Jane Siberry

Jane Siberry
Issa performing at Hugh's Room in Toronto, Ontario, 2007
Background information
Also known as	Issa
Born	October 12, 1955 (1955-10-12) Toronto, Ontario
Origin	Guelph, Ontario, Canada
Genres	Pop, folk, vocal jazz
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, composer, musician, record producer, poet
Instruments	Singing, guitar, keyboards, computer
Years active	1981–present
Labels	Sheeba, Duke Street, Open Air, Windham Hill, Street, East Side Digital, Reprise, Rhino
Associated acts	John Switzer, Brian Eno, k.d. lang, Hector Zazou, Peter Gabriel, Rebecca Jenkins, Holly Cole, Mary Margaret O'Hara, Victoria Williams
Website	Jane Siberry on Sheeba Records

Jane Siberry ( /ˈsɪbri/ sib-ree), (born Jane Stewart, October 12, 1955 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, known for such hits as "Mimi on the Beach", "I Muse Aloud", "One More Colour" and "Calling All Angels". She has also released material under the name Issa ( /ˈiːsɑː/ ee-sah).

Musical style and commercial approach

Siberry's music is most commonly compared to artists such as Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell and Laurie Anderson. Her music has drawn from a wide variety of styles, ranging from new wave rock on her earlier albums to a reflective pop style influenced by jazz, folk, gospel, classical and liturgical music in her later work. She has cited Van Morrison and Miles Davis as being strong creative influences.

Siberry has often criticized the competitive power of commercial radio and the recording industry. In 2005, Siberry pioneered a self-determined pricing policy through her website on which the purchaser is given the choices of: standard price (about $0.99 USD/track); pay now, self-priced; pay later, self-priced; or "a gift from Jane". In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Siberry confirmed that since she had instituted the self-determined pricing policy, the average income she receives per song from Sheeba customers is in fact slightly more than standard price.

Career history

Early work (1981-1987)

Siberry was studying music and microbiology at the University of Guelph when she released her debut album, Jane Siberry, in 1981 on Duke Street Records. The album was relatively successful for an independent release, but the 1984 follow-up, No Borders Here, was critically acclaimed and included the underground hit "Mimi on the Beach". Her third album, The Speckless Sky (1985), was a commercial and critical success and paved the way to her signing by a major label, Reprise Records.

Reprise Records period (1988-1995)

Siberry's first release on Reprise Records was The Walking (1988), which was released on Reprise Records internationally, but byDuke Street Records in Canada. Although the album, like its predecessor, was a critical success, it was a popular failure in terms of the broader market success hoped for by Reprise (being a more abstract work which was considered less suitable for radio airplay). In spite of this, Reprise maintained the contract with Siberry, even taking over the Canadian side of the distribution for her next album, 1989's Bound by the Beauty. In 1992, Reprise released a Siberry compilation album - Summer in the Yukon - for the UK market. It focussed primarily on her more pop-oriented side and featured a remix of the Bound by the Beauty track "The Life is the Red Wagon" with a new dance-friendly rhythm track.

In 1993 Siberry released her sixth album, When I Was a Boy, on which she'd worked with Michael Brook and Brian Eno in addition to her more frequent Canadian collaborators. The album featured Siberry's best-known song, "Calling All Angels" (a duet with k.d. lang which had first appeared as part of the soundtrack to Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World and as a track on Summer in the Yukon (it was later re-recorded for the Pay It Forward soundtrack). The album introduced the more spiritually-oriented themes that became a hallmark of her later work.

Siberry's next release was Maria (1995). In contrast to the intricate studio production of When I Was a Boy, Maria featured a more jazz-inspired direction with live acoustic instrumentation and approaches similar to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. It also featured the 20-minute conceptual work "Oh My My".

Sheeba Records - first phase (1996-2006)

After Maria, Siberry parted company with Reprise Records, later stating "they wanted me to work with a producer and that severed any sense of loyalty. I realized they truly didn't understand what I was doing... so I took my leave." She founded her own independent label, Sheeba Records, and has released all of her subsequent material on that label. Although her public profile became lower once she became an independent artist, she retained a devoted cult following. Siberry's first Sheeba release was Teenager (1996), an album of songs which she had originally written during her teenage years.

In 1996, Siberry performed four concerts at New York City's famous Bottom Line jazz club. All of the concerts were recorded and released on a set of live albums between 1997 and 1999, collectively known as the "New York City Trilogy". The first of these was 1997’s Child: Music for the Christmas Season, a double album which combined Christmas standards and carols (such as "O Holy Night" and "In the Bleak Midwinter") and original Siberry songs containing religious imagery (such as "An Angel Stepped Down..."). The second and third volumes were both released in 1999. Lips: Music for Saying It was based around themes of communication (and included a "Mimi"-sung riposte to 1984’s "Mimi on the Beach"). Tree: Music for Films and Forests documented a concert in which Siberry had sung songs linked by the concept of trees, as well as adding a couple of songs she'd contributed to film scores. The complete trilogy was reissued as a three album box set the same year.

