By Kat Goldman, for www.kickassmusicwomen.com

I never meant to become a songwriter, although I do remember as a kid, having dreams of becoming a rock star and lunging at the microphone in some kind of black leather or gold lame outfit. I was a child of the seventies. What do you expect?

After a brief and unsuccessful stint in college, including busking in Harvard Square, I returned to my hometown Toronto. I felt lost, without direction or goal. I happened to walk past an open mic downtown one night and went in. I meekly asked the host if I could do a song. Although just starting to close, he generously agreed. It was a Dylan song, “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Somehow I impressed him enough that he asked me if I would come back and do my own show. MY OWN SHOW!

A month later, I appeared onstage at The Free Times Café. My set consisted entirely of cover songs by Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Shawn Colvin and Dar Williams. I had not yet begun writing songs of my own.

My next gigs included benefits at homeless shelters, women’s centers, an old folks home, and oh, of course, one of my highest paying gigs–singing to people in the produce section at Loblaw’s supermarket. While I sang Simon and Garfunkel’s, “The Boxer,” people smelling melons one floor below looked up at me in confusion.

It is now fifteen years later, I have been awarded two Canadian recording grants, made three CD’s, have had over a dozen song placements in television and film, and my songs have been covered by the Grammy-nominated band “The Duhks” –along with some other unknown and very disheveled looking men on YouTube.

However, my journey was not without its trials! Looking back, I can say that becoming a singer-songwriter made me who I am today- -that is, one hell of a kickass woman.

How did this happen, you might ask? I shall be happy to tell you.

It gave me a voice:

My first songs were tongue-in-cheek. I just wanted to make people laugh. I couldn’t write serious songs because I had not yet been able to take MYSELF seriously as a musician. So I wrote songs about myself, and my life, which at that time was clouded with depression, like “The Prozac Song.” It went something like this:

There is a pill, pill, pill

For when I’m ill, ill, ill

It gives me glee, glee, glee

It makes me me, me me

For when I am really groaning it will raise my serotonin

And it gives new definition to happy….

And so on.

The crowd loved it. The crowd went wild. Yet I knew at some point I would need to voice more serious concerns, like how it felt to be in a relationship and lose oneself. Don’t women do that? Don’t they compromise themselves in order to be accepted by their partners? So I began writing more sobering songs like, “The Great Disappearing Act.” which talks about a woman who  “disappears” in order to be loved. It was empowering.  Over the years, women and even men have come up to me after my shows to say they could relate to this experience.

I began to believe in my own voice. Whether I felt depressed or had relationship problems, I could express these issues in my songs, and have my feelings HEARD and validated. Songwriting gave me a voice.

How else did I become kickass?

I learned how to FIGHT BACK!

Once I became more established in the Toronto songwriter scene, I was offered an opening spot for a high profile act, a man who had hung out with Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan back in the day. After the show, he asked me to have a drink. He said my song, ‘The Underground,” is a true gem and that I was a “Canadian Treasure” –at which point he began making passes at me, asking me to return to his hotel room. I suggested dinner the next night instead.

After I refused him a second time, he dismissed me and sent me home. I felt humiliated.

The next day I called him:

“Remember me? This is your co-bill, Kat Goldman. Do you remember when you called me a “Canadian Treasure?” I wonder if you’ll let me use this for my press kit.”

“Milk it for everything it’s got, baby,” he said.

And from that day on, I have used his quote to gain some really great promo!

Women, I am certain, have much more to contend with in this business, including sexual harassment and being taken advantage of financially.

I can’t tell you how many times I have opened for some hip, high profile songwriter who would come onto me back stage, and then try to rip me off my earnings for the night! One guy, let’s call him “Slick,” greeted me from the stage as he was doing his sound check.

I went up to him when I first walked into the bar.

“ Hi, I’m Kat.” I said shyly.

“Nice to meet you,” he said.

I fumbled through my jean pockets for my lip gloss. I could feel his eyes on me.

“You certainly are diminuitive,” he said.

“ Diminuitive?” I asked. For a minute I had forgotten what that word meant.

“What don’t you understand about ‘diminuitive?’” He asked.

Ten minutes later we were sitting side by side in the dressing room on a loveseat sofa. He began to stroke my hair. Then he began to kiss my neck.

“ Would you like to go to the movies sometime with me?” He whispered.

“Uh…ummm…sure,” I said.”

I left for a moment to go down for my own sound check. When I sat down to the piano, I noticed that the pedal had been taped to an exact spot on the floor. My short, “diminuitive” legs could barely reach it.

