I’m not writing a concept album like Grenades, I’m definitely thinking, ‘How do these [songs] all fit together thematically?’”

 

Working on Strange Medicine was freeing, she says. “I felt more open and trusting of collaborators during this process, and less attached to the final product. I felt detached from my career in a really good way.”

 

            Once the songs were written, Kater reached out to collaborators who would bring something specific and special to particular songs. “I had a shortlist in my mind of heroes and dream collaborators, and Allison Russell, Aoife O’Donovan, and Taj Mahal were at the top,” she says. “I gave some thought to their personalities and histories as performers and how they might bring themselves to the song. Taj was the first Black artist I ever knew to play the banjo, and his music has had a huge influence on my own creativity and playing. When we met in 2022, Taj spoke of his pride in his Caribbean heritage. He was the perfect person to sing about Fédon. Beyond his vocal abilities, he would ‘get’ the content of the song. I wrote him a letter explaining my entire thought process. I was overjoyed when Taj agreed to take part.”

 

Kater prefers to trust her collaborators rather than micromanage. “I firmly believe that if you have great artists, the quality of the music will always be good,” she says. “I gave them vocal guide tracks, with the express encouragement for them to do their own thing too. I truly loved everyone’s instincts. I used the majority of everything these artists sent me.”

On “Maker Taker,” which she calls her most personal song, listeners learn about the woman behind the banjo in words she’s never shared before. “Phrases like ‘I’m alone on stage with no exit’ harken back to when I felt trapped in my career and my role as a performer, and so exhausted by the energy that it takes to hold a room. It’s not easy stuff to talk about. ‘Maker Taker’ was a release to write, and to have entirely from my perspective.”

 

Referring to the astute line in “Mechanics of the Mind”—“They all want a kitten, but nobody wants a cat”—she continues, “The music industry has a craving for youth and for freshness. Nobody wants a cat. What if you state things as they are, or things that you’re uncomfortable with? Or say no to a gig, in solidarity with someone else who’s had a negative experience with the presenter? No one wants a difficult woman is what I observed. And I think about that [as I am] figuring out, ‘OK, when I do return to the stage, and who do I want to be? What am I willing to accept?’”

 

 

Back in the world of streaming numbers, who’s who, and Top Ten lists, Kater says she is being intentional, and that practising self-care and appreciation is allowing her to find peace with the ever-evolving process of making and performing music. “My stamina—my tolerance for uncertainty—has improved,” she says. “I’m less quick to judge myself and others than I used to be. There’s a new voice in my head, one that gently questions blanket statements like ‘I’ll never be successful’ or ‘That was a terrible show.’ In my time off and in therapy, I’ve learned to introduce nuance to my thoughts and actions, which feels so needed for someone like me, who has spent a lot of their life as a self-punishing perfectionist drenched in shame. I’ve learned to give myself more grace, and to be proud of myself for the little things, like getting up at six [a.m.] to get to my early-morning flight to a gig.”

 

The first half of 2025 will find Kater steadily on the road, playing concerts and festival dates in Canada, the U.S., and Europe, with breaks in between. Although actual songwriting is too difficult while she’s touring, Kater is absorbing new stories that may find themselves woven into future tracks. “I love to journal,” she says. “It’s a nice way to look back on the tour once I’m home, and see what kind of poetry I can grab from the experience. For example, on my four-hour drive through the Rocky Mountains today, I saw six big-horned sheep on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway. There’s a compelling lyric in there somewhere.”

 

Kater is open to the idea of bringing her inimitable style to an album covering classic folk songs, or another genre. “I love Frank Ocean’s music, but I don’t know if I’d attempt to remake it, it’s just so singular and beautiful on its own,” she says. “But I’d definitely approach a remake of albums like Daniel Lanois The Beauty of Wynona or even Bill Withers' Justments.”