A Martian Awareness Mix

Mary Margaret O'Hara rarities for St. Patrick's Day—and this newsletter's anniversary!

“Crritic!” is one year old! I didn’t realize it when the date came last week, so I’m toasting it today. I wanted to do something special. And it occurred to me that someone else in Toronto is also celebrating an anniversary today.

That’s local legend Mary Margaret O’Hara, who along with her brother Marcus is hosting their 47th (!!!) annual “Martian Awareness Ball” at the Horseshoe tonight. A local St. Patrick’s Day institution (Martians are green, get it?) that started in 1978, it’s a night when friends, family, and Queen St. scene veterans, grizzled to various degrees of extremity, gather to sing Celtic songs, dress in emerald hues, and defy the passage of time.

Mary Margaret O’Hara at last year’s Martian Awareness Ball (photo borrowed from Facebook).

In international music circles, Mary Margaret is usually thought of as an eccentric who put out one untouchably ideal album, 1988’s Miss America, then vanished into reclusion. Around here she’s a much more familiar presence than that myth would suggest. And, as the Martian Ball record indicates, a much more continuous one. Elusive as she certainly can be, local music lovers have kept track since her (before my time) early days with Songship aka the Go Deo Chorus, through her brief flash of prominence, then into her many years of cameos—as an unofficial member of The Henrys, or turning up to sit in at free-improvisation gigs at the Tranzac and elsewhere, or backing many friends and other artists across generations.

From Miss America alone, you’ll understand that M2OH has a channel to something deep. If you’ve had the fortune to see her live, you’ll know it’s to the very origin point of music. When she’s improvising vocally, she seems to outline an evolutionary tree that links the urge to sing to the beginnings of language, spirtual glossolalian ecstasies, and transmissions from the stars. Yet she can also make a hushed ballad feel like she’s inside you, repairing your life.

The good news is that there’s a lot more M2OH music on record—and on streaming—than people think. Some of it is definitely difficult to access, like the CD from I think the late 2000s called It’s Okay to Touch My Fancy, which was only available at shows. There’s also a full 2012 live album with Vancouver cellist Peggy Lee’s ensemble, Beautiful Tool, which you can hear and buy exclusively on Lee’s Bandcamp. But Mary Margaret’s soundtrack for one of the several independent films she’s acted in, 2002’s Apartment Hunting, is unofficially a full M2OH album, and it’s usually visible on her streaming profiles.

A lot else is available but not as obvious. Her many tracks with the Henrys—several on each of their albums for years—usually escape fans’ notice. She’s also been on lots of tribute/themed albums (including some produced by legend-in-his-own-right Hal Willner, like the pirate-themed Rogues Gallery albums and The Harry Smith Project), and guested with so many others. That goes back to when Morrissey invited her to caterwaul on his definitive early solo single “November Spawned a Monster,” through Nick Cave/Dirty Three drummer Jim White recording the single “And the Angels Sing” with her in 2022. She made one of my favourite Christmas albums in 1994 with Jane Siberry, Victoria Williams, Holly Cole, and Rebecca Jenkins—not to be confused with the Christmas EP she put out solo in 1991, including the original song “Christmas Evermore” (recently covered by Cold Specks).

So for this particular Martian Awareness day, I’ve compiled a retrospective mix called The Best of the Rest of Mary Margaret O’Hara. I worked only with what I could find on Spotify, and it’s still 52 songs long. (One for every week in Crritic’s first year.) And I was being selective. But with this voice, the cup should always run over.

Listen to it now on Spotify, Apple, Tidal, or YouTube. (Track list will vary with platform and region.)

I love the way one of Mary Margaret’s longest-standing collaborators, songwriter Bob Wiseman, describes his first time working with her, in about 1989. (You should go buy Bob’s book Music Lessons. And you should hear the theme song they made together for the CBC podcast Somebody Knows Something, which I couldn’t include on the mix.)

Bob writes:

“… [She] came with her boyfriend but she made him leave when we were about to start recording. She arranged it for him to come back in an hour or two. I thought it was amusing that she needed him to leave in order to sing. Then, for me to record her, she needed to stand around the corner so I couldn’t see her. Okay. Then, she needed the lights off. Okay. And then she sang and it was more than I could have hoped for.

“Each take she did, I would hear aspects I liked and some I didn’t. But each time I played it back I didn’t hear it in the same way. I couldn’t find what I thought were wrong parts, plus I heard new things I didn’t notice the first time that gave me pause and made me feel regret about expressing criticism. She tried to accommodate me, and went back out to re-record each time with my jumble of directions, only to do something else equally brilliant and confounding. I started to grasp it made no sense to try and direct her. I learned a lesson: certain artists are so exceptional you shouldn’t interfere, just trust their talent. It might take many hours of listening later to properly process, and it’ll be worth it.”

He concludes: “Whatever one does in the presence of saints, that’s what you should do if you meet her, offer to wash her feet or get her a piece of cake.”

… Or a dram of whiskey, perhaps, if it happens to be Saint Paddy’s. Happy anniversary to her, and to “Crritic!” And happy listening, I hope, to you.