Jane Siberry

“I try to make my music have the quiet spaces of folk, the intimacy, and the energy of rock.”

“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 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!”

“I started feeling it was wrong to withhold my music for money - as strange as that might sound!”

“I'm not a household word. The climate for original music is always a bit difficult.”

“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!”

“I'd like to see the Second Coming in every one of us. That we all be Jesus. That we all embody that consciousness.”

“Every night is different, a ball of thread that unrolls differently.”

“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.”

“'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Definitely I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell, and I think she is a wonderful writer, so she is probably part of me.”

“I was raised on pop music. Anything classical ran together in a complicated blur.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”