Welcome to Episode 17 in my 2024 Monday Music Matters “Song-A-Week”series of stories in memory and in honour of my daughter, Kait
Link to Song
This is a first for me – a fiddle tune! There is a story behind it as I did not sit down at the piano to write a reel.
About a year after my daughter, Kait, passed away, I was in a dark place believing I would never sing again – never mind write a song. I tried a few times and they were so filled with anguish and grief that I knew I could never sing them anywhere because they were heavily laden with so much pain. So I closed the piano lid and stopped sitting down at the piano.
Then this little tune started circling in my brain. It literally had dropped into my head one day and would not stop playing in a loop. No words. Just the melody. Now anyone who knows me knows I don’t read or write music so I put my cell on the piano and recorded what I heard in my head. I couldn’t even play it! Just sing it. I then reached out to a great friend of mine, Tom Leighton who eventually donated his time to record it as a tribute to Kait. And he got our mutual friend Conrad Kipping to lay down the fiddle and mandolin parts.
I reached out to Tom again and he provided some of the photos that he and his wife Sandra took during their trips out on the East Coast. They are both Maritimers from New Brunswick and so is Conrad. As for me, my Acadian ancestry is from PEI. It seemed fitting to include photos of the East Coast on this tune.
Hope you enjoy it!
You can read the first 16 stories & hear all the songs on my Stories page:
Link to more songs:
As always, I appreciate all your wonderful support!
Enjoy the beautiful artwork created by Jessica Bell and her 2 sons: Aiden, 11 and Isaac, 8 for the song & story.
The first story, “Malaika”, gives you a bit of a background of why I embarked on this 52 week journey.
Here is a link to Kait’s Comfort Kits which were created to bring some comforts of home to long term hospital patients with a focus on cancer patients