News
STEP RIGHT UP, COUNTRY/POP FANS!
December 12th, 2011
Alberta Based Singer/Songwriter Joanne Janzen brings her wonderfully painful, insightful and infectious "SAD CIRCUS" to life with a crop of Nashville's top session Musicians.
Talk about a juggling act! As an emerging singer/songwriter, performer and recording artist, wife and mother of two young girls, Joanne Janzen has her hands full, doing a high wire act at all times trying to balance her personal life and creative pursuits.
To the delight of country/pop fans everywhere, the Australia born and raised, Alberta, Canada based multi-tasker is perfectly in tune with the three rings of melodic chaos that defines our lives. Her clever phrase for this is also the name of her full length debut album: Sad Circus. Featuring three Janzen originals and seven tunes penned by top Nashville songwriters, it’s a wonderfully painful, emotionally compelling collection that offers a soulful examination of how music can truly fuel all moods--helping us soar when we’re happy and wallow (but not for long!) when we’re down.
With the circus motif running through many of the lyrics, the singer makes the personal universal as she embraces the unique contradictions that real life presents. In her musical world, we are sometimes the clowns and other days the lion tamers, but always the star of our own show with a soundtrack that sums up where we are and our role for the day. One of the best ways to cope with the ichotomy is to give back, and Janzen will be donating a percentage of her royalties from Sad Circus for the next six months to the local cancer charity Relay For Life; she plans to both run and perform at their annual event next spring.
Though Janzen writes and sings as much about the pains and struggles in life (“Hanging By A Thread”) as the joys, her musical career definitely finds her in “A Good Place” as she launches the digital and hard copy release of Sad Circus. Even as her kids proclaimed her the “world’s greatest mom,” they and her husband (whom she met years earlier when she was touring the world with Up With People) encouraged her musical dreams, which began coming true when she won Northlands “Country Vocal Spotlight” and earned a spot in the Global Rising Star program. In one of her first excursions to Tennessee in 2006, she won Female Entertainer and Female Vocalist of the Year awards at the North American Country Music International competition in Pigeon Forge. In 2008, working with top Canadian producer (Bart McKay), she recorded her first official country singles, which received significant airplay on Canadian radio stations.
A few years after earning a Music Business certificate from Berklee College of Music in Boston, Janzen was back in Nashville, working with veteran producer Eddie Gore on choosing songs and recording tracks for the project that evolved into Sad Circus. The self taught singer and guitarist was at first awed, but then held her own, as she worked with some of Music City’s most acclaimed sidemen, including guitarist Tony Obrohta (Wynonna, Gretchen Wilson, Big and Rich, The Wreckers), bassist Dave Roe (Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson) and drummers Keio Stroud(Rodney Crowell) and William Ellis (Montgomery Gentry). Another key component in developing Janzen’s unique circus of country-pop sounds was young keyboardist K.S. Rhoads, whose whimsical performance on keys, melodica, accordion and ukulele (tuned to sound like a mandolin) added dynamic sonic textures that perfectly complemented the singer’s array of raw emotions.
While it’s hard for Janzen to choose any favorite songs on Sad Circus, a few written by other tunesmiths tap into her own wealth of life experiences. Chief among those is Americana artist Lori McKenna’s “Hanging By A Thread,” about the ups and downs and huge challenges of being married in today’s world. It begins with the brilliant line: “We’ve got four walls holding us together and two dreams cutting us in half.” “Me Without You” is a breezy, poppy love song that uses the imagery of an empty ferris wheel and a sad clown to convey a person’s incompleteness without their significant other. Janzen’s own R&B influenced tune “Everybody Knows Better” is about everyone offering their opinions about how we should live our lives—but then there’s that one person who knows us better than anyone. And that’s the one that matters most.
“I think Sad Circus is an extremely accurate representation of where I am at in my life,” Janzen says. “As a 35 year old mother and wife, I am singing about topics that are coming from what I’ve learned over the years. The three songs I wrote—“Everybody Knows Better,” “Hollow” and “You Take Me Home”—are the most direct representations, and my philosophy when choosing outside material was, if I cannot have said every lyric, I won’t sing it. I think listeners will learn that I am more about substance than the money note. It was important to deliver a performance in the studio that came from my heart and soul and not worry so much about how perfect it sounded. This project was completely about honesty and the love of music and melody, and my ability to tell a story through them.”
