Jane Siberry: C/D, S/D

I wasn't really aware of the Issa records' existence - can someone please summarise??

apparently she has gone back to being jane siberry.

Thanks for this Ówen - I've known about the Issa records for quite some time but have tiptoed around them, as I was too afraid to be really let down by them. Now I'll be sure to give them a proper listen.

I second Ned Raggett: Search for Child, her Christmas album. It captures the essence of what is best about Christmas better than any other album. And what is best about Christmas? A group of people in a warm room on a cold night, happy for the warmth and the camaraderie.

(Plus it contains the short poem "A Bitter Christmas," which is a stitch.)

It also contains a shatteringly great version of "In the Bleak Midwinter" that never fails to give me chills and cause me to tear up at the same time. It is note perfect.

i notice that she no longer has either pay what you want or free downloads on her site.

I just picked up Child yesterday actually! Looking forward to some christmas spirit.

I am another "captivated by her contribution to the Until the End of the World soundtrack." hoping it goes better for me than cgould. but then "a Sarah McLachlan-level piece of proto-Lilith mush, gauzy Eno production and all" sounds like something I could get into.

Thought this was a revive for a mention of her Magic The Dog webstore. Bought a couple pair of chicken leg socks for Xmas gifts, and had good service.

listened to The Walking due to the comparisons in the Julia Holter thread and it's completely astounding

yeah it’s the best album ever made

Another recent convert from the Julia Holter thread here. That last track is quite a thing. It's vast and the production is clearly aiming for epic, but there's something contained about it, almost kitchen-sink.

She's the most seriously underrated artist. I got into her when I was 19 or so and bought The Rough Guide To Rock and picked up "When I Was A Boy" off that book's recommendation. Initially I was more enchanted by the "good" sounding stuff-- "When I Was A Boy" and "Maria"-- and I viewed the tinny production of her first five albums as "less preferable" or something. There are so many weird warts on her oeuvre, chief amongst them the "entirely extremely and oddly consistently flat vocal performance on the song from The Crow OST", but now these "warts" are part of my love of what she did/what she does.

I will investigate further for sure.

xp last track off The Walking, that is.

i still think When I Was a Boy is a huge crowning masterpiece of an album. Really underrated and overlooked.

I've been discovering her 80s albums this week: they're phenomenal! Especially "No Borders Here" and "The Walking." I didn't realize there was a missing link between Joni Mitchell and Laurie Anderson, but here we are.

Also the Fairlight CMI sounds on "The Walking" are so great

I didn't realize there was a missing link between Joni Mitchell and Laurie Anderson, but here we are.

She was exactly that for me! I think I bought Mister Heartbreak, The Walking and Hejira the same week in 1988. (I'd known Big Science for a while, of course, and the Joni hits).

THIRTY TWO YEARS AGO. Holy Mother of Mary Margaret.

...O'Hara

My wife is a big fan of Siberry. We saw her in a small suburban DC club out in Virginia last year.

For the curious, I recommend the excellent Love is Everything compilation album. As a casual fan, it's all I need.

I picked up The Walking last year, have been hearing/humming "The White Tent The Raft" in all my daily perambulations ever since :)

The tracklist for Love is Everything is excellent, though not including "Hockey" or "The Valley" or "See The Child" is just ????

I mean how can you look past a song with the lyric "This stick was signed by jean belliveau / so don't fucking tell me where to fucking go"?

Apart from those, it's hardly surprising that "The White Tent, The Raft" and "The Bird in the Gravel" are left off (and it's hard to be churlish about her including three songs from The Walking, though I think "Goodbye" could also easily fit on a best-of), but these two tracks are very close to my conception of "peak Jane".

holy fucking hell y'all i had never heard siberry's theme song to maniac mansion before

it is _very_ jane siberry

A new interview

https://toneglow.substack.com/p/055-jane-siberry

tone glow is the best for these sorts of interviews

hearing her description of how she wrote "the white tent the raft" is really something

Amazing, amazing interview, I love Tone Glow

having another phase obsessed with her because of that interview

the way "red high heels" reaches towards heaven and slowly dissolves is one of my favourite endings to a song ever

Same here. Thank you Ned for this link. Few interviews these days are actually inspiring to me but this was one of them. This response was also particularly resonant:

Nice isn't life... Joy is life. But nice? You don’t need me. You can get that somewhere else. So I really understood in myself that I wouldn’t bother doing this if it was just pleasant. There’s got to be more to it somehow... Music is more what you said: it’s constant roaming, roving, searching for new combinations of things that activate the life inside us.

Yeah Nick had been talking for a few days beforehand on Twitter about doing this interview -- he invited questions and I admit I couldn't think of anything good because I was more interested in hearing what he would bring to the table. And that hunch was correct!

finally digging into her discography beyond the first three albums and the next three are all good-to-great too. i am especially enjoying the jazz inflections on maria. she really has so much range and it's surely one of the best six album runs i've ever heard

oh by saying first three i was forgetting about her s/t debut that's not on her bandcamp, is it worth digging up at all?

