Have guitar, will travel
Garrett Kato stands on a hillside high above Byron Bay. Behind him, an endless beach hooks away to the left, a thin strip of yellow sand between deep blue sea and dark green bush.
‘‘Never been a gambling man,’’ he sings as he plucks a gentle, tumbling folk tune from his acoustic guitar. ‘‘But I’ll take a chance on you . . .’’
The song’s called Distant Land, and the simple, home-made video that goes with it sold me on the merits of this far-flung Canadian, who now makes his home in Australia.
I mean – what’s not to like? His voice is single malt and sandpaper. He’s handsome as hell, writes good songs, and plays a mean acoustic guitar. And he’s on his way here.
‘‘Yes, and I can’t wait to play in your town,’’ says Kato, who plays Nelson Arts Festival on Thursday, October 18 and will headline his first Auckland show at The Wine Cellar two nights later.
‘‘I was in New Zealand last year with my family. We went to Raglan, took a wrong turn and ended up somewhere really rural. I was stressing at first, but hey, it was beautiful, and there are worse places to get lost.’’
Kato is speaking to me from the home he shares with his Aussie wife Celeste and their two young kids. He went to Australia for a holiday and stayed for love.
‘‘My wife was about the fifth person I met after I got here. I arrived in Byron Bay with a guitar and a bag of clothes, and she lived at a share house I moved into.’’
Love at first sight? Indeed. Rather than the usual flatmate arguments about whose turn it is to cook tea or clean the dunny, they fell for each other right off the bat.
Eight years later, this gentle young dude from Vancouver is still in Australia, raising a couple of little tackers and making a name for himself as a rapidly rising singer-songwriter.
‘‘I think having young kids has really deepened my songwriting,’’ he tells me. ‘‘It makes you think differently about your own parents, and the struggles they went through.
‘‘You feel a deeper sort of selfless love, and some of that bleeds into your songs. You start to observe other people more, and think about the lives they might be having, rather than writing about your own internal narrative. Being a parent makes you a much more empathetic person, and that’s good for your music.’’
Have guitar, will travel. Kato made most of his income from busking when he first arrived in the land of the squashed vowel.
‘‘I loved it, man. It’s not even an option where I come from in Canada, because it’s too cold. But here you can stand on some sunny street and sing your heart out.’’
Kato grew up listening to ‘‘grungy punk stuff like Offspring and Nirvana’’ alongside his mum’s records: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Neil Young.
‘‘During high school, my friend and I used to smoke pot and listen to this tape his dad had of bluegrass picker Doc Watson. I was amazed by the beauty of the melodies, and decided, ‘I want to do that!’.’’
Kato became fascinated with contemporary singer-songwriters such as Ryan Adams, Ray LaMontagne, and the more introverted acoustic albums of Bruce Springsteen.
‘‘I started to gravitate towards records where strong emotion was expressed in a really direct, unadorned way. Most of my friends were still listening to punk and I was this weird kid, obsessed with Americana. But it felt really genuine to me. There’s nowhere to hide when it’s just you and an acoustic guitar.’’
A collection of smart and tender songs about shifting countries and stumbling across true love, Kato’s home-recorded 2015 debut album That Low And Lonesome Sound got a lot of attention in his adopted homeland. He went from busking to selling out 2000-seat theatres, playing huge summer festivals, and touring with Bernard Fanning, Jack Johnson, Kasey Chambers and Pete Murray.
His latest single, Take It Slowly, has been streamed over 7.5 million times, and a new EP is due early next year.
‘‘That first album found enough fans that I could quit my day job and do music fulltime, but I still feel like I’m honing my craft.
‘‘Writing a good song is a fine art. You want some beauty in there, but you don’t want it to go all sappy. It needs intensity, with just the right amount of sweetness.’’
And then, possibly because he’s talking with someone from one of the world’s great dairying nations, Kato reaches for a surprising simile: ‘‘Too much sentimentality wrecks a song, you know? You go from a really expensive, punchy, complex blue cheese to just a slab of cheap supermarket cheddar.’’
His two New Zealand shows will be prime blue cheese all the way, reckons Kato. He’s looking forward to playing some smaller venues again, with an expectant audience gathered around in the kind of intimate settings that really suit acoustic music.
‘‘I’m just bringing my guitar and my little stomp-box, and I’ll tell stories about the songs before I sing them. Really, I try to write subtle slowburners that will stick with some people who hear them for the rest of their lives, rather than big radio singles a gazillion people might like for a month. That’s a hard nut to crack, of course, but that’s my intention.’’
‘‘Having young kids has really deepened my songwriting . . . You feel a deeper sort of selfless love.’’
Garrett Kato plays Nelson Arts Festival on Thursday, October 18, and Auckland’s The Wine Cellar on Saturday, October 20.