"I sing a lot without any words, because for me, music is a language, basically. I don't always need to hear words. Music makes you feel something, makes you think about so much images, and i think i can express myself more with the music than words." (Jorane)
Jorane is a French Canadian chanteuse who accompanies herself on cello. I've seen her perform live twice and both times she was captivating and having something vibrantly special. That said, like many musical artists, her early material seems to me her best. (But I'm open to change my opinion) There is a brash intensity, playful self-indulgent gallic charm such that she can be mischievous elf in one moment and dark siren in the next. Her music tends to be a little more on the darker side, but still it is difficult to describe or classify as even Jorane herself says this.
"It's a bit like my story life ! The first album was said to be unclassable, but in real life, I think people always considered me as unclassable too. In high school a friend of mine told me : "Jo, it's an eternal handing-over in question !" I think she was right."
"What feeds me? Life, travels, all these people that I meet on the road, landscapes, nature, a lot." ... "My Christian name is Johanne but during a trip of co-operation [to construct a school] in Haiti, the children changed all our names. It was like a game for them and I decided to keep the name that they gave me. It was a strong moment for me, it became a name that means a lot to me. I would not have changed for any other name. I wrote a piece, Elmita, on a woman that I met over there. These Haitian women and these mothers touched me because they are very strong, very proud, it seems like the whole country rests on their shoulders."Name changes in many cultures are rites of passage and movement to one stage to another. In the Biblical story Abram became Abraham, Jacob Israel, and Saul Paul to name a few. Haiti left its mark on Jorane in a name change. But also something much deeper. Following on from my thoughts on The Motorcycle Diaries somehow I think unless we let the world touch us, to open us to other possibilities or other alternative realities then despair and ultimately death is all there is.
I think one of her strengths is when she moves to singing becoming sound music rather than word music, she enters a deeper realm of the psyche and moves towards the ineffable, which incidentally is the title of one of her tracks.(click to play at Youtube) But it is not a road of gentleness and serenity but rougher and with twists and turns and undulations. In the faith journey there is a point when questioning and even language loses its importance and what we are left with is raw stripped down faith, a moment when we are called analogously to take music or life seriously.
