A note from Deb
There is a wisdom that basically says that whether you can sing like the angels or see things like a prophet it doesn’t matter unless you love. None of it matters. It says that without love you’re just noise. It’s a sobering thought, but the more I journey and the more I understand what matters, this all makes sense to me. Learning to love yourself can be a hard thing to do, but our ability to love others is dependent on it. Love yourself and love your neighbor as you love yourself.
It is really important to know what your story is and to be able to connect the dots in your life between the past and present. And it’s also not that important. We live in this tension like the Irish understanding that the past is the present and the present is the past.
What seems most true, though, is that we always have the opportunity to grow more, heal more, be more authentic and present, and learn more about life and love. We can show up at any moment in our stories and decide to make changes, change our mind, open our heart more, be more real and love better than we have before. At the end of the day, I think this is truly what matters most.
Photo by Coco Foto
The names and places
With seven albums behind her, and waterfalling a batch of singles late 2024 into 2025, Deb Montgomery got her start at the age of 29 with a couple of grants from The Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent On Recordings. She has played with, shared stages with, or been joined on albums by many hard hitting musicians, writers, and producers over the years from Toronto, New York City, Chicago and Seattle: Mark Stewart (Paul Simon, Bang on a Can), Marty Beller (They Might be Giants), Julia Kent (Julia Kent: solo, Antony and the Johnsons, Rasputina), Sim Cain (Henry Rollins), Andy Stochansky (Ani DiFranco), Producer John Abbey, and grammy nominated Producer João Carvalho. Amy Ray of The Indigo Girls called Deb in 2003 to talk about her music after receiving a demo from Deb. In 2018 Canadian Documentary Filmmaker Liz Marshall approached Deb about doing a House Concert in Toronto that she would film and be recorded by producer Don Kerr; a collaboration of friends and a house full of artists that resulted in an intimate album The Heart of It. (available on Bandcamp).
Deb’s songs were added to a couple of movie soundtracks including Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Awards for The Hanging Garden (1997) and Robert Redford’s daughter Amy Redford’s first movie The Guitar (2008). In 2019 Deb released All the Water (produced at Soundhouse, Seattle) with the cover album gifted by photographer Kate Parker (Force of Nature) after she sent Kate one of the songs.
In November 2024, Deb performed as part of Founders Weekend in Philadelphia hosted by Root Quarterly Magazine. Before his keynote, National Ambassador for Braver Angels’ John Wood Jr. said of Deb’s performance, “I never had the chance to hear Joan Baez but today I got to hear Deb Montgomery.”
Recently, Deb was interviewed by Todd Lipphold of KMUN’s Crossroads, and Todd said, “I feel like I get to come on the journey with you.” What Deb now says she wants people to know about her shows is that she does not want them to be as much about performance as they are about being with each other and waiting for Grace and Love to meet all of us in the middle of the room, concert hall or Not Church. Montgomery has a lot to say about how churches have been unsafe places for people emotionally including herself, and toys with the idea of calling her concerts NOT CHURCH. “We need to gather and know that we have community in our shared experience of the joy and the pain of this living.”
With a powerful voice that both soothes and unnerves the listener, Deb Montgomery's music is cutting edge nurturing while delivering unforgiving honesty in its quest to understand more about what makes us all face or run terrified from life's relentless questions.
Montgomery has grown accustomed to dwelling in life's in-between spaces: she's a Canadian who moved to Seattle from New York City, and the Oregon Coast from Seattle almost five years ago. She’s rocker who plays acoustic guitar, and a religious vagabond. Ultimately, she's an artist who is only at home when she finds moments of enlightenment on her way from place to place, or one part of self to another, and her music springs from that: the journey and tension between faith and doubt, and the mystery of all that is falling and being held at the same time.