Siberry’s greater creative freedom as an independent recording artist was demonstrated by her 1997 album, A Day in the Life, which was her most unconventional release to date. While it did feature song excerpts, it was predominantly a sound collage representation of a typical day's experience by Siberry. The album was filled with recordings of yoga classes, phone messages and street sounds; and featured conversations and exchanges with a wide variety of people - cab drivers, friends, fellow students and Siberry’s then-current musical collaborators Patty Larkin, Joe Jackson, k. d. lang and Darol Anger. Also in 1997, Siberry's former label Reprise Records released a second compilation album of her work - A Collection 1984–1989 - this time aimed at the Canadian and American markets and drawing from the whole range of Siberry's output prior to When I Was a Boy.

In order to finance Sheeba, Siberry began to experiment with what were then seen as unorthodox promotional ideas, such as the weekend-long "Siberry Salons" (a concert-cum-seminar featuring two performances plus a workshop and dinner, which were hosted at intimate and unusual venues such as art galleries and loft apartments). Siberry's first book of prose-poems, S W A N, was published by Sheeba in 1998, the same year that she toured as one of the acts on the female-oriented "Suffragette Sessions" tour, alongside Indigo Girls, Lisa Germano and members of Luscious Jackson and The Breeders. A second book, One Room Schoolhouse, followed in 1999.

Siberry's tenth studio album, Hush was released in 2000. This was a predominantly acoustic record consisting entirely of cover versions in which Siberry explored traditional folk and gospel songs such as "Jacobs Ladder", "Ol’ Man River" and "Streets of Laredo". The following year's City album compiled various non-album tracks, rarities and collaborations between Siberry and other musicians. As well as providing another home for "Calling All Angels", the album included work with Nigel Kennedy, Peter Gabriel, Hector Zazou and Joe Jackson and featured "All the Pretty Ponies" (a children’s song which Siberry had contributed to the Barney's Big Adventure soundtrack).

In 2002, Love is Everything: The Jane Siberry Anthology was released on Rhino Records: a double-CD album combining material from her Duke Street, Reprise and Sheeba eras and summarizing the first twenty-one years of her career. This was followed in 2003 by Shushan the Palace: Hymns of Earth - another Christmas-themed album of cover versions. This time, Siberry performed her own interpretations of liturgical Christmas hymns by various classical and Romantic composers including Mendelssohn, Bach, Holst and Handel.

Despite her apparent productivity, Siberry was by then finding her independent career and business efforts problematic. The live albums were in part an inexpensive tactic to enable her to gain resources to record her original work. She would later confess "I really thought it was going to be much, much easier. The whole label thing. It wasn't. Those records, Shushan and Hush, were to pay for studio time."

Issa period (2006-2009)

Early in 2006, Siberry closed her Sheeba office, then auctioned and sold nearly all of her possessions via eBay — including her Toronto home and her musical instruments. She retained one travelling guitar, but none of the other instruments featured on her albums and in her concerts. In 2006, she told The Globe and Mail that she had kept a very few precious possessions, including her Miles Davis CDs, in storage.

"I felt the need to make some strong changes in my life. It seemed important to change my name, so I did. I changed it to a name that I thought was simple, an empty cup. I had never heard the name Issa before, and it turns out to have some wonderful meanings, including a haiku poet in Japan, and the name that Jesus had in India. But two weeks ago I officially changed my name back to Jane Siberry. I felt with the name change, I had gotten in my own way, in terms of devoting myself to my career, making my work available to people. So, Jane Siberry is my name again until further notice, but I feel richer from having been Issa for three years."

Jane Siberry, explaining her time as "Issa" in 2009

On June 3, 2006, somewhere in northwestern Europe, Siberry changed her name to Issa: revealing this change of identity to the public a couple of weeks later on June 24, 2006. She told The Globe and Mail that she chose the name Issa as a feminine variant of Isaiah. She stated that her older music would remain available for sale under the name "Jane Siberry", but her new material would be released as Issa. At the time she also stated, regarding the change of identity, "I had to do it right. I had to be serious about it and I had to convey that. When I put Jane away, I went silent for 24 hours. Not a word to anyone. And then Issa from that point on."

Later she would describe the process of choosing a new identity in terms of changing her writing approach - "Moving into Issa, I didn’t know if I’d be in the music business any more. I just started writing. I wanted to let go of any expectations and just try to get closer to what I heard in my head... I just tried to write as precisely as I could to what I heard in my head. I slowed everything down and took one note at a time, and just waited until I heard the next note." The process was evidently successful, resulting in thirty-three songs written in thirty-three days.

On July 4, 2006, Issa gave a lecture at University of British Columbia in Vancouver on the topic of "Cracking the Egg: A Look from the Inside". She began with a poetic meditation on science and life, and then opened the floor up to questions from the audience. She talked about her recent adventures in decommodifying her life, her change in name, and her new conception of herself as an artist. Over 2006 and 2007, she documented the process of recording some thirty new songs in her journal, posted on her MySpace page and on her new website (www.issalight.com). In autumn 2008 she finalized a trilogy of albums to be called the "Three Queens" sequence. The first of these - Dragon Dreams - was the debut Issa release, on December 12, 2008. As with the previous Jane Siberry material, it was released on Sheeba: Issa had retained the label despite slimming down its operations.

