root salad f18 Sarah Jane Scouten
Country, folk, blues, rockabilly and more. And over here soon. Tony Montague investigates.
British audiences are. I’m really looking for- ward to being back in October – my fourth tour, and the first with a larger band. We do three weeks together, then I do some dates opening for the Paperboys.”
As for Rosehips For Scurvy, the lilting old-timey waltz belies a dark – almost mediæval – thread running through it, as: “The worms will come and eat me / and they make not a sound / And all the ravens and the magpies / eat the worms up by the pound / And the coyotes eat the mag- pies…” Bon appétit. The song is also painfully personal. In the final verse a little black dog appears who follows the singer everywhere and “wails upon the sorrow that he smells upon the air”. Fido belongs to the family, but ain’t no pet.
“M
arah Jane Scouten likes songs that travel, picking up musical influ- ences and lyrical allusions on their way to finding shape and form. So the compositions on her third album When The Bloom Falls From The Rose are drawn from far and wide – old country songs, Appalachian tunes, Anglo-Celtic folk, coun- try blues, western swing, rockabilly, Louisiana honky tonk.
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“I appreciate having a broad palette – and other artists with one,” says the Van- couver-raised, Toronto-based, songwriter and guitarist. “I think of a set of music or record as a piece of theatre. It has to go on a journey. The song too. One of my pet peeves is listening to a song that has noth- ing really to distinguish it from the songs before. In my late teens and early twenties I was very much into theatre and took a lot of classes. I like to apply that, and think of songs as monologues and shows as a the- atrical performance.”
When The Bloom Falls From The Rose is appropriately varied in pace, theme, and mood. The slow and torchy country opener Acre Of Shells is followed by the solid beats and noisy electric guitar of Bang Bang. “That’s an odd one – like Wanda Jackson meets Memphis Minnie. I was listening to Memphis Minnie at the time, and her clever, dirty blues: ‘You think I’m talking about this, but I’m actually talking about that’. Things that couldn’t be sung onstage in the ’20s and ’30s. There’s such a goldmine of music out there that’s really empowering for women to sing – stuff that makes me blush.”
Scouten can be a quirky writer. Bang
Bang, for instance, references Edward VIII’s controversial American wife Wallis Simpson. “It was for audiences in the UK. I lived in Cardiff for a year and I’m quite the Britophile – if that’s a word. I wrote that in Aberdeen, so I was thinking about British history, hence the line ‘My name is Simpson you can call me Wallis’. I love how attentive
y grandfather was kind of a morose guy. He’d go off into his shed and deal with his depression and
say he had ‘the black dog’. The dog in the song isn’t just his though – it’s the family’s. All of the Scoutens have it to varying degrees. I dealt with it in my twenties, but it occasionally raises its head. What inspired me to write about rosehips was my burgeoning interest in herbal medicine. My best friend is a naturopath and steered me off going back onto antidepressants when I was feeling pretty messed up. We got these tinctures of different sedative herbs and they got me to a place where I could cope, so that was the impetus to write that song.”
The image in the title song of When The Bloom Falls From The Rose – an uptem- po country-rocker about love in vain – has become symbolic in a different way. “I have so much fun singing that song because it’s basically pop. I worried, because I knew that when I presented it to my record label they were going to love it! The guy lived in Okla- homa and I lived nowhere at the time – sort of Montreal. I realised early it wasn’t going to work because we were both pursuing these hell-bent music careers.”
“But the title has taken on a larger meaning for me, essentially hitting this point in my career where I’ve got to weigh all choices carefully and not say yes to every- thing. The bloom fell off the rose as far as the illusory aspect of being a touring musi- cian. Now it’s the reality – and though it’s hard work I like that better.”
Sarah Jane Scouten tours in the UK throughout October and into November. See news pages for dates, and
sarahjanescouten.com
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