Jann Arden: Fave Sonnets, Soundtracks, Novelists
Canada singer on Shakespeare, Mozart, and Great Film Scores
Sep 3, 2008
Jann Arden Loves Prose Writers from Frank McCourt to Henry Miller
Here is an interview excerpt with Canada's Jann Arden circa 2000 after the release of Blood Red Cherry. Jann is a natural wit, but one Saturday afternoon about 2 p.m. in Calgary "sitting at her kitchen table looking out into the abyss, on an endlessly cloud filled day, " her thoughts turned to the profound effect of music and the prose of William Shakespeare.
Your music touches people in a very profound way. I want to know who affects you like that.
Jann Arden: "It would mostly be writers … of prose – whether it’s Frank McCourt or Henry Miller. Just writers that sort of tap into that thing that you are talking about where you can really relate to what they are saying – and you feel like they are talking about your life."
Mozart's Requiem vs Pop Music
"I don’t really think there is anything musically right now that does that for me. I try and be recreational about music. I love it so much. I think classical music would come closer to that than anything. You can’t sit down and listen to Mozart’s Requiem without feeling that enormous sense of loss that he must have been feeling. Pop music these days is pretty homogenized and you are dealing with pretty much the same subtext, plot, theme – maybe it is sort of a drab time for music because I think maybe that commercial radio leads us to believe that, but there’s so much good music out there for instance – The Buena Vista Social Club."
High Fidelity and 70's, 80's 90's Film Scores
Do you like listening to movie soundtracks? Have you heard Amercian Beauty?
Jann Arden: Yes…they are really great! There’s some wonderful soundtracks out there - the High Fidelity soundtrack is really good. I highly recommend that to people that are out there struggling with choices to make as far what music to buy and especially if you have seen the movie – it is nice to have a souvenir of that. But even if you haven’t, a lot of the time, the older soundtracks from the '70s, '80s and ‘90s you’ll find in bargain bins, and I would really recommend picking those up.
Shakespeare's Sonnets
I know you are voracious reader – and you are into the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Fave sonnet?
Jann Arden: "Oh God. That’s impossible to name. I’m not a huge fan of his plays – I guess that’s probably a remnant from high school and of just loathing having to read through Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V, ... Much Ado About Nothing. But I enjoyed the films they have done. I love Roman Polanski’s Macbeth… but Shakespeare’s Sonnets especially – were certainly a tender side to him. He could be very dramatic and very violent and everyone was killing each other, so I guess he was probably writing about the times he was living in too. They were probably very intense and very dramatic and … passionate and I don’t think writing like that survives all these years without it really defining humanity very well."
"But people are overwhelmed by Shakespeare and I would highly recommend picking up a book of sonnets. Often you will see his sonnets in poetry collections but they are understandable. Sometimes you get lost in the semantics of the English at that time – the " thous" and "the thees" and the "thou arts."
"In Shakespeare's sonnets you can really get a sense of what he’s writing about in them. They really are beautiful.. "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day..." And that’s probably the most famous that we have heard over and over and there’s a reason for that too – to compare something this way and that is timeless. Think in those terms now as you would all those hundreds of years ago."
I find the more I see and hear it – the more I understand it.
Jann Arden: "Oh yeah. Once you understand the language, it’s like reading Zora Hurston. She was a writer who wrote in this slang (patois). Or try reading Trainspotting – when a writer writes and sometimes writes the slang into it, that can be really overwhelming and I think Shakespeare strikes a lot of people that way too. When you get a sense of how the rhythm of that language and how plain it can be, that you sort of understand it."
"It’s the same with song writing – when you find a favorite writer whether it’s Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell or Ron Sexsmith, you understand their body of work and how they write and different phrases they use time and time again to express different things so it’s just getting use to something and that’s why when you try and change, sometimes you rock the boat with people… and they don’t like that much."
Jann Arden performs at The Canadian Country Music Awards Sunday Sept 13. 2009. New Release Free comes out Sept 29, 2009..
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