Jane Siberry

Jane Siberry worked her way up in Toronto coffeehouses like so many other aspiring folksingers. Not being able to count on a particularly brilliant voice, her ballads relied on lyrics and dramatic tension.

She s comparable to Joni Mitchell for the acoustic nursery rhymes on Jane Siberry (Duke Street, 1980 - East Side Didigtal, 1991). This Girl I Know and The Sky Is So Blue were ordinary boy stories. But Marco Polo and Strange Well revealed the first symptoms of her neurotic romanticism. Magic Beads and Writers Are A Funny Breed hatched a more sophisticated taste for cocktail lounge atmospheres. However, the production of the disc was too spartan to allow these elements to fully emerge.

No Borders Here (Open Air, 1983) is a step up in quality. Not only is the disc arranged as it should be, but Siberry has also treasured the lessons of the new wave. Nightmarish songs like Dancing Class , You Don't Need and Map of The World regurgitate with dreamlike atmospheres and psychodramatic lyrics la Laurie Anderson. Waitress features more simplistic singing, rocked by funky rhythms and a na ve nursery rhyme. I Muse Aloud is one of the few airy and romantic ballads vaguely in the style of Joni Mitchell that made her famous. The rest are more ambitious pieces: sarcastic sketches punctuated by hysterical choruses (Extra Executives), surreal and cerebral parodies of the sound of the Sixties (Symmetry), martial sagas in which the epic and lyrical accents of a certain post-feminist performance theater ring out (Mimi On The Beach, certainly that genre s peak).Taking inspiration from the music hall, from commercials, from the most rapid Top-40, from the music of disco off, capable of oscillating naturally between the registers of the tragic and the comic, and endowed with a soft and neutral voice that is more reminiscent of sentimental teenagers of the beat than modern experimenters, Siberry builds hyper-realistic streams of consciousness that examine the female condition and, more generally, the human condition.

Speckless Sky (Duke Street, 1984) remains faithful to those artistic coordinates: to enhance the fundamentally adolescent quality of her voice and the postmodern taste of the arrangements. The emotional spectrum is more radical, because Siberry - having abandoned the psychological center - moves as much towards impalpable lullabies like One More Color and Taxi Ride as towards disconnected agonies such as Seven Steps To The Wall and Vladimir Vladimir. Effortlessly dish out both festive sarabande like Very Large Hat and conversational gags like Mein Bitte, according to an estrangement technique updated to the new wave and at the same time imbued with the poignant sense of everyday life that is derivative of country. The new version of Map of The World (Part II) constitutes the pinnacle of this cabaret, overloaded with musical signs, from ecstatic choruses to the marching tempo of the majorettes, from musical nursery rhymes to lysergic vocalizations.

The Walking (Reprise, 1987) pushes that technique to epic proportions. Not only do the songs get longer and more complex, but the arrangements become lush and the rhythms jazzier. The sound is almost the opposite of the shy early folk. The synthesized string sections create a whirlwind of violent sounds around the lost moans of her singing in songs that are now crazy, heterogeneous and monumental acts of contrition (see the nine minutes of White Tent The Raft and the ten minutes of the moving requiem of Bird In The Gravel). However, the melody is dispersed in introverted litanies (such as The Lobby, almost a Tim Buckley-esque delirium in slow-motion, and Red High Heels), sometimes bordering on a Greek tragedy scream (Goodbye), instead of being concentrated, as in the past, in daring gags (the only exception is the whispered fairytale Lena Is A White Table).

Bound By The Beauty (Reprise, 1989) eats away some of those ambitions with an acoustic sound (no electronic keyboards) and roots (the accompanists are seasoned session-men). A transitional work, the record brings an element of recollection and intimacy in its exuberant cocktail of arrangements, like the cocktail lounge samba of Are We Dancing Now, the crescendo spiritual of Half Angel Half Eagle, the barrelhouse dreamy of Something About Trains and the honkytonk nursery rhyme of Everything Reminds Me of My Dog.