“Sorry,” the sound man told me, “ Slick needs to have his pedal in that exact spot and will not allow for it to be moved.”

Needless to say, I was practically lying horizontal on my chair just to reach that goddamn pedal while I sang and played that piano during my show.

As it turns out, we never went to the movies together. Instead, his manager called me the next day to demand I pay for HIS piano rental since I used it for one song.

Then of course, there was the time I managed to win a spot in the Taste of the Danforth Street Festival in Toronto one summer. Not an easy gig to land! A week before the show, I went to see the manager who was organizing the festival and who had given me this lucky break.

“Thank you so much for this opportunity, “ I said to him.

“ Just don’t suck!” He grumbled.

Well, suck I did not! I wowed that crowd and came home very proud of myself that night.

Then there was the time I was invited to open for another very high profile folk icon at The Black Sheep in Quebec. After a grueling seven-hour drive, I arrived at the venue to have his tour manager tell me there had been a mistake. He said that Mr. So and So does not usually have opening acts, but perhaps if he tells Mr. So and So that I am “ CUTE,” he will agree to give me fifteen minutes.

The first thing I did was go to my room and had a good cry. I then marched downstairs and said to that tour manager:

“Please tell Mr. So and So, that I have just driven seven hours to play this gig, and I would greatly appreciate him letting me go on stage tonight.”

And so I did. I won over the audience that night and even managed to win over Mr. So and So who invited me to join them for breakfast the next day.

Now recording, well there’s a tough gig right there. I remember during one of my first recording experiences, I had to bring my mother into the studio with me because I was so intimidated by my producers! Not only were they robbing me blind, they were taking my precious songs and turning them into something they were not. They then had the audacity to demand songwriting ownership rights to songs I had written in whole years before! I have since learned how to choose producers who treat me with respect and sensitivity.

Now, why is it that when we ask for what WE want for our songs (and we MUST defend our songs at all costs!) we must be called “neurotic”, “demanding,” “bitchy,” oh, and I love this one- “a prima donna!” Yet, I have seen many men in recording studios, and at band rehearsals, simply stating how they want their songs to be played and nobody asks any question or interferes.

Hell, even soundmen can be sexist in this industry! Often they roll their eyes while I do my sound check, or ask in a bossy voice: “ So what do you want?” I have learned to just ignore them and not let them intimidate me.  What I do, see, is I start to adjust the microphone a lot to really look like I know what I am doing, and then I will tell them in the most assertive voice I can muster up: “ More reverb on my bass notes, please!”  This seems to calm them down a bit.

How else did I become a kickass woman?

Becoming a songwriter gave me earning power!

Hell, I get checks for at LEAST 42 dollars and 32 cents every two months from CD Baby!

Seriously, though, I do also get royalty checks and I have learned to demand equal pay at the end of a co-bill, especially when I am the one to bring out the majority of an audience.

I have also learned how to become my own manager, promoter, publicist, and well, a kickass businesswoman all-in-one. Any article I ever got in a newspaper, any spot I ever had on a radio station, was because I MADE THE CALLS!

If you can believe it, I was signed to Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin’s management out of New York City only because I emailed a music writer online who knew the guy.

Any time I have been offered promises, or have had carrots dangled in my face, like lawyers inviting me to their office to shop me to record labels, nobody ever came through. So persevering alone in the music business has made me tougher, has made me more independent, and has made me a fighter.

Becoming a songwriter has even made me a stronger daughter.

My parents, may they be blessed, would have wished a different career for me.

“ Beth Fingold just became a nutritionist,” my mother would say, “ Maybe YOU can be a nutritionist too, or a teacher, or, a social worker…YOU’RE SO GOOD WITH KIDS,” she would tell me.

“ But I don’t want to work with kids,” I would tell her.

“ But you need something more stimulating for your BRAIN,” she would say.

“My brain IS stimulated, mom.”

Being a songwriter, a woman singer-songwriter, is about taking up space in this world. It is not for the timid! It is a competitive industry. It is also a place where women must put up with a lot of crap in order to be taken seriously.

My final words of advice: Voice yourself, choose for yourself, take a stand for yourself, and take yourself seriously. And just know, that being a woman singer-songwriter is one of the most special gifts you can give to yourself and to others, so don’t let anyone stop you!

