The fierce folk of Katey Gatta
She has been a familiar sight in Niagara clubs and on summer patios for years. Guitar in hand, usually barefoot.
If Niagara has a designated folk singer, it’s probably Katey Gatta.
So it’s surprising to hear just when, exactly, one of the region’s brightest talents decided to devote herself to music full time.
“Around this time last year, I decided I didn’t want to be a web designer at an agency … it was time to give music a real try,” she says.
“Music was always the plan, but my parents are old school — there was no ‘Oh, just be a musician and hope for the best.’ They wanted there to be a real backup plan.”
Since that decision? She won the Niagara Music Award for female vocalist of the year, and on May 17 she records her longawaited new album. In one take, no less.
“Live Off the Floor” will be a show and recording session at Oddfellows Temple in St. Catharines, with Gatta and her band busting out all new songs minus the studio frills.
“Playing live is my favourite aspect of playing music,” she says. “I found when I did the first recording, it was a great experience but I felt slightly removed from the songs because I was just singing them by myself, to no one.
“Most musicians would agree that when you play live, there’s something intangible that gets
added to the equation. So I wanted to try and capture some of that.”
Cheekily dubbing herself ‘acoustic death metal,’ and a ‘loser of shoes,’ Gatta and her guitar weren’t an obvious match at first. While a young student at Princess Margaret Public School in Niagara Falls, her parents forked over $15 so she could take quickie piano lessons during recess.
Unlike most of her friends, Gatta had been begging for lessons. She made it count.
“After the second lesson, who- ever was running it called my parents and said, ‘Uh, you should put her in lessons. She could be singing at weddings for money in a couple years.’”
Her parents then bought her a guitar when she was 10, which Gatta was ambivalent about at first.
“I actually didn’t want to play guitar, but my parents kind of talked me into it,” she recalls. “They said, ‘If you want to play in restaurants and stuff, that’s easier than lugging a piano around.’ Then I fell in love with the guitar and don’t really play the piano anymore.”
She played her first gig, a charity show, at 12. Before long she was singing the anthem at Rap- tors, Blue Jays and Sabres games. It wiped out any fear of crowds early on.
“It kind of sucks the fear out of singing in front of other people,” she says. “But don’t get me wrong, there’s always like a nervous edge when you play live.”
Her new album will include songs she wrote when she was 15, right up to recent stuff within the past year.
If there’s one intimidating thing about playing live, she agrees, it’s debuting personal new songs for the first time: “You feel like you’re ripping your heart open a little bit.”
Gatta brings her full band to the show, including Dan Serre (bass), James Gizzie (guitar), Jess Gold (drums), Ben Goerzen (cello) and her sisters Karley and Kelsey (vocals). Admission to the show will include a digital copy of the album upon release.