In 2009, Issa released the second album in the "Three Queens" trilogy, With What Shall I Keep Warm? However, it was plain that her identity was no longer fixed, as both of the names she'd used as a musician - "Issa" and "Jane Siberry" - were included on the cover. In December 2009, she notified her fans that she had recently changed her name from Issa back to Jane Siberry, feeling that the process of working under a different name had run its course.

Recent work (2010-present)

Inspired by the dichotomy between frequent e-mails from devoted international fans asking her to play a concert in their city and her difficulty in finding a suitable concert promoter, Siberry launched a "microtour" through her fan mailing list in 2010, in which she offered to play small venues — ranging from intimate cafés to fans' own homes — in any location in Europe where one or more fans could organize a space, an audience of about 20 to 30 people and a night of accommodation.

In May 2010, Siberry made her entire back catalogue of music available as free downloads in MP3 and AIFF formats. She had previously employed a flexible pricing policy, stating "I started feeling weird about holding back anything people wanted because of the money. It just felt wrong to my stomach, so I made a flexible interface so people could take it with whatever reasoning they felt was right, and I didn’t have to worry about it any more."

In March 2011, Siberry advised her fans through her mailing list that the third album of the "Three Queens" trilogy was almost ready (having been "nearly completed" several times before), and that she intended to release a fourth disc as part of the collection. The album, Meshach Dreams Back was released later in 2011 and was the first album to be credited to "Jane Siberry" for eight years.

Awards

On August 30, 2005, Jane Siberry was awarded the 2005 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in music by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Personal life

Born "Jane Stewart", Jane Siberry took her stage surname from the family name of an aunt and uncle. She would later explain her choice by saying "this woman and her husband were the first couple I met where I could feel the love between them and I held that in front of me as a reference point."

Jane Siberry is a vegetarian.

Discography

Albums

Studio Albums

• Jane Siberry (1981)
• No Borders Here (1984)
• The Speckless Sky (1985)
• The Walking (1987)
• Bound by the Beauty (1989)
• When I Was a Boy (1993)
• Maria (1995)
• Teenager (1996)
• A Day in the Life (1997)
• Hush (2000)
• Shushan the Palace: Hymns of Earth (2003)
• Dragon Dreams (as Issa) (2008)
• With What Shall I Keep Warm? (as Issa/Jane Siberry) (2009)
• Meshach Dreams Back (2011)

Live albums

• Count Your Blessings (1994, live, performances by Jane Siberry, Holly Cole, Rebecca Jenkins, Mary Margaret O'Hara and Victoria Williams)
• Child: Music for the Christmas Season (1997, live)
• Lips: Music for Saying It (1999, live)
• Tree: Music for Films and Forests (1999, live)

Compilations

• A Collection 1984-1989 (1995) - North American "best-of"
• Summer in the Yukon (1995) - UK-only "best of"
• New York City Trilogy (1999) - 4-CD box set of live albums '"Tree'", '"Child'" and '"Lips"'
• City (2001) - Collaborations, non-album tracks and rarities
• Love is Everything: The Jane Siberry Anthology (2002) - 2-CD "best of", 1981 - 2002

Chart singles

Siberry has placed three singles in the Canadian RPM Hot 100:

• "Mimi On The Beach" (1984) - #68
• "One More Colour" (1985) - #27
• "Sail Across The Water" (1993) - #66

Two other tracks made RPM's Adult Contemporary charts:

• "Map Of The World (Part II)" (1986) - #17
• "Calling All Angels" (1992) - #9

Compilation albums

Siberry has also contributed tracks to a number of movie soundtracks and compilation albums:

• Until the End of the World, 1991 ("Calling All Angels")
• Kick at the Darkness, 1991 ("A Long Time Love Song", duet with Martin Tielli)
• Toys, 1992 ("Happy Workers (reprise)")
• The Crow, 1994 ("It Can't Rain All the Time")
• Faraway, So Close, 1994 ("Slow Tango")
• Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro, 1997 ("When I Think of Laura Nyro")
• Women Like Us: Lesbian Favorites, 1997 ("Temple")
• Pay It Forward, 1998 ("Calling All Angels")
• Care Bears: Journey to Joke-a-lot, 2004 ("With All Your Heart")
• Whatever: The 90s Pop and Culture Box, 2005 ("Calling All Angels")

Covers

Her song "One More Colour" was covered by Sarah Polley on the soundtrack to The Sweet Hereafter, and by the Rheostatics on their Introducing Happiness album. k.d. lang covered "The Valley" and "Love Is Everything" on her album Hymns of the 49th Parallel.

Rock Plaza Central covered "You Don't Need"; and "Calling All Angels" was covered by The Wailin' Jennys in 2009.

Guest Perforances

She sings on Bob Wiseman's 1991 Presented By Lake Michigan Soda

External links

• Jane Siberry on Sheeba Records
• Jane Siberry at the Internet Movie Database