Life and Times of Laura Barrett in the Globe

The Globe and Mail's Robert Everett-Green did a lovely article yesterday on the Life and Times of Canada's Sexiest Musician Laura Barrett. Give it a read and find things you never knew before.

" I grew up surrounded by singers and dancers," one of whom was her mother, Barrett says. "My father ran a dinner theatre, His Majesty's Feast, on Lake Shore Boulevard. It doesn't exist any more, but it was around for 18 years. They would pipe in medieval music as you were coming in and being seated, but all the songs were pilfered from stage musicals of the time."

Steeped in the family business of putting over a song, she studied piano and clarinet, and throughout high school wrote her own songs, including one (she won't say which) that eventually found a place on Victory Garden. She still has masses of audio tape from the song-storming sessions of her teenage years.

"My songs generally were very melodramatic, like forties Broadway," she said of those early efforts. "I would just sit there and improvise and write lyrics. I would never perform them in front of anybody but my mother. She has always encouraged me to express myself. All my musical tastes, from zero to age 17, were basically hers."