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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - It is said for a daughter, the death of a mother is the first sorrow wept without her.

Songwriter Laurie Sarkadi lost her mom last spring, and she is healing with music.

Songwriter Laurie Sarkadi and drummer Kevin Dunbar of the band Wake Up Hazel play on stage. The pair performs at the Top Knight Saturday, March 14 at 9:30 p.m. with the rest of the band. Wake Up Hazel backed blues-rocker Colin James at last year's Festival of Trees. - photo courtesy of Francois Rossouw

"Grief takes its own time," she said.

Janet Taylor succumbed to an eight-year struggle with progressive supranuclear palsy last April. The rare and degenerative neuromuscular disease acts on the brain. Sarkadi wrote a song for her mother about the heart before she died.

"I'd spent an entire morning reading a website for my mom's disease, and on a chatline from people who had it and from their family members, and I was so sad afterwards," Sarkadi recalled. "I closed down the computer and wandered around my house wondering what to do with myself. I contemplated a walk, then saw my guitar. I picked it up and this song kind of flew out of me and within an hour it was done."

What poured forth was not a sombre dirge but an up-tempo country-blues ditty, titled That Door, about the loving relationship between Sarkadi's mom and her husband of 30 years, Jack Taylor.

"I wanted her to hear it and not feel sad," Sarkadi said. "She played it over and over and over. Mission accomplished." Sarkadi's six-piece band, Wake Up Hazel, will open its first show at the Top Knight tomorrow with her latest maternally-inspired song, a blues ballad about loneliness she wrote last fall called Bleeding Love.

"I have to give Laurie lot of credit for her strength," said Wake Up Hazel bassist Al Udell. "When her mom passed away, she came up to us and said that she wanted to do gigs and keep the band going."

Udell and drummer Kevin Dunbar, who also play with Funk 69, add their funk and jump influences to Sarkadi's rock-and-roots style.

Vocalist Sophie Leger, harmonica player Clayton Pielak and lead guitarist Jeff Norris make up the rest of the combo. "We don't just stick to one kind of music," Pielak said. "We like to roll it around a bit."

The band's original set list features Sarkadi's familiar, danceable alt-country and folk-rock love tunes and fast-paced lyrical expressions of the various social justice issues she holds close. The musicians perform uncommon covers of the White Stripes, David Bowie, Sheryl Crow and others.

Saturday's concert will close in the wee hours with Take Me Home, Sarkadi's final honorific to her mom.

"I wrote it to comfort her in her passage into the next realm, as I worried that she would be scared," Sarkadi said. "I managed to sing it to her on the phone, me in Yellowknife and she in an Ontario nursing home, the morning of the day she died. The song was the last words I ever spoke to her. As the anniversary of her death is coming up, April 5, I see now that this show is turning into a tribute to her. I hope she likes it."

Wake Up Hazel takes the stage at the Top Knight at 9:30 p.m. tomorrow night.