REVIEW
JANE SIBERRY
Calgary Folk Music Festival
June 25 to 27
Prince’s Island Park
From the relatively mundane – "unencumbered by reality" – to the frankly incomprehensible – "a slo-mo bullet aimed at boomerang spatial geometry" – Jane Siberry’s music defies description.
Just don’t call her quirky.
"For a long time in my life, I wasn’t quirky at all," says the singer. "I feel like I’m so moved and interested in everyday things, I find ‘quirky’ limiting. I prefer eccentric, as meaning ‘more yourself than not yourself.’ Ultimately we should all be aiming to be completely eccentric, and then we’ll have complete eccentricity and honesty in the world. Wouldn’t that be a great thing to aim for?"
It’s clear that, quirky or not, Siberry’s musical path has been interesting, unexpected and hard to track, at least from the outside. After her second album No Borders broke the underground single "Mimi On the Beach," Siberry challenged her listeners almost continually throughout the ’80s, mostly by working in pop music while refusing to adhere to such petty limitations as time signatures and regular pop song structures.
She wasn’t the first – this was territory already being staked out by Laurie Anderson and Kate Bush – but Siberry did it with an inimitable sweetness and a lack of self-consciousness (unlike Anderson or Bush, in some cases), and continued to make songs accessible enough to cause blips on the mainstream radar. This culminated in 1993’s When I Was a Boy, which presented us with the seminal Siberry tune "Calling All Angels," a duet with k.d. lang for the Wim Wenders film Until The End of the World.
"I’m a Libra, which means I’m distinctly of two minds most of the time," says Siberry. "So, in regards to my musical career, in one of my minds I assumed I would walk the world stage comfortably, and in my second mind I was constantly surprised to be in the limelight at all….
"Sometimes I really don’t know what I mean (as an artist or as a person), or how I fit in the greater scheme of things. But that’s all countered by a feeling that it’s all alright anyway."
When I Was a Boy was Siberry’s closest brush with commercial success, and arguably her least experimental, risk-taking album. The lull didn’t last long. Despite the public slavering for more of the same, Siberry has never really travelled that route again, choosing instead the tougher path: classical, jazz, improvisational. You name it, she’s done it – all except the part where she did what people expected of her, of course.
She is a creature of many parts – soft-spoken, gentle, even a little ditzy-sounding on the phone – but she ain’t no pushover. At the beginning of our interview she informs me, politely and without malice, that it will last only 15 minutes unless it seems to be worth her time to continue. This is a woman who started her adult life as a microbiology major (and, yes, got the degree), but says (perhaps playfully, perhaps not) that she doesn’t "entirely believe in germ theory" – you know, the theory that says germs exist.
She owns and runs her own company, Sheeba Records, right to the level of learning how to construct and maintain a Web site ("I’m learning things I could never have predicted in a million years"). This sharpness, attention to detail and essential pragmatism sit comfortably inside her clearly articulated sense of the spiritual.
"My definition of success is flow. Harmony. When the body’s relaxed, the stomach’s relaxed, you feel a bit like you’re floating. Too many problems in the world come from a lack of striving for harmony. When I’m feeling controlling or afraid of something, it’s easy to tell. I look tense. I don’t attract good things in that frame of mind.
"Really, the reason I ended up opening up my own company is that I can’t stand anybody telling me what to do. Like contracts where people say ‘you can’t play in a 400-mile vicinity for two months before and after’ – I just say ‘fuck you.’ That’s too controlling. It changes the kind of venues I play, obviously, but I’m fine with that."
And it’s a Libra style that obviously works for her.
"In the lifelong analysis, I think we should all just do more of whatever makes us happier. I’m happiest when I feel like I’ve done good music and I can relax for a while – I feel like I’ve earned my spot on the planet for a little while longer." |
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