When songwriter Jann Arden released her first album
'If my music is anything at all, it truly is Calgarian'
Anyone could accidentally dump a can of cat food while feeding their cat. But not everyone could make a song of it — though Jann Arden could.
"It splatted on the kitchen floor, and I looked at it and I thought, 'what if this was pieces of your body? And, as a woman, sort of sitting there, picking them up and sort of sticking them back onto yourself,'" Arden explained to the CBC's Tina Srebotnjak in March 1993.
Arden said that was the inspiration for I'm Not Your Lover, one of the songs on the Calgary songwriter's album Time for Mercy.
In the years since, Arden has gone on to release multiple albums and star in her an eponymous TV show, Jann, in which she played a fictionalized version of herself. According to her official website, she released her 15th studio album on Jan. 28. She made an appearance on CBC Radio's Q the same day to talk about the album.
Calgary had its advantages
Back in 1993, she appeared as a guest on CBC's Midday via a remote connection while sipping a mug of coffee at Calgary's venerable Blackfoot Truckstop.
Arden said Calgary had been a good place to be a musician and hone her sound.
"There's some advantages and disadvantages from coming from a smaller centre," she said. "I wasn't really influenced by anything. So, if my music is anything at all, it truly is Calgarian."
Arden can be found in the CBC-TV catalog stretching back to 1988, when she was profiled on a local newscast as a Monday-night regular singing the blues at a Calgary bar called the Old Scotch.
"There's some wonderful writers here, there's a really great, sort of a mini, little Seattle scene that's happening in our underground," she went on in the 1993 interview.
'A really funny person'
"Your music is very beautiful, very haunting ... very sad," said Srebotnjak. "And yet you are renowned ... as a really funny person."
On that basis, she asked Arden if she had ever considered writing comic songs.
"Life is a contradiction," responded Arden, displaying some of that wit.
In a 1994 profile in the Globe and Mail, western arts correspondent Chris Dafoe noted that contradiction, describing Arden's songs as "heartwrenching ballads with emotions as big as her voice."
"In person, however, that melancholy is cut with a dry, almost dour sense of humour," said Dafoe.
'A form of shyness'
Arden told Srebotnjak that being funny was a "really great way to break the ice," but wondered whether there was a deeper reason for it.
"Is it a form of shyness?" she asked. "I think it could be a form of shyness."
As they said goodbye, Arden showed her sense of humour again.
"Have a piece of that pie for me, OK?" said Srebotnjak, referring to the diner's flapper pie.
"No," said a deadpan Arden, eliciting a laugh.
