Windsor native finding her way in Nashville music scene
Top vocal coach’s songs have cracked Top 20 charts in Australia and the U.K.
As a Windsor-born singer/songwriter with a lilting Australian accent, and established as an artist in the Nashville country music scene, Janine Le Clair is more interested in creating her own mould than fitting into one that’s already there.
She and her Nashville producer, Shannon Sanders, have coined the phrase “world country” as a means of conveying her personal songwriting and performance style.
“We were talking about all the types of instruments I like, from the African drum, to the Australian didgeridoo, to the spoons to the washboard,” said the 39-yearold University of Windsor grad.
Le Clair picked up the accent during a 10-year stint in Australia where she toured with a band and worked giving singing lessons and as a vocal coach.
“I hadn’t really noticed (the accent),” she said. “It hit me when it sounded like my own parents (in Windsor) had an accent.”
After studying fine arts and musical theatre at the University of Windsor, Le Clair headed to Australia with her then-fiance.
“I didn’t intend to move there but I was offered a spot in an established band in western Australia,” she said. “I very quickly morphed back into giving singing lessons as well.”
On one of her many trips back home to attend the wedding of a friend from university or high school days at Holy Names, Le Clair made a side trip to Nashville.
Leaning toward soul and R& B, she never considered herself a country artist.
“With my original songs, no one ever classified them as a modern sort of country style,” she said.
“No one said, ‘I think you’re writing country music.’ I didn’t really know what I was writing either.”
But she came to embrace the “post-Shania” modern country music scene and opted to relocate.
Nashville has been her home base for just over 10 years now.
Her songs have cracked the Top 20 music charts in Australia and the United Kingdom, and her work as a vocal coach was recently recognized by Seattle-based ranking service Expertise as one of the top 12 voice teachers in Nashville.
“It’s a huge honour because it’s Nashville,” Le Clair said. “There are so many singing teachers and vocal coaches here, it’s a unique place in the world for that.”
Expertise looked at 133 voice teachers in Nashville before narrowing the list to a dozen.
A vocal coach “is not dissimilar from what a singing teacher is,” Le Clair said. “The main difference is a vocal coach is more indepth coaching on levels that are not just technical. It’s sometimes like a therapy session where you’re coaching the woes and the blockages.”
Le Clair also recently auditioned for, and won, a role in an upcoming movie production, the details of which she’s not at liberty to discuss just yet.
It’s a long way from singing Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue on her way to winning the title of Miss Leamington 1996.
“When I tell my friends here in Tennessee that I was Miss Tomato Festival, they call me the ‘Mater Queen.’ ”
While Le Clair’s parents have both died, she still has relatives and friends to lure her back to Windsor once in a while. She would like to perform in her hometown again, something she hasn’t done since three sold-out shows at the old Fidel’s Havana Lounge years ago.
Perhaps by then she’ll have figured out a way to weave a didgeridoo into her music.
“That’s still in the works,” she said.