Jane Siberry turned into an avant-garde musician with When I Was A Boy (Reprise, 1993), which is in fact a collaboration with producer Brian Eno. The album picks up where The Walking left off, with all of her electronic arsenal, even if it adopts the spirit of recollection and intimacy of Bound By The Beauty .
With the sole exception of Temple (the "commercial" track), the disc presents itself as a collection of anomalies in line with the personality of this cultured and sophisticated musician. Whatever she decides to do with sounds (and "ai" sounds), Siberry always ends up weaving unheard-of and suggestive watermarks: the "space"-funk of All The Candles of The World, which seems to be sung inside a cathedral, due to the intensity of the trills and the echo effect; the layered harmony of An Angel Stepped Down , which on one level is a kind of whispered rap, on another level it seems to interpolate Michael Jackson, and on yet another it is a powerful choral soul-rock work; and Calling All Angels, half country ballad and half religious hymn, with K.D.Lang(literally) reciting a rosary of saints and Siberry building dreamlike, vertiginously crazy atmospheres around it.
Whether she uses it or not, Siberry has, with age, further refined her extraordinary expressive and dramatic ability due to the flexibility and versatility of her singing style. She demonstrates this by improvising Sweet Incarnadinelike a stream-of-consciousness, skilled spiritual singer resurrected in full new age (the piece is extracted from twenty minutes of live delirium in a cloud of electronic hisses); and she proves it by, once again, brushing the memory of Tim Buckley in monumental free-form psychodramas such as The Vigil , which live only on heartbeats, imperceptible sighs, nervous tensions, mental phobias (guitar, bass, cello and organ accompaniment ensemble).
It s therefore not surprising that the singer switches with ease from the breathless whisper of Love Is Everything (the central theme of the work, and one of the most melodious arias of her career) to the hypnotic Sail Across The Water, punctuated several octaves higher by a series of contralto trebles. The major influence is now that of black religious music, which also permeates a spiritual testament, the hymn of hope that is The Gospel According To Darkness.
These songs really seem to be born out of a ritual that is at the same time extremely personal and completely universal; masses celebrated in the solitude of a room, in spiritual communion with other millions of people alone in their armor.

Still nsatisfied, Siberry released Maria (Reprise, 1995) the most jazzy album of her career. Siberry constructed the songs by manipulating her favorite passages from three free improvisation sessions with a jazz quartet. The inspirer of Siberry seems to actually be Van Morrison.
In the way thatSiberry hums the elegy to Maria almost absent-mindedly, sobs the proverb of Lovin Cup in amusement, whispers the nursery rhyme of See The Child as she whirls in mid-air, fiddles with the lyrics over the fast-paced beat of Begat Begat, the very meaning of the art of making music is contained, that of referring to a mathematical absolute beyond the reach of rationality. The soft and discreet jazz of the accompaniment, with trumpet and piano in the foreground, is the natural counterpoint of her ethereal and velvety scatting, even if in Caravan it falls into para-Caribbean night club stereotypes. Her phrasing is refined as well, to the point of no longer singing, but just pure sound.
Thematically, the disc continues the psychoanalytical journey into childhood started by the predecessor. It is no coincidence that the record, and maybe all of Siberry's career, culminate in the 20-minute Oh My My, a melodic fantasy that quotes the childlike nursery rhymes. Siberry transforms it into some sort of psychoanalytic nightmare, into the confession of a soul afflicted by a terrible depressive crisis who takes refuge in childhood circles. The song has practically no musical development, but is simplydefiningly chilling. The disc was enthusiastically reviewed by both the jazz press and the avant-garde.

Teenager (Sheeba, 1996) is a record of songs that Siberry composed as a teenager, derivatively arranged in a purely acoustic way.

Siberry then withdrew from the big musicbusiness and humbly released Child (Sheeba, 1997) and Lips (1999).

Jane Siberry was one of the most isolated artists of her era. As a songwriter, she has composed songs that are both moving and innovative, fusing Joni Mitchell's arduous introspective signature singing and Kate Bush's acrobatic fusions into a new musical form. By marrying an eccentric vocalism to conceptual arrangements, Siberry boasted the gift for performing vocal and harmonic acrobatics with the most casual nonchalance.

She assembled an odd sound collage, A Day in the Life (1997), then left New York and returned to Toronto where she published books of poetry ("Swan", 1998; "One Room Schoolhouse", 1999), released live albums such as Lips: Music for Saying I (1999) and Tree: Music for Films and Forests (1999), wasted her talent on cover albums such as Hush (2000) and Shushan the Palace (2003), and compiled leftovers on City (2001). The best anthology of her career was the double-disc Love is Everything (Rhino, 2002).

In 2006 Siberry changed her name to Issa. The "Three Queens" trilogy consists of the albums Dragon Dreams (2008), With What Shall I Keep Warm? (2009) and Meshach Dreams Back (2011), which mixes spoken-word poetry and music, the latter credited again to "Jane Siberry".