Jann Biography
FREE – JANN ARDEN IN HER OWN WORDS
It’s not easy writing about yourself…or myself as it were. But here I go, about to ramble on quite gladly about all things me.
I feel like I should give a brief synopsis of how I even got to this point in my life. We lived, and still live, in a very small community south of Calgary. I didn’t roll far from the tree. I don’t plan on rolling.
My mother, Joan Richards, was taking guitar lessons when I was 12 years old. She needed something to do while I was engaged in hockey practice at the Rockyview Community Association. If you’ve ever tried to learn to play guitar, you find out very quickly that it’s hell on your fingers. They become bloody knobs. Mom gave up within a few months, after having perfected “On Top of Old Smokey”, and “Irene, Goodnight Irene”.
I used to sit atop the stairs in our living room and watch her strum away, struggling to make the chords sound like something, singing quietly, not knowing anyone was listening. I was intrigued to say the least.
Whenever I had a spare moment I’d grab that giant Yamaha guitar, open her large orange songbook, and try to figure out how to make something happen. After learning a few chords, I was able to play the entire John Denver collection. I moved on to Janis Ian, The Carpenters, Frank Zappa, James Taylor, Bette Midler, Olivia Newton John, ABBA, KISS, Blondie, Carly Simon, Seals and Crofts, and a hundred other artists that I wanted to dissect and emulate. I was overjoyed. I had found something that I loved to do. That I could do on my own, that I could do without having to be funny. Writing unlocked my imagination and the very key to my soul.
I was obsessed with all things guitar. John Denver, not so much, but it was a great start to understanding that people wrote songs about simple sentiment. I started writing my own songs that same year …they were all terribly sad and lonesome and introspective and usually long and winding ballads. The first song I ever remember writing was about my mom and dad dying. The song was called “Paradise”. I still laugh about that one…
It would take me an entire book to cover what’s happened between then and now, that perhaps will be at another time.
“FREE” is my tenth studio record. That in-and-of-itself is unbelievable to me. I didn’t sign with Universal until I was nearly 30 years old, so all of this came to me rather late in life. In light of labels signing 15 year old acts these days, I don’t think my story will be repeated very often, if ever. I am 47 now and feel like I don’t know anything about music. I feel like I am just getting started.
With “FREE”, I’ve more or less gone back to my roots. All 11 of the songs are very simple in their message. They are all about simple human sentiment. Not political in nature, not preachy, not overly poetic, just very simple basic emotions. I did a fair amount of co-writing on this project to try and get my mind pushing into different corners of my own understanding. That was a wonderful, educational experience. I didn’t want to keep making the same record over and over again, and I felt like I had begun to do that over the past 5 or 6 years. I just found myself in a rut for a thousand reasons, so I was determined to make some big changes.
It’s hard to change. It’s hard to move forward for the most part…. But I knew I had to. It’s not easy breaking off relationships that you’ve nurtured for a long time, but art suffers if you don’t constantly try to reinvent yourself, which is what I feel like I did with this record.
I worked with an old friend of mine, Bruce Leitl, who is more known for his work on composing music scores for film and commercial use, than he is for pop music production.
Bruce is a brilliant musician and a wonderful composer. He has a wonderful sense of structure. I needed structure. I wanted to be very clear as to what my intentions were. He kept me on track. I wanted to experiment with different textures and grooves and sounds and Bruce was confident in what we needed to do. He presented ideas to me that were exciting and innovative. I felt like it was a new and fresh version of me and my work. Because of the amount of time that I’d spent in Nashville the previous year and a half, I felt it only natural to use some of the extraordinary musicians.
Mandolins and acoustic guitars and pedal steel and dobro and banjo…all sounds that I loved, but had never thought to use these past 25 years. Between those organic sounds and Bruce’s progressive programming, I knew I’d done something very different for me, but yet, extremely familiar. We knew with the blend of organic and electronic sounds we’d threaded together that we’d need someone amazingly gifted to mix the entire project. I didn’t have to think twice. It would be Ed Cherney. I won’t list off his thousands of triumphs: you can do that on the world wide web. He was as much a part of the music as the music itself. I trusted him completely to carve his way through the hundreds of tracks we’d recorded. I love what he’s done and I’m proud of what we have made.
