Kate and Anna McGarrigle Songs and Stories

Dane Lanken
Kate & Anna McGarrigle

9 X 11 inches, 216 pages

Archives of Canadian Arts, Culture, and Heritage

"THE ANARCHICALLY GENTEEL living-room musicality of these sisters has to be one of Canada's greatest contributions to world culture." So wrote New York rock critic Robert Christgau of Kate and Anna McGarrigle, whose singing and songwriting talents took them from a quiet Québec village to the top stages of New York and London.

This is the story of that remarkable adventure, told in text and in songs, in scores of pictures from family snaps to formal portraits, and in the words of leading journalists from around the world.

Includes a Kate and Anna McGarrigle songbook with complete lyrics and full musical notation to 34 favourite Kate and Anna songs.

Dane Lanken is a newspaper and magazine writer, and the author of books including Montreal Movie Palaces. He is married to Anna McGarrigle.

"An engrossing account of [Kate and Anna's] bicultural family history and their early years in the Laurentians — both of which had a huge impact on their music." — Montreal Gazette

"At last, the definitive book on the Mcgarrigles to be published. It has surpassed all my expectations — it's as if you are invited to share their private archives, photos, songs
and memories at their Saint-Sauveur parlor. The only way the McGarrigle family story could be told." — Robert Bower

Dane Lanken

Author

Dane Lanken was born in Montreal in 1945. He worked at the Montreal Gazette as a film critic and feature writer from 1967 to 1977, and thereafter as a freelance journalist, most regularly for Canadian Geographic magazine. He and his wife Anna McGarrigle live near Alexandria, Ontario.