Jane Siberry


Jane Siberry is a Canadian singer-songwriter, known for such hits as "Mimi on the Beach", "I Muse Aloud", "One More Colour" and "Calling All Angels". She performed the theme song to the television series Maniac Mansion. She has released material under the name "Issa" – an identity which she used formally between 2006 and 2009.
On 30 August 2005, Siberry was awarded the 2005 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in music by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Career history

Childhood and early years

Jane Stewart was born in Toronto in 1955 and was raised in the suburb of Etobicoke. She would take her subsequent surname, "Siberry", from the family name of her maternal aunt and uncle. Many years later, she would explain this choice by stating "this woman and her husband were the first couple I met where I could feel the love between them and I held that in front of me as a reference point."
Siberry learned piano from the age of four, predominantly teaching herself and developing her own concepts of notation and structure. At school she learned conventional music theory and taught herself to play guitar by working through Leonard Cohen songs. Her first song was completed at the age of seventeen, although she had been developing song ideas since much earlier.
Following high-school graduation from Richview Collegiate in Etobicoke, Ontario, and then the Canadian Junior College, Lausanne, Switzerland, Siberry moved on to study music at the University of Guelph, later switching to microbiology when she found freshman music courses to be stifling. She began performing in folk clubs in Guelph, linking up first with singer Wendy Davis and then with bass guitarist John Switzer in a group called Java Jive.

First three albums and Canadian success (1979–1986)

Following the split of Java Jive in 1979, Siberry maintained both a musical and a romantic relationship with John Switzer. On leaving university, she supported her work as a solo performer by working as a waitress, earning enough to finance and tour her debut album, the folk-influenced Jane Siberry, which was released in 1981 on Duke Street Records. The album was relatively successful for an independent release, enabling Siberry to sign a three-album deal with A&M Records via the Windham Hill label. As part of the deal, Siberry was able to release her albums on Duke Street Records in Canada while Windham Hill handled American release and distribution.
Assembling a backing band of Switzer, guitarist Ken Myhr, keyboard players Doug Wilde and Jon Goldsmith, and drummer Al Cross, Siberry recorded her second album No Borders Here for which she mostly abandoned the folk approach in favour of electronic art-pop. This coincided with a growth in support of new wave and independent music within Canadian broadcast media, including the Toronto radio station CFNY and the video channel MuchMusic. Both of these became keen supporters of Siberry and put her onto high playlist rotation.
Siberry's first hit was the No Borders Here track "Mimi on the Beach" – a seven-and-a-half-minute art-rock single which benefited from the art-friendly broadcast support at the time. Both factors earned it heavy MuchMusic and college radio play. Two further singles with videos – "You Don't Need" and "I Muse Aloud" – consolidated the success. No Borders Here sold 40,000 copies and won Siberry a CASBY award for Best Female Vocalist, as well as giving her first opportunity to play live in New York.
Siberry's third album, The Speckless Sky, continued her art-pop approach. It was another commercial and critical success, going Gold in Canada by selling over 50,000 units and establishing Siberry as a Canadian pop star. The album provided another hit single, "One More Colour" and won the 1985 CASBY for Best Album, with Siberry and Switzer also picking up the award for Best Producer. In 1986 Siberry signed with Warner Brothers subsidiary Reprise Records, which picked up her American contract from Windham Hill, while honouring the existing Canadian arrangement with Duke Street Records.

Reprise Records period

''The Walking'' and ''Bound By the Beauty'' (1987–1992)

