A JOURNEY TO JAVELIN
Klassen tackles tough topics
Jordan Klassen has spent more time on the road than at home this year.
The Vancouver indie singersongwriter went on an eight-week tour of Europe to kick off 2016, followed by a four-week cross-Canada trek that will wrap at home at the Imperial in Vancouver on April 27.
“Eight weeks is the longest tour I’ve ever done,” Klassen says via phone during a tour stop in Calgary. “It’s too long. You forget what it’s like to live a normal life.
“I Facetimed my girlfriend a lot. It’s good that it was in Europe. You can get lots of sleep. The drives are shorter. Most of the places are very inspiring. My girlfriend came to visit for a couple of weeks and we went to Copenhagen, and it was just so amazing. We wanna live there one day. They have restrictions on advertising on buildings — it just feels really clean and comprehensible, great food and coffee. It was just my bag.”
Klassen’s journey making and touring his latest album Javelin, his second full-length effort, has been transformational.
Released in February on label Nevado Music, the followup to his excellent 2013 debut album Repentance (with highlight single Go To Me), sees Klassen delve into some very personal issues, including dealing with depression and coming to grips with his mother’s own illness, cancer.
“I think the place I was writing from was really different, even where I’m at in my career,” Klassen says. “When I wrote Repentance, it was before I was doing music fulltime. I made the record on my own and self-funded it. This is a record that has some money behind it.
“I had a lot of realizations about my own mental state and my mental illness and coming to terms with that. My mother was going through cancer treatment. Thinking about it now, yeah, there were a lot of changes.”
Now 31, Klassen doesn’t shy away from discussing his battle with depression and anxiety openly.
“Throughout my 20s, I had this dark cloud above my head. I spent most of my 20s trying to figure out what it was. I didn’t really want to think of myself as having a mental illness. I wanted there to be some kind of answer — even some kind of spiritual answer — or some key that would just make me better. I think in the last couple of years, I realized I wasn’t healthy and nothing I was doing was helping.”
In 2014, Klassen sought help. Through proper treatment and medication, he says, he got better.
Klassen explains the title Javelin is a play on words about pinning down past issues and tackling them with precision, and it’s an album that engages its topics with a frank outlook and “having much more clarity and accuracy.”
Gargoyles is a song Klassen dedicates as an “apology to the women in my past,” explaining how depression and anxiety can affect your relationships. “It was looking back and asking them, figuratively, to be patient with me.”
The weepy, string-laden Baby Moses is about “looking back, angry, and thinking, ‘If I knew then and I’d been healthy I could’ve done all these things. I could’ve accomplished so much more and I wasted my time.’”
The brilliant one-take video for the song was shot one early Sunday morning in January on the streets of Gastown.
“We just blocked the street and pretended like we belonged there,” Klassen says with a laugh.
St. Fraser references a time when Klassen lived in a house off Fraser Street in Vancouver. “It was a pretty dark time, through 2013 — remembering these things and putting it into songs.”
Meanwhile, his mom’s cancer — which was diagnosed as Klassen was confronting his own demons — has been all but eradicated through intense treatment. The song Delilah is dedicated to her.
Javelin sparkles with an ’80s gloss — pointed synths, percussive tones, twinkles of keys and shimmering guitars.
The album kicks off with a Peter Gabriel-esque ode, Glory B, before touching upon sonic references like Enya (Smoking Too Long) and African rhythms (St. Fraser).
Javelin was self-recorded and produced at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, near El Paso. The studio was recommended to Klassen by acclaimed singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow, who recorded his 2014 album Post Tropical there.
“I was in a place I knew that, creatively, if I didn’t challenge I wasn’t going to be happy,” Klassen says.
“I felt going somewhere I didn’t know, and fully self-producing for the first time, was scary. It was the perfect place to do it. They take care of you and feed you and do your laundry. They have amazing gear — these old neat boards that Aretha Franklin recorded her records on.”
For his Vancouver performance, Klassen will be accompanied by his backing band consisting of longtime collaborators Jocelyn Price ( keys) and Simon Bridgefoot (drums), with Taylor Swindells from The Tourist Company ( bass), and Brian Chan (cello).
“I think I’ve learned I have to approach my own perspective very humbly and my view of my past very humbly, and know that I can be very wrong in how I think things have gone,” Klassen says.
“I’m not trying to spread a message with my records or anything, but if there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that one.”
Throughout my 20s, I had this dark cloud above my head. I spent most of my 20s trying to figure out what it was.