Canadian icon Jann Arden reflects on the pandemic as she resumes touring
The singer-songwriter says she enjoyed being forced to take a break during the pandemic
Canadian darling Jann Arden is back on tour after being forced to postpone shows in 2020 when COVID-19 forced the shut-down of venues and performances.
The singer-songwriter kicked off her latest tour on May 16 in Moncton, N.B., and over the next couple of weeks she's got stops in B.C., including several on Vancouver Island.
She's also making her way through the Prairies in July before returning to B.C. in August for the annual Roots & Blues Festival in Salmon Arm.
She sat down for an interview with All Points West guest host Kathryn Marlow ahead of her Vancouver show on June 14.
LISTEN | Award-winning singer, songwriter Jann Arden on her latest projects
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You're back on the road again after a bit of a delay. How has it been going so far?
Arden: It's going great. We're being very cautious and there's lots of masking. I'm travelling separately from the band. The last thing I want to do is postpone dates again. The shows are going great. The crowds are having a blast.
What were the last two years like for you?
Arden: I hate to even say this, but I really enjoyed it. I mean that certainly from a perspective that is not unaware of the absolute tragedies that happened globally, the loss of life, the long-term care, I mean, all the things that happened because of this.
But, just on a personal level ... I've been travelling 250-plus days a year for 30 years. I can't imagine anything else in the world that would have made me stop and just garden, read, hang out, watch movies. I just think it was really quite nice and I actually made a lot of mental notes to myself about how I wanted to go forward and how I wanted to work — I'm going to say 'no' a lot more than I was.
I love music. I love all of it. But I think there's a whole other life that I kind of ignored for a long time.
Do you think you're approaching touring and music with a different perspective now?
Arden: Absolutely. I think you'd be foolish to not fill your entire body up with gratitude and to really take in how special performing is, how special the gathering of community is, how special it is to have thousands of people in a place with a common love of something, to stand a few feet away from people with your glass of chardonnay in your hand and being excited about seeing art or dancing or a film. We really felt the effects of what we're like by ourselves.
Tell us a little bit about Descendant. This is your 15th studio album released in January. What is this album about?
Arden: I don't always know what my records are about, but I certainly had time. For me, what it came down to was thinking about where I came from, thinking about what relationships look like at 60, as opposed to how they looked at 25, the desperation and the yearning and the unrequitedness.
I was able to just look at everything more as a person that had a lot of experiences to draw from. There's really something to be said about living your life with the absence of doubt. And I think that's where this record comes from as well.
I'm very sure about what I do. I feel very good about what I do. I know I'm good at what I do, and I don't have to apologize for that anymore. It really has been about rejoicing in and celebrating how I've made my life's work the last 40 years. This record is about just owning your life, being comfortable and being able to share the things that you've learned with other people.
Is there a particular song from the new album that you'd like to tell us about?
Arden: I would like to cheer people on and this is the title track on the record, a song called Descendant. I got thinking about my great-grandmother who came from Ukraine through Sweden, through Europe, and made it over here, met my great-grandfather, married, and she went on to have 17 children in southern Alberta, my mum's mother being one of them. And I just thought about what is the friggin' likelihood of even being here at all?
So Descendant is just a shard of my thoughts on coming from this mysterious place and the likelihood of it and the struggle of being a person.
With files from All Points West