Roger Levesque Heine’s musical taste blends love, life and artificial sweeteners
Folk-pop artist’s first album in a decade reflects on an extended period of change
You have probably never heard someone singing a song called Aspartame, but then Jessica Heine is not your average tunesmith.
In fact, the notoriously off-tasting artificial sweetener turns out to be a metaphor for the aftertaste of a past relationship, as in, “My old love was just aspartame, words like sugar, the whole thing fake.” That tune Aspartame is another example of the clever wordplay and charming delivery from Heine’s fresh folk-pop release Goodbye Party, just out on the new locally based label Fallen Tree Records.
“Songwriting isn’t laborious or painful,” she said. “If someone gave me the parameters of a song that they needed I would feel comfortable sitting down to write it. But the exercise of doing it is like doing a really fun Sudoku puzzle. If you have a certain thing you want to say, it’s a matter of taking time to fit those pieces in. I tinker at it and leave it and come back to it or sometimes it comes out all at once like it’s been percolating in the back of my head.”
Heine (pronounced hi-na) has been “tinkering” with music in some form for most of her life, but Goodbye Party is her first album in almost a decade, an instalment of new and old original tunes that reflects an extended period of change. While most tracks are essentially love songs written in the first person, Heine’s mature sense of craft takes the set well beyond the predictable.
Born in Pincher Creek and raised in Edson, Heine recalled singing from the time she was able to talk — thanks in part to her father’s job as a minister — in choirs and her family’s a cappella singing group. Following early piano lessons, she switched to guitar at 16, but classical voice training was the real focus of Heine’s music studies and after moving to Edmonton in 1999 she wound up graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in music and vocal arts from the University of Alberta.
That long-term focus on classical vocalizing is not immediately apparent in Heine’s voice on her own material. Her folk career really started at open-mike events during her university years and she has an endearing, bright sound, but from the start she chose to set a different path vocally.
“I love classical singing in its own context, but I learned to separate those two styles.”
She’s been writing songs since high school. As influences go, there was the stuff she heard growing up, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, Christian music, singers like Sarah McLachlan, Sarah Harmer and, later, on Joni Mitchell. But in the end, she was more drawn to dissecting song poets like Paul Simon, Tom Petty and Tracy Chapman for clues on how to get better.
Heine made her first recording Either Way in 2006, managed to get a spot at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival that same year and made a her first stab at touring, travelling to Britain and working as a volunteer in Central America. She put out her second album Songteller Storywriter in 2009.
Her new title song Goodbye Party came from travels in El Salvador, but it helped encapsulate the themes of love and loss, and transitions like divorce and death that thread through the album.
“I liked the idea of a goodbye celebration, but also the sadness mixed with that celebration. In another sense, it’s about getting something beautiful out of something that wasn’t necessarily beautiful.”
She said the songs fall somewhere in between fiction and non-fiction, but “they feel very real” and expressing them was therapeutic. Heine can’t quite explain the recurring seafaring references that crop up in her songs.
“I’ve never been sailing, but I think the metaphor of water or sinking or swimming speaks to me.”
She had planned to record again sooner, but personal and professional demands intervened, including two years living in Yellowknife and establishing connections in the music scene there. Heine feels she’s gained a lot of helpful musical knowledge and experience in the meantime while she worked her way into a day job as a project manager for an engineering firm.
“You’re always getting better and those first two recording experiences taught me a lot about what I liked and didn’t like. With this new record, I was really going for it, trying to make something that represents who I am and what I want to say. I was a lot more picky and took my time to work with people who felt the same way I did.”
One of them was Peter Stone of 100 Mile House, who produced the album and contributed a bit of guitar. Heine coaxed people she knew from gigging to join her sessions at The Audio Department, including keyboardist Brennan Cameron, guitarist Chris Tabbert, bassist Keith Rempel, drummer Matt Grier and several backing singers. She’s hoping the long-awaited set will help expand her audience, which is bound to happen this summer after appearances at the Edmonton, Canmore and Jasper folk festivals.
Fallen Tree launch
Jessica Heine marks the release of Goodbye Party with an 8 p.m. performance Thursday at Empress Ale House (9912-82 Ave.) It’s a dual launch event of new vinyl releases from Fallen Tree Records. The award-winning husband-wife act known as 100 Mile House also marks the availability of its fourth release Hiraeth on vinyl, now reissued through the label. Tickets are $12, available in advance online through Fallen Tree Records or the artists’ websites.
It’s always exciting to hear about the launch of a new independent label and Fallen Tree Records promises an intriguing mix of “folk, Americana, alternative electronic and beyond” with other new releases by Toronto’s Jon Brooks and Vancouver’s Logan & Nathan. The label is founded by Peter Chapman, who enjoyed a long experience as a publicity assistant at Stony Plain Records. Good luck folks.