A recent performance by Kate Maki in her home province of Ontario.
By Todd Lavoie
Front porch romantics and summer sunset swooners, set your heartstrings a-flutter in anticipation. Canadian alt-country-folk songstress Kate Maki will bring her enchanting “No Depression” melodies to Café du Nord Thursday, April 24, opening for weirdly wonderful Giant Sand mastermind Howe Gelb. Trust me: if you’ve ever tumbled weak-kneed and flustered over the down homey charms of a blue highway-rambling singer-songwriter in your lifetime, you’ll fall hard for Maki. I certainly have.
Boasting an arrestingly gentle, plainspoken delivery, Maki fashions impressive levels of pull-up-a-chair-and-stay-awhile intimacy out of uncluttered arrangements and emotionally direct lyricism. A cross between Suzanne Vega and Iris DeMent, perhaps, though I do detect threads of similarity with Gillian Welch – albeit with considerably less of that tattered black-and-white Dorothea Lange photo vibe going on here – as well as with fellow Ontarian Sarah Harmer.
It’s immediate, familiar-as-an-old-friend kind of stuff – and yet it’s all quite stimulating and at times even challenging. It ain’t easy to craft deceptively simple, homespun little charmers like those on Maki’s recently released American debut, On High (Confusion Unlimited/Ow Om) – a lot of folks try and fail, often out of succumbing to cliché or insisting upon self-perceived limitations of the genre. Not an issue here: this 27-minute introduction is loaded with forcefully understated little wonders. Can’t wait to hear ’em live.