By the time Jann Arden's second album came out (no download here, hit whatever streaming service you choose), the Herald had changed course from their somewhat negative review, going with this headline profile: [img width=662.5px]//7ca49eb9f67ba1319ef136f9d52cd8b8.cdn.bubble.io/f1726108278104x331929926677750200/richtext_content.jpeg[/img] [b]TIME FOR JANN[/b] [b]Calgary singer Jann Arden is on the highway to fame[/b] By James Muretich Jann Arden sits down at a table in The Roasterie, a coffee hang-out in downtown Cowtown, and immediately the jokes begin. "I enjoy rug hooking and needle point," she says in her best affected bimbo accent. What? Hooking and needles? "I was that close to having to do that. But in this kind of industry you are a kind of hooker, man." The jokes are Arden's way of breaking the ice. Always have been. The lady likes jokes. It's the way she deals with the world, a world that is not always kind, a world of longing and often loneliness that formed the heart and soul of her Juno Award-winning album from last year, Time For Mercy. "Humor is tragic too and I use it as a form of dealing with shyness too. Songwriting is the only place where I can express myself seriously. Everywhere else I bleed in sarcasm and this off-the-cuff blue kind of humor that a lot of people do find offensive. But when I started writing songs, and it's got to be about 15 years ago - I was eight at the time, by the way- that's the way the songs came out." And a lot of people like the way the Calgary artist's songs come out. Arden has a powerful voice. She's in the same league as fellow Albertan k.d. lang or an Annie Lennox. And the people who propelled her debut disc to gold status (sales of more than 50,000 copies) in Canada will likely fall head over heels in love with her new recording, Living Under June, which arrives in stores this coming Wednesday. It has the same pop feel and textured "adult" ballads (including one with Jackson Browne) but the songs are more ambitious and Arden's singing has more conviction and confidence. "I think confidence has a lot to do with it. As far as the first record goes, I love that record very much but, like with any career, you have to start at the beginning. It's a linear process. I couldn't have done the new album without having done the first. "And musically there's more of a backbone to this album, from the playing to the fact that I used a cheap $250 mike as opposed to the $90-million variety we used on the last album. Plus I did a lot of singing in the last year and, like anything, you use it and it gets greased up and works better." Not only is Arden's singing more powerful on Living Under June, it's matched by lyrics that blend honesty and simple observations with emotional integrity. "Hemingway said he started every one of his books with something real and I do try and put that into my songs. Sometimes I don't realize how real they are until about 10 months later when I go, hell, that is me," says Arden. "I'm not saying or doing anything that no one's done before. This is not new musical territory, not a new genre. I've never claimed to do anything but express a point of view, an experience." The most striking song on Living In June is the title track, a poignant slice of Arden's life. "I lived in a basement suite for five years in (Calgary's Mission area) and I wrote a hundred songs in that basement at a desk early in the morning. And I lived beneath June for three of those five years and you can hear everything in that house. Not intentionally but you can't help it. You can hear phone conversations and I heard her life. "The song is about the house and my apartment, my cat that was dying, my corduroy couch... the song is full of those tiny, seemingly insignificant things that set the scene for what it was like being underneath this person, being underneath anyone for that mat- ter. How, it's hard being involved in somebody else's life when you really don't know them but you're sort of forced to be involved because of the circumstances. The other out-of-left-field track is the jazzy Looks Like Rain that ends off the album. "For a singer-songwriter, sometimes it's hard to escape your own techniques all the time. I wanted to leave the album open-ended somehow, to say don't ever think I'm just gonna do this because I don't know what I'm going to write in the future." Aside from her own future, Arden is also a believer in the future of Calgary's music scene, from the young rock bands that spread their posters along 17th Avenue S.W. to songwriters like Anne Loree (whose tune Insensitive she covers). And for her first single, Could I Be Your Girl, she got Calgary's Jeff Weinrich (who won a Juno for an Arden video earlier this year) to direct her new video. "All I have to do in Jeff's videos is stand there. You don't see me doing too much of anything or wearing a gold lame dress or having my breasts strung around my ears. I just stand there and sing the song and he shoots it and makes it look as interesting as possible. The concept footage is to make people think that I'm hipper than I am... and we use that a lot," says Arden, breaking into Valley Girl speak. Arden doesn't have to be hip or trendy. She's a singer-songwriter making her way in the commercial music arena after years of slugging it out as an opening act for anyone and everyone in clubs, like the now-defunct Sparky's. Her new album proves that Time For Mercy was not a fluke. Living Under June is not a mercy listen. It's a strong album from a strong woman with an even stronger voice.
