Lucy Wainwright Roche

Oliver and I were having our supper last week at My Plum, My Duck, the new vegan restaurant on University Avenue (try explaining that to your 1995 self). While I was tucking in to my macrobiotic plate and Oliver into his veggie burger, Kate & Anna McGarrigle came on the hi-fi, which was almost too much of a cliché to be a cliché, Kate & Anna being something of standard-bearers for the macrobiotic vegan social justice warriors of the 1980s.

Some say the heart is just like a wheel. I cannot hear that song without being transported back to 1986, spinning LPs in the booth at Trent Radio.

Now this is going to get complicated, so hold on.

Kate McGarrigle was married, from 1971 to 1977, to musician Loudon Wainwright III.

They had two children, both of whom went on to become successful musicians in their own right: Rufus (Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk) and Martha (Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole).

Loudon Wainwright later had a relationship with Suzzy Roche (Death of Suzzy Roche), who was another mainstay of the late-century singer-songwriter intelligentsia. The Roches’ Hammond Song was on my playlist for many years; we’ll always love you, but that’s not the point.

In 1981, Roche and Wainwright had a daughter, Lucy Wainwright Roche. Lucy is herself also an accomplished musician (Call Your Girlfriend); as if proving that Spotify is more than it’s cracked up to be, she just showed up in my “discover” playlist. And so now I am.

The amount of musical DNA coursing through the veins of the members of that extended family is mind-boggling; what Thanksgiving dinners they must have.