Jane Siberry
I brought a Border Collie back home to Vancouver from Wales - where some of my ancestors are from - and needed to challenge him in other ways than just being my pet. So I investigated sheep herding and took a few lessons, and decided I was probably learning more than my dog!Collection: Pet
'The Taxi Ride,' from my second album, is one people want to hear a lot. I'm consciously trying to walk on the sunny side of the street, to really lift myself into a place of greater positivity, and that's a sad song.Collection: Sad
I'd probably be famous now if I wasn't such a good waitress.Collection: Famous
Music is all about training in harmony, training to understand and use musical energy for our greater pleasure by attuning to the natural laws of the universe.
I'm just opening the doors. And a lot of this is new to me - thinking about it, and letting go again and again and again, trusting that if I'm meant to continue working as a musician, it'll happen. If I'm not, then pull out the life support.
I see more people taking on the cloak of accountability, more people tiring of the blame game. If we are all connected and our actions in Australia affect us in Istanbul, then we are all to blame and all to be healers. We can't blame lawyers anymore for the 'liability' vs. common sense imbalance.
I'm not a household word. The climate for original music is always a bit difficult.
It's all about consistency, and what makes a child or a dog secure: order, clarity - all those things.
Hurry, conscious younger people! Get to power quickly so political decisions can be based on the greater good for all rather than the greater gain for few. Hurry, before it is too late!
I was raised on pop music.
I think, because I'm an artist, part of my job is to be a barometer, an antenna. It's in the air and it resonates with a lot of people to lighten up.
I think we're returning to more of the original vibration of music and creativity through the removal of this distortion called the music industry. That's where we're heading. And it'll cut out a lot of music if people ever expected to make money.
Every night is different, a ball of thread that unrolls differently.
When I made my way across childhood to the tinny AM radio, it was dark. Lights out. I listened intently. More intently than I ever had before. Something was speaking to my unformed-ness like a long lost friend. Something that I had never met but forgotten nonetheless. I was 'realizing' that music was 'different' from other things in life.
I am a musician. I didn't know I would be so when I was young. I do know that I have always heard music in my head that I wasn't hearing somewhere else and I 'needed' this music. And obedient to the laws of nature, I created into this vacuum.
If you ask someone if they like music, they look at you strangely. It seems to be a universal given. Like asking someone if they like breathing. It is like breathing. Or air, rather. Flowing without and within. A matrix within which our lives are set. The setting for the tableware of our beings.
Music is gathering. Taking our scattered thoughts and senses and coalescing us back into our core. Music is powerful. The first few chords can change us where no self-help books can.
Since the music industry cracked and fell apart, gasping for the cash flow it had come to expect, much re-thinking has been the order of the day. It is a fine time to be a musician. Like walking through Sodom and Gomorrah while it is still smoking, on your way to the next gig.
Harmony is when the sum is greater than the parts. A happy exaggeration.
I have had the good fortune to experience both the limelight and the traffic light as a musician. I did my first recording on my own and it was available at concerts. The second to seventh were released on small and then large labels. My eighth to 14th were done under my own steam once again, but with the benefit of the Internet.
Anything that activates the joy center in the brain makes you happy, and therefore protects you. Oddly enough, that's what they do in 'Harry Potter': The nurse gives the kids chocolates when they've been near the Dementors!
The gym of life has a free membership. Build powerful life-muscles through family gatherings from hell. Do you really want to be a happy, peaceful blob?
I tour alone. There's no sound check, no back up. I stay with the hosts; I am in a family home and it's really nourishing. I just have to remember after the show not to run out into the living room in my pyjamas. Every day, it's a new relationship being built. It's odd and wonderful.
I don't make decisions with my head anymore. If I don't get the go ahead with my gut, I usually back out.
I felt old when I was young and I feel younger now. Maybe that's a trick of my mind, but I'm springier and lighter.
We live in a world where the laws are getting so tight that management has changed to micro-management to quantum-management to paralysis.
Acceptable food rots while we are chased from bins behind restaurants, chased from sleeping on the street, chased from relieving ourselves unless we pay for food or gas, until finally we are so hungry, sleepless, smelly, constipated and beaten-down that we simply die of lack of will to live.
I started feeling it was wrong to withhold my music for money - as strange as that might sound!
I am part of an age-old profession of musicianship. I believe these times require grounding, real-ness and fun. Let's do it. Whatever happens is all good.
I think judgment is from within. It's not a God judging. Someone who is nasty - they're the one who has to sleep at night.
As far as I understand, the Second Coming is already here. It's a consciousness. It is not someone who is going to arrive and land in a clearing in the forest. The Hell that they talk of is going to be people creating their own unhappiness, a Hell on Earth.
I'd like to see the Second Coming in every one of us. That we all be Jesus. That we all embody that consciousness.
Definitely I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell, and I think she is a wonderful writer, so she is probably part of me.
I found it stimulating to study the sciences. It was a side of understanding the universe that I hadn't been exposed to.
I try not to agonize over my lyrics, though, because that can come across in them. Some lyrics come more easily than others and some you have to spend a lot of time on, but I think you have to watch that you don't take the life out of them by worrying too much.
Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.
So many of my friends are still trying to get record deals, and I've had one for 10 years now, where my only goal is to make the best music I can make. I've been very lucky. I have great faith that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, and whatever happens is going to be absolutely right for me.
I was raised on pop music. Anything classical ran together in a complicated blur.
I've always loved acoustic music because I've always loved to hear someone's words or just watch them and just get into them. The distancing thing about rock is it's so assaulting.
I try to make my music have the quiet spaces of folk, the intimacy, and the energy of rock.
Everything I write is highly personal, but put in such a way that it's not dropping everything in someone's lap. Although sometimes I think 'The Taxi Ride' embarrasses me, because sometimes I think it's too close.
I always seem to find myself fighting the law of equilibrium - the great leveling force that brings things to the mean and takes the 'cartoonishness' out of life. Perhaps I am doing a very unnatural thing... If Einstein were still alive I would ask him about it.
Ultimately you understand there is order in the universe, even if there is no order in your immediate circumstances.Collection: Inspirational
It takes forever if you go by inertia.Collection: Forever
You can't chop down a symmetryCollection: Symmetry
I tell everyone a different story. That way nothing's ever boring, even when they turn and say goodbye.Collection: Goodbye
I tour alone. There's no sound check, no back up. I stay with the hosts I am in a family home and it's really nourishing. I just have to remember after the show not to run out into the living room in my pyjamas. Every day, it's a new relationship being built. It's odd and wonderful.Collection: Running
Though the night seems long, you're tears won't fall forever.Collection: Fall