Our Story

Margaret Sweatman and I first met in the early 90's when the Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg asked me to write some music for her first play which was adapted from her novel Fox. They introduced her to me as a novelist, playwright and jazz poet.

Very compelling.

At the party, after the play closed, everyone performed something. Actors, director, playwright, composer. There was much laughter that night. Margaret sang a Tom Waits song, and I played guitar for her. That was the beginning of Margaret's singing career.

Our first spoken word performance was in 1993 with players from the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra during their annual New Music Festival, which I was curating at the time. The CBC were very interested in the collaboration, so they invited us into the studio to do some recording, and that led to our first CD which was released in 1995.

By then, we were living together in the country just outside of Winnipeg right beside the Red River. And two years later we lost our beautiful house to the great flood of 1997. So we got married in the ruins. The ruins of the St. Norbert monastery - damp that year, but secure enough for an outdoor wedding. We conjured our beginnings, so our friends sang Tom Waits: Running through the graveyard, we laughed my friend and I. We swore we'd be together until the day we die; until the day we die.

We've written a musical (called Flux, premiered in concert at the Guelph Spring Festival in 2005); we've performed with jazz bands, rock bands, string quartets and symphony orchestras; and we're working our way to an opera, which is scheduled for a performance at the Grand River Festival in 2012.

I followed Margaret in the winter of 2010 while she toured her new brilliant novel, The Players. And she patiently listened as I described the growing pains of my fourth string quartet that same year.

Our latest project is Phenomenological Love Songs, a collection of the various songs we've written for various reasons from 1994 to 2008.

And we're still laughing. Still making music out of words, and words out of music.

Glenn Buhr
June 2010