Heart and mouth

>> Montreal’s Katie Moore feels more pain

GENERALLY HAPPY: Katie Moore

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“A friend of mine told me the other day that it’s scientifically proven that redheads feel more pain,” says Katie Moore, musing about the abundance of sad songs on her new album, Only Thing Worse, out on Borealis Records. But she could easily be referring to the physical distress she was in when the Mirror phoned her last weekend, the result of some dodgy dental surgery. It’s bad timing, what with her upcoming CD launches next week, not to mention a pair of shows in Warsaw, Poland, this weekend with her other gig, klezmer hip hop sensation Socalled. With any luck, she’ll be fine, and with codeine, we were able to discuss sad songs, musical styles and the pleasure of recording live.

Mirror: Are you more drawn to sad music as a listener?

Katie Moore: Not necessarily, though there are a lot of sad songs in old-time country music and those definitely attract me more than the songs about mountain dew, so maybe that’s where I got into it. I guess there’s something therapeutic about writing sad songs, ’cause I’m generally a happy person. Whenever someone I’m close to passes away, if I eventually write a song about them, or some aspect of them, I feel a lot better.

M: How do you describe your sound to people who’ve never heard your music?

KM: It’s a tough one, I never know how. I guess it’s kind of folky, it’s kind of country. Maybe it’s alt-country, though I don’t even know what that is—that’s like anything that’s not on country-music stations. But certainly it isn’t reggae, and it’s not classic rock, I can say that for sure.

It’s really affected by whoever I happen to be playing with, like Warren [Spicer] brings something different to it, and Woody [aka Matthew Woodley]. The fiddle player and the bass player are classically trained, so they’re like the rocks, and Josh [Dolgin, aka Socalled] has his own really cool piano style that I like, and when we play a show, he brings his hip hop vibe and yells at me, which is really funny—this sad music and him saying “Yeah!” between the lines.

M: Does he?

KM: Sometimes.

M: Wow. Anyway, why was recording the album live so important to you?

KM: Well, the one that I did before was the antithesis of live. It just went on forever and I didn’t like it in the end, it just lost its essence. So I wanted this to be as live as possible and really limit the overdubs. I also wanted to have fun recording it, ’cause you can feel that in recordings, when they’re having a good time. And I so much prefer singing live, like a show, ’cause I don’t have a perfect voice, I have a lot of flat notes, but I’m okay with that, I don’t need to put the auto-tune on it.

So we did it like that, and it was a bit of a challenge, but the recording was really a hoot, very enjoyable, and I think you can hear that. It’s not perfect—in some songs, you can hear chairs creaking—but it has a great feel.

CD launch with Mike O’Brien at la
Sala Rossa on Wednesday,
Sept. 12, 8 p.m., $8