I’ve found a great amount of comfort in my life over the past 3 years…amazing peace and happiness. For whatever reason, I feel like that all shows up here on “FREE”. I do feel free. I feel like I’ve come over the hill and I can see much clearer than I did before.
FREE: SONG-BY SONG
Free - This song personifies what I think it is that I do best, and that is writing about the intricate yet mundane things that we go through while leaving a relationship. This was one of the first songs that I actually co-wrote in Nashville a few years ago. I was very influenced by everything that goes on in that town. You can find people everywhere, from every walk of life, writing songs in coffee shops and bus stops and sleazy bars. Nashville buzzes with songs and songwriters. It’s inspiring to hear what people are thinking and jotting down. Songs seem to hang off every building and tree and empty bottle. My friend was going through a rather tumultuous break up while remodeling her house and so we followed down that footpath, making comparisons between a house being torn down and a life being built back up. The high-strung "Nashville" guitar leads the way as the verses fold into a haunting pool of strings and mandolins and droning background vocals. The message is so positive but you have to dig a little to flush it out.
Daughter Down - It seems I have become rather well known for writing about my "Good Mother" but this song is all about my dad. He is a complicated person and I was trying to figure out a way of describing his life without being too precious, or too revealing. I was thinking about what he would do if he had one more day on the planet. What would go through his mind, what he would change, if anything? The string arrangement is epic, but it suits this piece very well. I love singing this song. It pulls at me every single time I hear it. I am reminded of how hard it can be, to simply be a human being.
The Devil Won - This is the very first song I ever wrote in Nashville. I, for some reason, thought that I was writing a country song, completely based on someone else's life, but within the first line of the second verse, I knew it was once again wrapped around my past. Even when I try not to write about myself, I inevitably do. I had been listening to a lot of Bluegrass and was completely inspired by the long, wailing notes that wind themselves around simple melodies. I tried to bring a bit of those nuances into this song. It is challenging to sing. I wanted to keep it simple and organic. The drums remind me of a pounding heart. The acoustic guitars, dobro, mandolin, and pedal steel seem to weep and whine. It’s still a pop song, but it is rooted in something very old indeed.
Yeah You - This is my ode to traveling - to being on the road constantly. I am always torn by staying and by leaving. It's very hard on one's personal relationships. I love the urgency of this track and how it clips along like a train. It feels like I am moving when I listen to it. Layered electric guitars give it a ‘60s feel, along with some unusual background vocals. Although the content is somewhat depressing, it feels very UP. The idea that love waits for you when you step off the bus or the plane or the boat is enticing. The desire to come home always conflicted by the desire to leave again. That is the life of a traveling musician.
Away - There may be a theme here. This song is about being away from the people you love. It's about being away from home. It's about feeling like you're missing out on such simple things by constantly moving from city to city, hotel to hotel. Distance eats away at your comfort and your confidence. You can feel like you're in a trance when you're on a plane for 10 hours and this track echoes that feeling. Deliberate steady grooves, layers of acoustic and electric guitars, haunting background vocals sung by the women from SHeDAISY. The techno beats living in behind all the organic instruments make a very compelling combination. It's my version of reggae.
Until This – In my opinion, this song is the most unusual on the record. It's a hybrid of traditional instrumentation and progressive drum programming. It somehow comes together in this rock opera sort of way, which suits the lyric of the song perfectly. Finding happiness can be chaos. Finding someone who brings such joy to your life can be completely overwhelming. It's a difficult song to sing as it's at the very top and bottom of my range. The violin part seems to be the vein that holds the whole thing together. The song never lets up; it rushes you right to the end of bliss and then just lets you rest.
You Are Everything - I had recorded a version of this song 5 or 6 years ago as an exclusive digital track. I have received so many requests for this song over the years, people trying endlessly to find it. I would tell them that I couldn't find it either. I've always loved the song but felt that the original arrangement wasn't quite right. Perhaps I just outgrew it? I felt like the song never got the chance to live as it were - to present itself in its true form. So we went back and reinvented it. Cellos pull you in and out of the verses, drifting over the vocal and back again. This song is about love in its simplest form. When someone is your oxygen. When someone is your medicine. When you feel like you are perpetually 9 years old.
