wayne@utflis.UUCP (Wayne Young) (08/24/85)
[munch munch, boxed lunch/ how do you like your meat?]
I just picked up a copy of TO magazine (mostly about entertainment
in and about Toronto), and it features an interview with Jane Siberry.
It's the July/August issue for those of you sufficiently interested.
The article features what I think is the first decent picture of Jane
I've ever seen. I'm going to quote some of the article, but I'll try
to keep it down for those of you out there without the `n' funtion
on your rn.
When Jane Siberry suddenly catapulted from the local minor
league of Toronto's music scene to unprecedented national acclaim
last year, it was no ordinary breakthrough.
The singer/song-writer's second album, _No_Borders_Here_,
garnered almost uniform critical congratulations from aross the
country, selling about 40,000 copies in Canada to date. Two singles
and videos, "Mimi on the Beach" and "I Muse Aloud", were both given
full rotation on MuchMusic and she won several nominations and
awards at the 1984 Juno and 1985 CASBY pop music awards.
Surprised as she is by her own success, Siberry is at an impor-
tant juncture in her career. This fall, she'll release a third
album - the follow-up to _Borders_. There's a lot riding on it.
If you want to get dramatic, it could mean the difference between
sales of 100,000 units or going back to bars.
Sitting on the floor of her manager's mid-town Toronto apartment
on a sunny weekend afternoon, Siberry is playing with Wolk, her
stout German Shepherd, wearing simple dark clothes and rolling her
own cigarettes. She is often described as shy, soft-spoken, quiet,
and delicate. True - but behind is a calm, deliberate self-assurance
that will guarantee Toronto's unlikely pop star more than 15 minutes
in the spotlight - if she wants it.
[----------------------------------------------------------------------------]
[ Skip several paragraphs that discuss how Jane, like some other artists, is ]
[ insisting on full independence - she went out and shot a video for "You ]
[ Don't Need" by herself last spring (the record company eventually backed ]
[ her up on this one), ]
[----------------------------------------------------------------------------]
"Do it yourself" could be Siberry's motto. Having studied piano
from the age of four, she took the French horn and learned music
theory in Toronto's Richview High School. At 17, she decided to
perform in public and taught herself to play quitar. She dropped
out of a music course at Guelph University - too boring, too stiff -
and instead earned a degree in microbiology. After a brief fling in
Southern Ontario clubs and coffee houses with a folk trio called
Java Jive, Siberry paid for her first album by waiting on tables.
The record's solo acoustic work gained critical appraise but went
nowhere commercially. But the resourceful artist took a stint as a
filing clerk to pay for _Borders_, done with a full band. She doesn't
just sing about waitresses and executives - she's been there.
But that's made her independent enough to write in images as
obscure as Merthyr Tydfil (a coal mining centre in South Wales)
and Beddgelert (a burial site named for a dog) in "You Don't Need".
Or about "the Great Leveller" in "Mimi", which she says is "any-
thing that forces you to the centre and to the mean of everything.
You get that when you have a job you don't like. It keeps reducing
you, your joie de vivre.
"Sometimes these references - even though people won't understand
what they are coming from - are the only way to say it precisely
to myself," she explains. As an outlet for this creativity, her
style is more open-ended than most. "A lot of times I leave songs
loose when I first write them. And a lot of songs develop that way,
like "Dancing Class" and "You Don't Need". I change the words a lot
during performance. They finally become more and more convoluted
but, actually, they are better centered than the first versions.
"I don't know how this will affect this album because all the songs
are pretty new. I don't know how they'll have that `inside development'
without playing them live," she frowns.
"But I think that it might be a better album, a better piece of
clear work. I've been able to do most of the parts and drums on my
own. I've done a lot of it on the Fairlight CMI. It's going to be
more of me than the the last album, although I don't know how it
will appear to other people."
While Siberry is clever enough to recognize that it could all
vanish tomorrow, one gets the feeling that if nobody was looking,
she'd probably still be making music. As ever, independent and
determined.
"The best thing for me is to be able to take control of everything,
musically," she says. "What I think is best for me is to have complete
freedom - to be the opposite of the Great Leveller.
"Whatever it is I do well, I learn to do it better."
[-----------------------------------------------------------------------------]
The magazine was the July/August issue of TO Magazine.
The article was "Border Crossing - Jane Siberry conquers the charts
on her own terms.
The author was Howard Druckman, and I'm
-Hermetically Sealed-
(but you can just call me Hermey)