Happy? Grateful, busy? Check, check, check
Amid novel writing, activism and filming, singer releases her 15th studio album, ‘Descendant’
Trust Jann Arden to have a novel idea.
No, really — after writing five works of non-fiction including “If I Knew Then” and “Feeding My Mother,” the multihyphenate singer-songwriter-actor-activist and recent inductee into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame has just finished her first work of fiction.
In fact, she submitted the book — which has yet to be titled — to her publisher on Monday.
“Hopefully she’ll make sense of what I’ve done, because I’ve been working on it for 15 years,” Arden said from her spacious Calgary home during a Zoom session this week.
Arden hadn’t decided on a title for her first work of fiction and wasn’t sure of its quality.
“It could be a pile of s--t,” she admitted. “And you know what, it doesn’t even matter, because it’s been such a learning curve. Obviously, I didn’t write 15 years every day of my life. But I kept picking it up and dropping it off, and then I thought, ‘There’s something here.’ And then you’d spend three days wading through the drivel that you’ve written and go, ‘Oh well … some of this is, I think, manageable and then delete, delete, delete, delete.’
“Anyway, I finally just sent it off and I was like, ‘F--k, I can’t do this anymore.’ ”
But those pining for a new project by the Order of Canada recipient and eight-time Juno Award winner had their hunger appeased Friday, which marked the release of “Descendant,” her 15th studio album and one that sounds fairly different from what you might expect from the musician who gave us such classics as “I Would Die for You,” “Could I Be Your Girl,” “Good Mother” and “Insensitive.”
There’s a flow to such tracks as “Unbreakable” and “Moonbow” that permeates the uplifting arrangements, although not all of the songs are necessarily positive in their lyrics.
“It was done in bits and pieces,” said Arden, adding that making the album, co-produced by longtime associates Russell Broom and Bob Rock, was somewhat of an anomaly from the way she usually records.
“It was stretched out over a 20month period and normally I make a record in eight weeks. So it was different, but really advantageous in many ways because we had all the time in the world.”
Composed of 15 songs, the most she’s ever put on a single studio effort, Arden said she included them all because “I couldn’t bear to part with any of them.”
“We worked a lot in my colleague Russ Broom’s studio — my co-writer, producer pal — we probably spent two or three afternoons together every week. We’d pick up Starbucks drive-through coffees because we were still allowed to do that at the time and we’d go through these tracks with a fine-toothed comb.
“We’d have fun and add things, and find old synth parts and look up drum parts that were played in 1929 in Ireland. We literally had so much fun just piecing everything together.”
Arden, who is scheduled for a pair of Massey Hall dates on May 23 and 24, says she also wrote a few songs with Rock remotely, since he was stuck in Maui for 16 months.
“Some days we wrote three songs in an afternoon,” she said. “Five of those songs ended up on this record.”
Arden said the songs on “Descendant” came from a place of gratitude.
“And just being able to have the time to sit and think about where you’ve been and where you’re going. It’s a weird process for me, because I don’t have any plans when I sit down to write something — it just falls out of the sky and I scribble it down as quickly as I can. And no one is more surprised than I am when I look at a lyric sitting on a page, and melody and the first chord progressions.
“It is the weirdest thing and I don’t read music, so I have no concept of it that way.
“A lot of the songs felt like they were just pulled from another time,” she continued. “‘Loving You Is Like a Job’ is like a job description. It’s about being in a relationship where there is just such clockin, clock-out, the same s--t every day. There’s no joy in it at all. And then you finally make the decision to choose yourself over whatever. So that was kind of a nice song to write.
“And there’s a song called ‘Was I Ever 13’ that was just about growing up in my childhood home and thinking about what a s--t show that was. And how dysfunctional — you know, at the time, everything seems so status quo and kind of normal and then you get into your 50s and you look back at those times and go, ‘How did we manage?’ How did any of us get through that?’ Like, how did my mother get through it … never mind us.”
If writing and recording an album isn’t enough, Arden has also kept busy with a beehive of activity outside music. She hosts “The Jann Arden Podcast” and filmed Season 3 of her CTV series “Jann” last March, “which was weird because it was before vaccines,” she said.
“So we had to be super mindful. There were pods and different groups, and bathrooms that you could use and not use. And a lot of testing — we were probably tested three times a week, three out of five days.
“So it’s actually been a very, very creative, productive time for me. I certainly wasn’t idle. I’m not particularly great at anything I do. I just like doing a lot of things.”
She’s also been a strident voice against the slaughter of horses and the transport of horses by air to be slaughtered in other territories. “It’s important,” said Arden. “I’ve been involved with horses probably for 15 years and, living in Alberta, there’s such conflict here. All these seemingly proud horse guys, you know, with their quartermillion-dollar horses … these are the same guys who own feed lots that you can see from space. There are thousands of draft horses that are purpose-bred — they’re Budweiser horses, they’re huge — and every two weeks they send them on a f---ing plane to Japan for people to eat raw.”
Arden, a patron of the Canadian Horse Defence Coalition, said she’s encouraged by the federal government’s promise to ban the practice, but expects it might take two years for the legislation to be crafted and passed.
“It’s been mandated by the federal government to ban it, so we’re no longer trying to get their attention; we got their attention. So now, (Prime Minister Justin) Trudeau has sent out a mandate to his MPs that he wants it done.
“Now we’re going to go into a whole new part of our campaign. We want to get it tabled and enabled in 24 months. We want it to get shut down. All these guys that own these feed lots and horses will be scrambling — I don’t think they like me very much, but you can make a difference by raising your voice.”
Last year, Arden was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
“It was great,” she recalled. “It was one of my favourite moments because it has nothing to do with being the best at anything. And I thought about all the little bars that I played in and how many beer bottles that were thrown at my head and all the fights that broke out; singing up in Dawson Creek and Yellowknife and Whitehorse and the Yukon and interior B.C. and northern Manitoba, just putting in my time and paying my dues.
“It’s hard to believe how many years have gone by: 40 years of playing music.”
Because the Juno Awards ceremony was held without an audience, Arden — who celebrates her 60th birthday on March 27 — performed in isolation, something she was thankful for.
“I was so relieved not to be there with people,” she admitted. “I was so relieved to be there with a bunch of guys with masks on. Because I think I would have been such a nervous wreck.
“I loved it.”