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Jessica Rhaye returns after six years
Times & Transcript October 17, 2006 By Eric Lewis Good things come to those who wait. And if you're a fan of Saint John singer-songwriter Jessica Rhaye, you waited a long time. After a six year gap since her debut self-titled album, Jessica's sophomore album Short Stories is now out on her own label, Jessica Rhaye Music, and is available through her website and at her shows.It will be on sale at her CD release show at the Riverview Arts Centre, this Sunday (Oct. 22). Jessica has been keeping busy since release of her debut album. She runs a freelance graphic design business, Creative Graphic Design, for starters. She's also kept busy playing shows at the North-by-Northeast Festival, the Canadian Country Music Awards, the East Coast Music Awards and in Niger, Africa, in December of last year. So the three-time East Coast Music Award nominee and finalist in the folk category of the International John Lennon Songwriting Competition knew there would be a wait between albums. She admits though, even she didn't realize the wait would be this long. "I knew it would take a while to sit down and write the songs. I'm not the kind of songwriter who writes every day, and I don't have a big backlog of songs like some songwriters probably do. So I knew it would take a while, but I guess I didn't expect it would take this long." Shortly after her first album was released in 2000, she began working with producer Ed Woodsworth in Cape Breton. They met at the East Coast Music Awards in 2000 and decided to work on some of her songs. Once they starting demoing tunes, Jessica knew she wanted to work on the album with him. "Eddie hadn't really produced other full length releases, so we didn't choose him based on a body of work. But he really liked my songs." Jessica says while she had final say over the direction of the album, Ed had a major hand in the work. "I just told him, 'you do what you think you have to do' with the production of it." What she wanted out of the album was something, "Very organic. Music that we could easily strip down and play acoustically if we wanted to." She says it was an awesome experience, staying for a few weeks at a time in Cape Breton with the musicians who played on the record. She even had some guests, including the Jimmy Swift Band's Craig Mercer who played guitar on a track, Maritime bluegrass star J.P. Cormier who played banjo on a track, and award winning songwriter and producer Gordie Sampson who played guitar and piano on a few tracks and even recorded some of the album. The result is an album that mixes folk and pop and would fit well alongside artists like Jewel, Sarah McLachlan and Vanessa Carlton on radio and TV. Jessica says with Short Stories she hopes to build a base and add to her name. Since she is only selling the disc on her website she is working to increase traffic to the site. She says she can't really compare Short Stories to her self-titled album as they are quite different from each other. "A lot of artists will say, 'Oh, my first album is terrible. Listen to me now, I'm much cooler now,'" she says with a laugh. "But I won't say my first album is bad. We didn't really know what to expect. My first record was very safe. I was very green." She describes her new record as more mature than her debut. "It's just kind of dawning on me that it's out there now," she says with a laugh. "It's a little scary, I have to be ready for criticism. Not everybody is going to love it. But I'm tough." |