Everybody's Broken - This song has 3 very different stories within it, all of which speak of the difficulty of simply "being": the hardship, the pain, the grief, and the longing that comes with everyday life. How, in some way, we are ALL flawed. We are all broken. We intentionally created tension, the feeling that you're never going to get to where you're going. It's hard to remember at times, that we all have a story, that we all have a past and a present and an uncertain future. We all belong to each other. We are all in this mess together.
A Million Miles Away - This song has a very universal theme and that theme is longing. The progressive drum loops play backdrop to organic instrumentation, played by some of Nashville's finest studio musicians. The lyrics are stark in contrast to the complex string arrangements and pedal steel swells. If I were ever to record a dance track, this would be about as close as I get. I think it's a great summer song. You can commit this to memory after the first listen. It's not wordy or preachy or precious. It's kind of voyeuristic really, picturing someone in their room, doing intimate things and wishing you were with them.
All The Days - I don't write on piano very often, but when I do, I am most always surprised. The message here is about regret, and also about the small triumphs that make up each of our lives. I wondered what I would think about when I was old; how I would remember my life, if at all. How would it feel to just let go of everything? Although it sounds morose, I also wondered what it would be like to say something from beyond the veil; what it would be like to whisper in someone's ear and have them hear you from somewhere out there in the stars. This is about living and dying and everything that floats in between.
Lost - This was a late entry on this record, but one which I am very glad I was able to make. I wrote this song with Michael Buble a few years ago for his most recent record. I am proud to say it was a great success for him all over the world. I was curious after having heard Michael sing it many times this past year, to see what I would do with it. How I would treat it. How it would feel coming out of my heart. He did such a wonderful job on the song, so it was intimidating to think that I would ruin that sentiment in any way. I knew I had to make it my own, and I think I did. It's a very simple approach led by grand piano and a very sparse acoustic guitar.
It’s not easy writing about yourself…or myself as it were. But here I go, about to ramble on quite gladly about all things me.
I feel like I should give a brief synopsis of how I even got to this point in my life. We lived, and still live, in a very small community south of Calgary. I didn’t roll far from the tree. I don’t plan on rolling.
My mother, Joan Richards, was taking guitar lessons when I was 12 years old. She needed something to do while I was engaged in hockey practice at the Rockyview Community Association. If you’ve ever tried to learn to play guitar, you find out very quickly that it’s hell on your fingers. They become bloody knobs. Mom gave up within a few months, after having perfected “On Top of Old Smokey”, and “Irene, Goodnight Irene”.
I used to sit atop the stairs in our living room and watch her strum away, struggling to make the chords sound like something, singing quietly, not knowing anyone was listening. I was intrigued to say the least.
Whenever I had a spare moment I’d grab that giant Yamaha guitar, open her large orange songbook, and try to figure out how to make something happen. After learning a few chords, I was able to play the entire John Denver collection. I moved on to Janis Ian, The Carpenters, Frank Zappa, James Taylor, Bette Midler, Olivia Newton John, ABBA, KISS, Blondie, Carly Simon, Seals and Crofts, and a hundred other artists that I wanted to dissect and emulate. I was overjoyed. I had found something that I loved to do. That I could do on my own, that I could do without having to be funny. Writing unlocked my imagination and the very key to my soul.
I was obsessed with all things guitar. John Denver, not so much, but it was a great start to understanding that people wrote songs about simple sentiment. I started writing my own songs that same year …they were all terribly sad and lonesome and introspective and usually long and winding ballads. The first song I ever remember writing was about my mom and dad dying. The song was called “Paradise”. I still laugh about that one…
It would take me an entire book to cover what’s happened between then and now, that perhaps will be at another time.
“FREE” is my tenth studio record. That in-and-of-itself is unbelievable to me. I didn’t sign with Universal until I was nearly 30 years old, so all of this came to me rather late in life. In light of labels signing 15 year old acts these days, I don’t think my story will be repeated very often, if ever. I am 47 now and feel like I don’t know anything about music. I feel like I am just getting started.