Folk Roots/Folk Branches with Mike Regenstreif (Ottawa Jewish Bulletin)

KAT GOLDMAN
Gypsy Girl
katgoldmanmusic.com

In 2004, Kat Goldman was a promising Toronto-based singer and songwriter preparing to move to New York where her music was causing a stir. Goldman’s first CD, The Great Disappearing Act, had been released in 2000 to critical acclaim and “Annabel,” a song from that album, found favour with a number of other artists, including the Winnipeg band,The Duhks, who recorded it on a Juno-nominated CD. The song also inspired the Giller Prize-nominated novel, Annabel by author Kathleen Winter.

But the move to New York never happened because Goldman was seriously injured when a car crashed into a bagel shop she was visiting, necessitating multiple surgeries and two years of rehabilitation. She came back with a second CD, Sing Your Song, in 2007, and has now released the lovely Gypsy Girl, her third.

Reflecting the transitory implications of her album’s title track, Goldman now divides her time between Toronto and Boston where she studies English literature at Harvard and Boston Universities. Some of the songs were recorded in Boston and some in Toronto; all of them written with poetic craftsmanship and compelling melodies enhanced by arrangements which blend both folk and pop influences.

Among the highlights are “World Away,” inspired by her intertwined lives as a Toronto singer and songwriter and Boston student; “Letter From Paris,” in which she seemingly escapes or hides from both identities; and, perhaps, best of all, “Gypsy Girl,” in which she sings about the compulsion to move and to travel and to explore new places which drives so many artistic souls.

EXCLAIM! Magazine By Jason Schneider

Having started a new phase of her life three years ago in Boston, the Toronto-born Goldman draws strongly on feelings of displacement for her third album. It puts her in line with countless other singer-songwriters who found a new perspective through exile, but Goldman displays highly attuned powers of observation throughout these 11 tracks. Combined with unhurried production reminiscent of New England forbearers such as James Taylor and Dar Williams, Gypsy Girl is the sort of bittersweet folk to which many less literate artists aspire but rarely achieve. The best compliment that could be paid to Goldman’s efforts is noting the strong echoes of Blue/Court & Spark-era Joni Mitchell on tracks such as “The Road” and “Letter From Paris.” Goldman is little-known outside of Toronto, but with songs as strong as those onGypsy Girl, that shouldn’t be the case for very much longer.

(Independent)

By Any Frank, rootsmusic.ca

You may remember Toronto’s Kat Goldmanfrom about a decade ago when her debut CD,The Great Disappearing Act, created a sensation at home and in the States.

She had New York City management, and was opening for the likes of Dar Williams, The Waifs, Regina Spektor, the Strawbs, and Jonatha Brooke. But then her career was derailed by an accident in 2004 when she was severely injured in a freak accident (a car crashed into the storefront of a bagel shop she was visiting).

She spent the next two years in recovery. But she is back — and in a glorious way — with her new record, Gypsy Girl.

It covers a period beginning in 2009 which finds the now forty-ish Kat majoring in English Literature at Harvard and Boston College. The record takes us from present day Massachusetts to reflections on 1980s Paris, to dreams of Tennessee and the halcyon days of New York City. What hasn’t changed — and in fact is better than ever — is Kat’s gorgeous, natural voice and her brilliant melodies.

She likes to be called a “songmaker”. I like that too, it rolls off the page and tongue better than singer-songwriter and it works. It’s a generous umbrella term that covers all the other skills involved in making a record like musicianship, vision, arrangements and production.

This precise use of language is also an example of the kind of care Kat lends to lyrics of her third CD. The pencil is well-sharpened, an especially difficult editing challenge when it comes to producing a record that is also an autobiographical journal, it lovingly leaves listeners with plenty of blanks to fill.

Maybe I’m not the marrying kind/ But more like a joke or a Stomping Tom/ Along the roads of time/ And I’m so far away from home/ (from the title track, “Gypsy Girl”)

The supporting crew is wonderful, led by the usual superb drums of Gary Craig, the record’s talented Toronto-based producer and versatile musician Maury Lafoy, and his clone in Massachusetts Adam M Rothberg.

Kat Goldman will launch Gypsy Girl at a concert at Hugh’s Room in Toronto on  Tuesday, April 10. Her friend Kevin Hearn of Barenaked Ladies will open the show.

Throughout my four years of writing these songs, I realized I truly was the Gypsy Girl. After surviving a terrible accident in 2004, I found myself wanting to run. If I wasn’t on the road, then I was in Toronto wondering where to go next. I finally moved on to Cambridge, MA in 2009. I enrolled in classes at Harvard and Boston University and began a degree in English lit. The songs? Well, they just kept coming. I learned that it’s never too late to make a change in life. Maybe running isn’t such a bad thing after all. “Gypsy Girl” is my new labor of love. I hope you like it, xox Kat