- Jill Barber, part of the Electric Evenings series, at North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre, Friday, Dec. 2 at 7: 30 p.m. Tickets: $30/$27, visit www. centennialtheatre.com.
2011 has been kind to acclaimed singer/songwriter Jill Barber.
The Vancouver-based recording artist's fourth album, Mischievous Moon, was released in the spring and debuted at No. 1 on the Soundscan Jazz Charts, remaining there for 13 straight weeks. Months after its release, the record has yet to fall below No. 5. The effort also claimed the top spot on the iTunes Jazz Charts for three months.
Barber is currently in the midst of her most extensive headlining tour to date, one she's dubbed "best tour ever."
"It really feels wonderful to kind of sweep across the country with this new record and to gauge the reaction that it's getting from city to city," she says. "It just really feels now like a lot of my hard work over the years, touring, is paying off."
Barber and her band made a stop in Coquitlam last evening at the Evergreen Cultural Centre, and they're set to play North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre tonight. The singer, originally from Port Credit, Ont., though who has also called Kingston, Ont., and Halifax, Nova Scotia home, is excited about the local performance as the North Shore is where her husband, CBC Radio personality Grant Lawrence, grew up. Lawrence's parents, Jean and Garth, still call Dundarave home.
No rest for the weary, Barber's tour will then take her and her band to Maple Ridge's The ACT on Sunday.
2012 is shaping up to be just as hectic, seeing Barber return to France for a month in January to continue her French-language studies. Mischievous Moon's first single, "Dis-Moi/Tell Me," was released in both English and French, a means of reaching out to her growing French-speaking audience.
In the spring, Barber plans to return to The Banff Centre, a place she thinks of as her "creative rehab," as it gives her an opportunity to get away from it all, and focus and be inspired to write songs. She completed successful artist residencies there in the lead-up to Mischievous Moon, as well as its predecessor, 2008's Chances. Barber is set to tour the United States, also in the spring, then come summer she'll head back into the studio to record her fifth album, with an anticipated release in early 2013.
The North Shore News caught up with Barber during a recent tour stop in Prince George.
North Shore News: Mischievous Moon has been well-received. What does that mean to you?
Jill Barber: It's been wonderful. It certainly is encouraging for me. I'm constantly trying to build a career in music so with every record my hope is that I can make new fans and keep the old ones. I think it's been doing that precisely. I think it's kind of reached new ears and challenged some of the long-standing supporters of mine. So it's been great. And most importantly it's keeping me busy and it's keeping me in doing what I love. I feel really happy.
North Shore News: How did the album come together?
Jill Barber: It came together over the course of about a year I guess from starting to really delve into writing songs to putting out the finished product. I realize now as I get deeper and deeper into my career that I totally go in cycles and right now I'm in the thick of touring and promoting and I'm actually booking off time this spring to go back to the writing process. . . . The making of Mischievous Moon was definitely started with the very intimate process of me writing or co-writing with someone and then working with my producer to decide what kind of record we wanted to make, how we wanted it to sound and how we wanted to dress up these songs. And the recording process was quite lengthy because it's an ambitious kind of record and there's lots of instruments and orchestration and arrangements that had to be written and then performed by string sections and horn sections.
North Shore News: Does Mischievous Moon mark or cement a new musical direction for you?
Jill Barber: I think all it marks or cements is where I was at when I made the record. . . . I've made Mischievous Moon now and for my next record I'm going to want to do something different. I can't say how different, I mean stylistically I'm certainly heading down a certain path and I will continue to explore that path but I feel like it's important with each record to experiment a little bit with musical ideas. I'm sure that my next record will be distinct from this one.
North Shore News: I've read you aim to charm audiences by weaving a romantic spell. What role does romance play in your life and career?
Jill Barber: A huge role. Sometimes I wonder. I don't know why romance figures so prominently in my music or in my life but I think it just has something to do with the way I'm happiest. I'm happiest living life where I follow my heart and where I can show my heart to others. . . . It figures prominently for me, certainly in my music but also in my life and certainly in the music that I listen to most. I want music to romance me and to seduce me. I want to get swept away in it when I listen to music and I suppose when I make music I want other people to get swept away in it, in the romance of it all.
North Shore News: What musicians do you look to for inspiration?
Jill Barber: I look to a combination of close peers, people that I love and respect and know personally, people like my brother (Matthew Barber) and artists like Rose Cousins or David Myles or Jenn Grant, great songwriters who keep making music that I love and respect. Kind of a combination between my contemporaries and then these old, often times dead, people that have left behind this incredible legacy of music, people like Ella Fitzgerald or Edith Piaf or Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole. I kind of cherry-pick my artists that influence me and I think I wear a lot of those influences on my sleeve.
North Shore News: The holidays are approaching. Are they a special time of year for you?
Jill Barber: I love Christmas. Are you kidding? I love it. Speaking of romance, Christmas I would say is the most romantic holiday, more so than Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day has nothing on Christmas in terms of romance and nostalgia and love and family and coming-togetherness and that kind of thing. I love Christmas, I love the holidays and I love Christmas music.
North Shore News: What are your favourite Christmas albums or songs?
Jill Barber: I would say the Bing Crosby White Christmas album is probably the No. 1 classic Christmas album for me. Also, The Muppets Christmas with John Denver. My brother and I grew up listening to that on vinyl and it's such a great album, I love that. Ella Fitzgerald has a great Christmas album that I have on my iTunes and occasionally it starts playing throughout the year and I still enjoy it.
North Shore News: Do you have any holiday traditions you adhere to annually?
Jill Barber: Lots of libations. Lots of eating, drinking and music and family of course. I have an amazing family and also now I have two amazing families because I'm now married and have a new family and am now becoming part of their Christmas traditions.
North Shore News: Your show at North Vancouver's Centennial Theatre is a homecoming of sorts as your in-laws call the North Shore home. Does that make the performance more special for you?
Jill Barber: Absolutely. Vancouver, and West Vancouver being where Grant comes from, has definitely become a home for me. Of course I love the North Shore because it produced the man I love and I'm getting to know it more and more. Grant and I got married in West Vancouver (the ceremony was held at St. Francisin-the-Wood and the reception was at the Salmon House on the Hill) so it's special for me for that reason as well. . . . My motherin-law put word out to all of her friends about my show and I think she purchased a block of possibly 40 tickets to the show and she's hosting a wine and cheese in her home before. I have very supportive in-laws and they're very excited that I'm playing the North Shore.
North Shore News: What kind of a performance can we expect? Jill Barber: If I can be so bold as to say we're going to be on fire by then because we've been on tour all this fall so myself and the five guys in my band, we're like a well-oiled machine, we kind of work as one. That's something that's so nice about being on tour is you just get into a total rhythm. It's a really cool thing. We're up there communicating telepathically almost at this point. It's pretty cool to have been on tour for this amount of time and played this amount of shows. . . . Given the fact that it's kind of a hometown show of sorts I know that it will just give us that extra edge to present our show with great charisma and pizzazz.