With “FREE”, I’ve more or less gone back to my roots. All 11 of the songs are very simple in their message. They are all about simple human sentiment. Not political in nature, not preachy, not overly poetic, just very simple basic emotions. I did a fair amount of co-writing on this project to try and get my mind pushing into different corners of my own understanding. That was a wonderful, educational experience. I didn’t want to keep making the same record over and over again, and I felt like I had begun to do that over the past 5 or 6 years. I just found myself in a rut for a thousand reasons, so I was determined to make some big changes.
It’s hard to change. It’s hard to move forward for the most part…. But I knew I had to. It’s not easy breaking off relationships that you’ve nurtured for a long time, but art suffers if you don’t constantly try to reinvent yourself, which is what I feel like I did with this record.
I worked with an old friend of mine, Bruce Leitl, who is more known for his work on composing music scores for film and commercial use, than he is for pop music production.
Bruce is a brilliant musician and a wonderful composer. He has a wonderful sense of structure. I needed structure. I wanted to be very clear as to what my intentions were. He kept me on track. I wanted to experiment with different textures and grooves and sounds and Bruce was confident in what we needed to do. He presented ideas to me that were exciting and innovative. I felt like it was a new and fresh version of me and my work. Because of the amount of time that I’d spent in Nashville the previous year and a half, I felt it only natural to use some of the extraordinary musicians.
Mandolins and acoustic guitars and pedal steel and dobro and banjo…all sounds that I loved, but had never thought to use these past 25 years. Between those organic sounds and Bruce’s progressive programming, I knew I’d done something very different for me, but yet, extremely familiar. We knew with the blend of organic and electronic sounds we’d threaded together that we’d need someone amazingly gifted to mix the entire project. I didn’t have to think twice. It would be Ed Cherney. I won’t list off his thousands of triumphs: you can do that on the world wide web. He was as much a part of the music as the music itself. I trusted him completely to carve his way through the hundreds of tracks we’d recorded. I love what he’s done and I’m proud of what we have made.
I’ve found a great amount of comfort in my life over the past 3 years…amazing peace and happiness. For whatever reason, I feel like that all shows up here on “FREE”. I do feel free. I feel like I’ve come over the hill and I can see much clearer than I did before.
FREE: SONG-BY SONG
Free - This song personifies what I think it is that I do best, and that is writing about the intricate yet mundane things that we go through while leaving a relationship. This was one of the first songs that I actually co-wrote in Nashville a few years ago. I was very influenced by everything that goes on in that town. You can find people everywhere, from every walk of life, writing songs in coffee shops and bus stops and sleazy bars. Nashville buzzes with songs and songwriters. It’s inspiring to hear what people are thinking and jotting down. Songs seem to hang off every building and tree and empty bottle. My friend was going through a rather tumultuous break up while remodeling her house and so we followed down that footpath, making comparisons between a house being torn down and a life being built back up. The high-strung "Nashville" guitar leads the way as the verses fold into a haunting pool of strings and mandolins and droning background vocals. The message is so positive but you have to dig a little to flush it out.
Daughter Down - It seems I have become rather well known for writing about my "Good Mother" but this song is all about my dad. He is a complicated person and I was trying to figure out a way of describing his life without being too precious, or too revealing. I was thinking about what he would do if he had one more day on the planet. What would go through his mind, what he would change, if anything? The string arrangement is epic, but it suits this piece very well. I love singing this song. It pulls at me every single time I hear it. I am reminded of how hard it can be, to simply be a human being.
The Devil Won - This is the very first song I ever wrote in Nashville. I, for some reason, thought that I was writing a country song, completely based on someone else's life, but within the first line of the second verse, I knew it was once again wrapped around my past. Even when I try not to write about myself, I inevitably do. I had been listening to a lot of Bluegrass and was completely inspired by the long, wailing notes that wind themselves around simple melodies. I tried to bring a bit of those nuances into this song. It is challenging to sing. I wanted to keep it simple and organic. The drums remind me of a pounding heart. The acoustic guitars, dobro, mandolin, and pedal steel seem to weep and whine. It’s still a pop song, but it is rooted in something very old indeed.
