Eliot Wilder: August, 2001

Sweet Jane

All the foofaraw surrounding the likes of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera can make you yearn for someone a little less frivolous and a little more authentic. Someone with a little spiritual, psychological and emotional oomph. Someone like Jane Siberry.

A singer and songwriter of uncommonly beautiful melodies that are at once becalming and disconcerting, Jane has been creating music since the early 1980s when she was busking on Toronto's coffeehouse circuit. Along the way she has explored everything from trip-hop to jazz to performance art to (relatively) straightforward pop, creating a body of work that is sophisticated, passionate and poignant.

Although her albums from the mid-'80s such as No Borders Here and The Speckless Sky are tied to the dated sonics of that era, Jane survived the Machine Age and went on to produce works that still transcend easy labeling. To be sure, with the release of "The Walking" in 1987 and especially "Bound by the Beauty" in '89, she found her voice (or voices - Jane layers her vocals in a rich latticework of wired notes). These are challenging, original records that bring to mind echoes of Laurie Anderson, Kate Bush and especially Laura Nyro, and have certainly left an imprint on artists like Sarah McLachlan, Dido and Jonatha Brooke.

In the last few years Jane has left the security (and frustrations) of a major record label behind for the freedom (and frustrations) of pursuing her own path. Her company, Sheeba, not only manages her business and releases her albums (which include a collection of songs she wrote as a teenager aptly titled Teenager, as well as her ambitious multipart "New York Trilogy" and "A Day in the Life," a sound collage that consists of voice-mail messages, cab conversations and arguments with hairdressers), but distributes, as she says, "all things Siberry." The plucky entrepreneur has based her operations around a Web site (www.janesiberry.com), where fans can not only buy her wares but also connect directly with Jane herself.

"I'm still learning about it," Jane says, referring to her site. "I find that a Web site is like a training school in energy use. You become aware of dead ends here and there, when vitality is sucked away and where vitality exaggerates the energy of the Web site and what things have to keep shifting, what things can come back. When I put things up there's so much response that it's really important to take that energy and recycle it onto the Web site. Interactivity is quite an important part of the greatness that the Internet can offer."

Talking with Jane is much like listening to her albums - her thought patterns, like her music, are taken to eccentric flights and elliptical fancies. Hence, the typically atypical left turns in her recorded output, a prime example of which is her most recent release, "Hush." An intimate and moving collection of traditional ballads that are meditative without being soporific, "Hush" is delivered in an impressionistic style with minimalist austerity. But with the hundreds of songs that she might choose from for an album like this, just how did Jane decide which would make the final cut?

"I played the songs for a little girl with Down's syndrome in Scotland," Siberry says, "and the ones that had a magic quality in them would make her light up. She has a real proclivity for music. Her reaction was very pure - a purer form of everyone else's reaction. For some reason, she was given to me as a guiding light."

So for Siberry, "Hush" - which includes trad tracks like "The Water Is Wide," "Jacob's Ladder," "O Shenandoah" and "Ol' Man River" - is not just a mere collection of standards. "This record," Jane has said, "is a signpost, a distillation, songs that have stood the test of time, a handful of gems reflecting human nature: love, children, home, and our connection with 'the great unknown' at the end of your life." And as with all her work, many levels of thought and feeling resonate - sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict - beneath the surface, making the listening experience just that: an experience.

"I don't think of it as an album of covers at all," she says. "I feel honored to do this record - there's a reason why these songs have lasted. They give some comfort as we enter the new millennium."

That's an intriguing statement, given that the concepts of comfort and millennium have rarely been seen lurking in the same vicinity on any of her previous albums. If anything, most of her songs have had a sense of pre-millennial tension about them - especially so on the atmospheric "When I Was a Boy." That landmark 1993 album, produced in part with ambient studio whiz Brian Eno, focused on sexual ambiguity, angels and Armageddon. Its centerpiece, the stunning "Calling All Angels," appeared in the ominously titled Wim Wenders' film "Until the End of the World." Isn't it ironic, then, that after so much fretting over a century ending, a new one begins and Siberry should create a spiritual album this celebrative and reassuring?

"Yeah, that's odd," she says with a laugh, and after a brief, knowing pause she adds, "I trust all these things."

What's next for Jane Siberry, businesswoman and artist?
"I'm sure there's a way that this little Web site can become a golden thing," Jane the businesswoman says. "Right now it's a little difficult, but I'm sure it can provide me with the freedom I need. I have stumbled, and I'm sure I've upset the apple cart. But I keep trying to let people know that I'm listening and changing. I don't want to go backward. I have had my doubts about what I'm doing, but then I think of the alternatives - dealing with all the BS of big record companies."

As for Jane the artist, she says she's eager to get started on her first proper collection of new Siberry songs since 1995's jazz-tinged Maria, her last recording for a major label. The new album is "in my heart," she says, "but the gods have been directing. I hear it as an almost hypnotic piece like 'When I Was a Boy.' The shape of that one seems right. That's where I want to go back and pick up again."

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