That's my favourite record of hers, but not too beloved by those who prefer her more electronic/conceptual albums. It's maybe most like Bound By the Beauty, piano ballads and folk songs.

I like her s/t record a lot. The first few tracks lean toward the quirkier art pop that she'd subsequently pursue but the remaining tracks starting with The Magic Beads are gorgeous. No idea why she's not making digital copies available with the rest of her catalog.

I really love "The Strange Well" and "Above the Treeline".

"oh my my" is really so transcendental. a 20 minute jazz odyssey that makes quoting "mary had a little lamb" and a choir singing "puff the magic dragon" into something sublime

yeah I really loved Maria when it came out. I dont think it was received very well in general unfortunately.

I don't get the album, but I appreciate it might mean a lot to some people. My wife saw her doing those songs at the time at a big outdoor festival and losing the audience completely.

I talk about a bit upthread and probably over a decade ago, but from a certain perspective Maria is her creative apotheosis - as if she'd finally (albeit briefly) found a musical context that really matched her songwriterly desire to unfurl. There's a pretty clear line of extrapolation from "The Bird in the Gravel" through "Sweet Incarnadine" to "Oh My My".

i can't imagine siberry at any outdoor festival, let alone one where she'd be doing material from Maria. Yeah, that would almost certainly just be carried away with the wind.

Canada Day 1994, preceding the Tragically Hip!

Goodbye Sweet Pumpkinhead was an oft-performed song in the early 00s, she did it at Hillside in 2009. Maria is imo her most "complete" album stylistically, she found such a great foil in Tim Ray (piano).

The six album run is classic for sure, but imo the s/t and Teenager are also wonderful, not second-tier at all. Some would argue she continues to shine with her recent material (Shushan, the Issa trilogy) but I have not myself enjoyed them to be the case

Do you feel her decline is less steep than you did before?

great interview never thought about it but of course she knows Mary Margaret O'hara

"Decline" isn't a word I'd use! I feel like her fifteen years of "time off" from writing and recording original songs was more of a response to a highly bizarre previous fifteen years. Considering she was making enormously ambitious albums, doing Toni Basil-esque choreography onstage, but her moments of resonance seemed limited mostly to some AOR tracks that became popular with music supervisors ("Love Is Everything", "Calling All Angels"), I'd imagine the disillusionment was enormous and strange

I saw a Mary/Jane double-bill in a living room four years ago and it totally slayed

"the white tent the raft" is the most overwhelming song

The whole album destroys me

This thread prompted me to check out Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and I was genuinely surprised by the first track, "Possession". It's not what I expected. I have a vague mental impression of Sarah McLachlan, but she didn't sell any records in the United Kingdom, she didn't have a media presence, and as far as I can tell Lilith Fair was US-only, so I'm completely unfamiliar with her work. That song was not what I expected. It's really good! One of those creepy love songs where the lyrics start off innocuous but becomes sinister. With chugging minor chords and fuzzy guitars. The video even complements the song. There was a dance mix by Rabbit in the Moon that highlights the creepy aspect.

Of Jane Siberry the only song I know is "She's Like a Swallow" from Hector Zazou's Songs from the Cold Seas. As part of the album's concept she represented Canada. Until writing this paragraph I had assumed that Suzanne Vega was Canadian as well, but she isn't. She's not Canadian. I guess that shows me. You can't tell if people are Canadian just because their very essence exudes Canada. Or in Suzanne Vega's case a strange midway point between Canada and New York. Suzanne Vega.

Songs from the Cold Seas is top 1990s. It's distilled 1990s. It was CD only because it was the 1990s. To this date it has never come out on LP. It's a concept album with a huge roster of guest musicians and engineers that was recorded in a bunch of different studios that must have cost a fortune, presumably because Sony France had too much money. The record business had money in the 1990s. Which it largely wasted, but at least it generated economic activity.

The credits list sixteen(!) studios. The whole things seems to have been recorded onto digital tapes and moved back and forth. The production is pristine digital Pro-Tools. It has Bjork as a guest vocalist, which is something that happened a lot in the 1990s. It was actually released in the actual 1990s! I don't have anything to say about Jane Siberry.

you should probably listen to the walking because then you'll certainly have things to say about jane siberry

"the white tent the raft" is the most overwhelming song

yes

I remember when No Borders Here came out. We had a hard time deciding where to put it in the store; it kind of defied categorization. It was also very surprisingly put out in the U.S. by Windham Hill, which was not really known for taking chances like this one.

the whole song is gorgeous, but wow the last few minutes of "The Bird in the Gravel" are especially beautiful.

The production (and the production on her other 80s albums) might not be for everyone but imo it only further amplifies and foregrounds the emotional resonance and poignancy of the material

Yeah the way “the bird in the gravel” builds is nuts. She really earns that polyphonic “this is a whole world here” vibe.