Arden, Jann

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Jann Arden

Pop singer, songwriter

Canadian singer/songwriter Jann Arden traveled a circuitous road to success, spending more than a decade singing rock ’n’ roll covers and jazz and blues standards in smoky Canadian bars and lounges. She also worked a string of odd jobs to pay the rent, including busking on the street—until she was knocked out and robbed of the four dollars she had earned that day. After a series of failed relationships and a bout with alcoholism, Arden emerged from the fog with a major-label recording contract, a million-selling album, and international fame. Today, she is Alberta’s hottest musical export since k.d. lang. Meanwhile, her wicked sense of humor remains intact, sharply contrasting her endearing, melancholy folk/pop songs. “We’re going to be doing various songs about despair, heartbreak and loneliness,” she once told the crowd at an Edmonton concert, reported Mike Ross in an Arden website article. “We’ll be moving on to guilt later, so feel free to slump against the person next to you.”

Arden and her two brothers grew up in Springbank, Alberta, a rural town near Calgary in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Her father was a construction contractor and her mother was a dental assistant. Friends remember Jann as a happy, rambunctious child who was chronically anxious for approval. “This need was always there, as if she felt it was her responsibility to entertain everyone,” a childhood friend told Chatelaine magazine. Despite that yearning, however, Arden kept her musical interests quiet. She listened to Karen Carpenter and ABBA and headed down to the family’s basement when she played her hand-me-down guitar and sang her songs. After she was asked to sing one of her compositions at her high school graduation ceremony, her mother said, “We didn’t even know you sang.”

After high school, Arden moved to Vancouver and began singing with a series of forgettable bar bands. Alcohol was her steadiest companion. “I was making sixty dollars a week, although I usually owed the bar more than I made,” she told Chatelaine. “I was going home with different people. I thought it was part of the rock’n’roll life, but it was awful. I didn’t like who I was. I can’t even think of the specific incidents now, because they’re cringes to me. I’m ashamed of that time in my life.”

Arden sang covers as varied and Led Zeppelin and Tina Turner to Karen Carpenter and Billie Holiday in bars, lounges, and ski resorts. She worked as a ball washer at a golf course, a singing waitress, and a deckhand on a salmon boat, where she gutted up to 700 fish a day. She tried to launch a solo career, but the booze held her back. “I was 26 and dysfunctional and struggling hard,” she said in an interview with Bill-board’s Timothy White. At about that time NeilMacGonigill, a record promoter who’d grown disillusioned with the music business, took an interest in Arden. He saw enormous potential in her raw talent and offered to manage her career—if she was ready to take her singing seriously. She said she was; they agreed the first step was for Arden to work on her songwriting. Eventually, she quit drinking. “January 20, 1989. You don’t forget the date,” she told Chatelaine.

Success and Yearning

Success, however, remained elusive. Arden and MacGonigill spent nearly three years trying to interest a record company in the young singer. Then, in October 1991, A&M executive Allan Reid heard Arden’s demo tape and signed her to a recording contract, giving her the break she needed. Her first album, 1993’s Time for Mercy, achieved critical and popular success in her homeland. It registered strong sales, went gold in Canada, spawned the hit single “I Would Die for You,” and earned two Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy.

The second album, Living Under June, vaulted Arden to international fame. It churned out five singles—“Could I Be Your Girl,” “Wonder Drug,” “Unloved (a duet with Arden-fan Jackson Browne),” “Good Mother,” and “Insensitive.” The latter song hit the Top 10 in Canada,

For the Record…

Born Jann Arden Richards, March 27, 1962 in Calgary, Alberta; Canada; daughter of Derrell Richards (a construction contractor) and Joan Bentley (a retired dental assistant).

Released three albums on A&M: Time for Mercy, 1993; the million-selling Living Under June, 1994; and Happy?, 1997. Singles include “I Would Die for You,” “Could I Be Your Girl,” “Good Mother,” and “Insensitive.” On the strength of Living Under June, Arden has appeared on countless TV shows, including The Late Show with David Letterman, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, Good Morning America, and The Rosie O’Donnell Show. She also hosted the 1997 Juno Awards.

Awards: Junos include Best Solo Performer and Best Video, 1993, and Female Vocalist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, and Single of the Year, 1995.

Addresses: Record company —A&M Records, 595 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10022.

the United States, Italy, and Australia. Living Under June sold more than one million copies, earned Arden three more Junos, and kept her touring for more than two years. Meanwhile, the music press raved. Billboard editor Timothy White wrote that Arden exhibits a “thrillingly subtle and full-throated vocal vigor that makes Living Under June an extraordinary listening adventure.” Ellemagazine stated that the singer “pours out her gorgeous, wise songs with transcendent intensity.” Stereo Review noted that Arden “crafts smart, provocative songs about complex human relationships and sings them in a wise, knowing soprano…. Arden is usually nothing short of exquisite.” Chatelaine attributed Arden’s wisdom and emotionally revealing songs to her difficult past. “She’s still not sure how, early on, her life went from good to bad—the downward spiral that carried her into hard drinking, hard living and scrambling for money before she was 20,” the magazine wrote. “The songs on Living Under June explore elements of that painful past and reach out with a child’s yearning for her parents.”

By the time Arden released her third album, 1997’s Happy?, she was an international recording artist. Yet she remained as down-to-earth as ever. “Album sales change. Jann Arden doesn’t,” James Muretich wrote in the Calgary Herald. “At least not at the core. She is still very much the same Jann she always was, although there’ve been dramatic changes in her external life, like the way she’s gone from hard-drinking to abstaining from liquor, cigarettes and even caffeine.” The new album, Muretich noted, “is sparsely arranged but much more richly textured than before…. And her lyrics, buoyed by her powerful vocals—have become more direct, more heart-wrenching, constantly turning melancholy into a thing of beauty, of defiant hope.”

Despite the melancholy that invades Arden’s songs and the difficult detours she experienced on her way to success, hope permeates her music and her outlook. Although she admits to being used to failure, the artist is proud of her resilience and tenacity. “I used to worry that my songs were too sad or depressing,” Arden confessed to Nicholas Jennings of Maclean’s. “Now, I don’t really care because life is about imperfection and making mistakes. It’s not a beer commercial. And I feel so much happier that I know that now.” Arden’s ability to maintain her sense of humor has also been essential to her survival. When asked if her songs are autobiographical, Arden replied to Barbara Wickens of Maclean’s, “They must be. I couldn’t make up that pathetic life.”