For her fourth album Siberry created The Walking. Released in 1988, it contained a set of intricately structured songs, many of which were lengthy and shifted between narrative viewpoints and characters. Many of the songs dealt with romantic collapse and miscommunication, partially inspired by Siberry's breakup with John Switzer. She was marketed as part of the "high art" end of rock music, alongside artists such as Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel. Siberry embarked on a tour of Europe and the United States to promote The Walking. This included her first European performance, which took place at the ICA in London.
In spite of the efforts of both label and artist, The Walking was ultimately less of a commercial success than The Speckless Sky, with Siberry failing to make her mainstream breakthrough. Although the album met with the same critical interest and attention as its predecessor, reviews were noticeably harsher and less welcoming. As well, the album was considered unsuitable by broadcasters for radio airplay, despite the presence of several shorter and more accessible tracks on the album.
Despite this setback, Reprise retained Siberry's contract, even taking over the Canadian side of the distribution for her next album, 1989's Bound by the Beauty. Siberry moved towards more simple and direct song forms, jettisoning electronic art-pop in favour of more acoustic styles drawing on country and western and Latin music. While retaining her quirkier conceptual approach, the album's song themes were generally more lighthearted than those of The Walking. Prior to the album's release, Siberry toured various folk festivals to reposition herself in the market; Bound by the Beauty had better record sales, and appeared on the RPM Top 100 Albums chart in 1989. In 1990, she embarked on a 50-date tour of Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, the United States and Canada.
By 1991, Siberry had completed demos for her next album: however, this was scrapped when neither Reprise nor Siberry herself were happy with the results, which were deemed too much like Bound by the Beauty. In 1992, during the wait for a new record, Reprise released a Siberry compilation album called Summer in the Yukon for the UK market. This focussed primarily on her more pop-oriented side and featured a remix of the Bound by the Beauty track "The Life is the Red Wagon" with a new dance-friendly rhythm track.

''When I Was a Boy'' and ''Maria'' (1993–1996)

Siberry's sixth album, When I Was a Boy, was completed in 1993 after a three-year writing and recording period during which she'd undergone changes in her personal life and in her musical approach. For the first time she chose to share album production responsibilities with other musicians – in this case Michael Brook and Brian Eno, both of whom also contributed instrumental work to the album. During the recording period, she had also confronted and overcome a longstanding alcohol addiction. She would later consider the music on the record to be more liberated, featuring what she described as "more body in it, more sexual energy... it's about the sacred aspects of sexuality, and finally being able to embrace them and not, em, be an observer anymore."
In contrast to its predecessor, When I Was a Boy was influenced by funk, dance and gospel music and featured extensive use of layering and sampler technology, in line with developments in latterday pop music, trip-hop and R'n'B. It also featured what would become Siberry's best-known song, "Calling All Angels". Other contributors on the album included Canadian singers Holly Cole and Rebecca Jenkins and regular guitarist Ken Mhyr. The album introduced the more spiritually-oriented themes that became a hallmark of Siberry's later work and launched three singles – "Calling All Angels", "Sail Across the Water" and "Temple".
Prior to the release of When I Was a Boy, Siberry performed in Edinburgh as the opening act for Mike Oldfield's premiere of Tubular Bells 2. She met with a disastrous rejection by the audience. Initially, Siberry was devastated and had to make a serious reassessment of her perspective on her work. From this point onwards, she chose to reclaim her art for herself and decided "I took back all the power back that I had put outside myself trying to please. The worst show of my life has become the best show because it's given me the ultimate freedom to care only about what I think is really good. How my career does is secondary."
Siberry would subsequently reassert full control over all areas of her work, from songwriting to stage presentation and video direction. For her promotional tour for When I Was a Boy – which she called "The It Ain't a Concert Concert", she opted not to use a band and instead performed solo, encouraging audience interaction and including spoken-word material.
Later in 1993, Siberry collaborated with Holly Cole, Rebecca Jenkins, Mary Margaret O'Hara and Victoria Williams on a live concert of Christmas music, which was broadcast on CBC Radio on Christmas Day that year before being released in 1994 as the album Count Your Blessings.
During 1994 Siberry recorded sporadically, without constructing a new album. She came to the attention of a new audience when her song "It Can't Rain All the Time" was included on the soundtrack for the movie The Crow; time spent with Peter Gabriel at Real World Studios resulted in three more songs and she sang on the Indigo Girls album Swamp Ophelia.
Siberry's next release was another complete change of direction. In contrast to the intricate studio production of When I Was a Boy, Maria featured a more jazz-inspired direction with live acoustic instrumentation and approaches similar to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. The basic tracks to the album were recorded in three days flat by a group featuring Tim Ray, Betty Carter's double bass player Christopher Thomas, top jazz session drummer Brian Blade and trumpeter David Travers-Smith. She edited and reworked the recorded material into fully realized songs, most of which featured various perspectives on innocence. The album also featured a 20-minute extended conceptual work called "Oh My My". Siberry took this new band on tour across Canada and the United States and professed herself pleased with the results, but Reprise Records were less pleased with the album sales.
After Maria, Siberry parted company with Reprise Records, later stating "they wanted me to work with a producer and that severed any sense of loyalty. I realized they truly didn't understand what I was doing... so I took my leave."