Yeah You - This is my ode to traveling - to being on the road constantly. I am always torn by staying and by leaving. It's very hard on one's personal relationships. I love the urgency of this track and how it clips along like a train. It feels like I am moving when I listen to it. Layered electric guitars give it a ‘60s feel, along with some unusual background vocals. Although the content is somewhat depressing, it feels very UP. The idea that love waits for you when you step off the bus or the plane or the boat is enticing. The desire to come home always conflicted by the desire to leave again. That is the life of a traveling musician.
Away - There may be a theme here. This song is about being away from the people you love. It's about being away from home. It's about feeling like you're missing out on such simple things by constantly moving from city to city, hotel to hotel. Distance eats away at your comfort and your confidence. You can feel like you're in a trance when you're on a plane for 10 hours and this track echoes that feeling. Deliberate steady grooves, layers of acoustic and electric guitars, haunting background vocals sung by the women from SHeDAISY. The techno beats living in behind all the organic instruments make a very compelling combination. It's my version of reggae.
Until This – In my opinion, this song is the most unusual on the record. It's a hybrid of traditional instrumentation and progressive drum programming. It somehow comes together in this rock opera sort of way, which suits the lyric of the song perfectly. Finding happiness can be chaos. Finding someone who brings such joy to your life can be completely overwhelming. It's a difficult song to sing as it's at the very top and bottom of my range. The violin part seems to be the vein that holds the whole thing together. The song never lets up; it rushes you right to the end of bliss and then just lets you rest.
You Are Everything - I had recorded a version of this song 5 or 6 years ago as an exclusive digital track. I have received so many requests for this song over the years, people trying endlessly to find it. I would tell them that I couldn't find it either. I've always loved the song but felt that the original arrangement wasn't quite right. Perhaps I just outgrew it? I felt like the song never got the chance to live as it were - to present itself in its true form. So we went back and reinvented it. Cellos pull you in and out of the verses, drifting over the vocal and back again. This song is about love in its simplest form. When someone is your oxygen. When someone is your medicine. When you feel like you are perpetually 9 years old.
Everybody's Broken - This song has 3 very different stories within it, all of which speak of the difficulty of simply "being": the hardship, the pain, the grief, and the longing that comes with everyday life. How, in some way, we are ALL flawed. We are all broken. We intentionally created tension, the feeling that you're never going to get to where you're going. It's hard to remember at times, that we all have a story, that we all have a past and a present and an uncertain future. We all belong to each other. We are all in this mess together.
A Million Miles Away - This song has a very universal theme and that theme is longing. The progressive drum loops play backdrop to organic instrumentation, played by some of Nashville's finest studio musicians. The lyrics are stark in contrast to the complex string arrangements and pedal steel swells. If I were ever to record a dance track, this would be about as close as I get. I think it's a great summer song. You can commit this to memory after the first listen. It's not wordy or preachy or precious. It's kind of voyeuristic really, picturing someone in their room, doing intimate things and wishing you were with them.
All The Days - I don't write on piano very often, but when I do, I am most always surprised. The message here is about regret, and also about the small triumphs that make up each of our lives. I wondered what I would think about when I was old; how I would remember my life, if at all. How would it feel to just let go of everything? Although it sounds morose, I also wondered what it would be like to say something from beyond the veil; what it would be like to whisper in someone's ear and have them hear you from somewhere out there in the stars. This is about living and dying and everything that floats in between.
Lost - This was a late entry on this record, but one which I am very glad I was able to make. I wrote this song with Michael Buble a few years ago for his most recent record. I am proud to say it was a great success for him all over the world. I was curious after having heard Michael sing it many times this past year, to see what I would do with it. How I would treat it. How it would feel coming out of my heart. He did such a wonderful job on the song, so it was intimidating to think that I would ruin that sentiment in any way. I knew I had to make it my own, and I think I did. It's a very simple approach led by grand piano and a very sparse acoustic guitar.
