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Most exciting gig of this year, possibly

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Very exciting news, just in. In May Jane Siberry is to play her first Scottish shows since 2006, not in a big venue like Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, where she played last time she was here, but in two flats - one in the south side of Glasgow and one in Portobello, just down the road from me - to an audience of just a couple of dozen fans.

As soon as I heard about this I sent an email to the woman promoting Jane’s ‘Salon by the Sea’ in Portobello, practically begging for tickets (just in time too, because most had been snapped up already by the time I got in touch). Jane Siberry is my favourite singer in the world, and I never tire of telling people how fantastic she is. While she has worked with the likes of KD Lang and Brian Eno, she’s always been less famous in the UK than she is in Canada, where she’s from, so like her other British fans I spend quite a lot of time explaining to people why this woman they’ve never heard of is brilliant. Since you’re here, you can read me telling you this instead - or just watch the clip above if you’re pushed for time.

When I get into conversations like these, I usually say that Jane is like a funnier, more knowing Kate Bush, or a sexier, more feminine Laurie Anderson. That’s shorthand, though, and doesn’t really sum her up at all, given how versatile and unpredictable she’s been over the years. Her first album, from 1981, sounds like a more playful cousin to Joni Mitchell’s Blue. By 1983 she was making something resembling synthpop (imagine if the Associates were a girl group, and you’ll be reasonably close). Then the songs got longer, more multi-layered and cinematic, especially on her album The Walking.

One of my favourite Siberry songs is The Bird in the Gravel, from that album, in which she plays multiple characters - a heartbroken maid, a truck driver, a servant and a kitchen full of noisy cooks (The Fakester Resurrection, one of the songs on the second Swimmer One album, is very much a homage to The Bird in the Gravel - as well as to Kate Bush’s song cycle The Ninth Wave, to which The Bird in the Gravel is quite similar).

Then, just as people were getting used to this, she made a country album (Bound By The Beauty). Then a jazz album (Maria). Then she recorded an album of simple songs she wrote when she was a teenager (Teenager). Over the years she’s recorded everything from a 20-minute odyssey about dragons and lost innocence (Oh My My) to a funny song about her dog (Everything Reminds Me Of My Dog). When I saw her at the Queen’s Hall, back in 2006, she sang a 12-minute musical poem about a dreamlike journey through a forest, a 30-second version of What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor, and I Know My Redeemer Liveth by Handel. She was very funny too, in a completely random way (’Did you know that Britney Spears is an anagram of presbyterians?’ is a typical piece of Siberry chat).

What’s consistent through all this very different music is a style of delivery that’s like no one else I’ve ever heard - whimsical one moment, knowing and ironic the next, then flippant, then heartwrenchingly sincere, often all in the same line. Her songs never deal in one emotion at a time, instead recognising that you can feel all kinds of emotions simultaneously - you can laugh while your heart is breaking, or be cynical and incredibly romantic at exactly the same time.

I like her attitude to life and art too. She is incredibly unmaterialistic, even for an artist. Years before everyone else (including Radiohead), she started distributing her music online on a ‘pay-what-you-like’ basis through her own label, Sheeba. You can get loads of MP3s from her website, for whatever you can afford. Some you can only get if you live in Canada or the USA, but there’s plenty available worldwide too.

In 2006 Siberry took this further. She sold almost all of her possessions, including her house, changed her name to Issa Light, and set off around the world, to live as a kind of wandering troubador. When I interviewed her that year for the Scotsman, she’d just held a yard sale at her Toronto home, opening up the place to friends, family, neighbours and fans, and selling off furniture, clothes, photos, art, records, letters, her car. “I guess I feel like things were weighing me down,” she told me. “I was impatient with feeling weighed down. I want to focus on being a musician.’ Here’s a clip of her talking about it - and singing about it - on stage.

I asked her about her website’s ‘self-determined pricing’ policy - which has become much more commonplace since Radiohead did it but was quite radical back then, especially for an artist as well established as Siberry - and she said she was thinking she might even stop copyrighting any of her songs. “What am I saying when I do that? I’m sort of pissing on something like a dog. Maybe people can take them if they want and if they don’t treat them right that’s their problem, not mine.” She believed in trusting people, she said. “I hate locking my door and I often don’t.”

It’s easy to see why a woman like this would want to make and distribute music entirely on her own terms. Record labels, she told me, have never really known what to do with her - even her own. “I thought Sheeba would be a springboard for freedom, and it was to a certain extent,” she told me. But she soon became frustrated with the limitations of running her own business. “I had the freedom but I didn’t have the cash to have other people on my label and have a great artwork team. I wasn’t really proud of the company.” If she couldn’t do it properly, she decided, she just wouldn’t do it.

I asked her if she was an all or nothing kind of person. “Probably to my chagrin, sometimes,” she said. The decision to rid herself of all her possessions was, she explained, “an organic, slow-building thing”. “I have very few clothes, my diet’s very simple. My lifestyle means I’ve removed all debt from my life, my bills are down to almost zero. I don’t need that much to live well; I’m often on tour with just a suitcase. I’d go home and think, ‘oh my gosh I feel like ate too much dessert, looking at all this’.” Since the yard sale, she said, “sometimes I feel pretty shaky. A lot of people say, oh gosh, I’d be terrified to do what you did, and that makes me nervous. But there’s a recognition that it’s brewing somewhere in their consciousness. I feel like a barometer of what’s in the air.” People, she said, have too much “material baggage’, and deep down they know it.

At first, she told me, “I kept one letter from each person I love, and one or two photos, then I thought maybe I should let go of that too. I threw out thousands of photos. It’s odd with photos, you think, here’s 20 of this little girl I adore, let’s reduce it to two, and then one, and then I think, well, why do I need any? I can just go to her mother’s house and look at them.”

How many people are brave enough to do this at the age of 50? Most people cling on to all this stuff for dear life as they get older - the material posessions, the letters, the photos. It’s proof that you’ve lived, that you’ve had relationships, that you’ve had some success, that you exist. But really, why do we need any of this to feel alive? Can’t we just exist in the moment?

That seems to be what Jane Siberry - or Issa, or whoever she is these days - is doing. These days, she told me, she is trying to ‘follow the natural lines of energy flow’, ‘to find a new way of doing things’. I suppose this will just sound eccentric or hippyish to some people, but it resonates with me. And, increasingly, the idea of catching special, unusual performances in a small space is much more interesting to me than a big gig in a hangar-sized venue. I think I’m more excited about Jane Siberry’’s Salon by the Sea than I am about any other gig this year.

Andrew

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