Sass Jordan Biography

THE CD

Sass Jordan's first love and inspiration was seminal American music and the artists that most reflected its influence. Her latest musical offering, GET WHAT YOU GIVE, is a celebration of the rough-hewn beauty of the genre. Partly recorded in Nashville with much-in-demand blues-roots expert Colin Linden (Bruce Cockburn, Colin James, The Band) in the role of collaborator, player and producer, the process was the exemplification of the simplest of musical partnerships and philosophies. As Sass describes it: "Tone on tone, wide brush strokes on a canvas, pulling the sap up from the roots of country/soul."

In this setting, the accomplished songwriter and singer, whose husky-toned voice People Magazine once described as "pained but indomitable," swaps the poppy vibe of her last studio album for a more rootsy, intimate sound that reflects her early propensity for artists like The Band; Little Feat; Delaney and Bonnie and Friends; Bonnie Raitt; and The Allman Brothers. Linden gives the singer plenty of elbow-room for vocal performances that have an impromptu feel yet are thick with gritty conviction. She is perfectly complemented by the understated contributions of session stalwarts like bassists Bob Babbitt (The Funk Brothers) and Garry Tallent (Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band); drummers Ken Koomer (Wilco) and Bryan Owings (Shelby Lynn); guitarists Colin Linden, Audley Freed (Black Crowes, Jimmy Page) and Gary Nicholson; keyboardist Richard Bell (Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band, The Band); percussionists Gary Craig and John Whynot; and vocalists Richie Kotzen and Derek Sharp.

“This is an exploration of the past 20 years of my musical life, mining all the influences more directly and yet more sideways than ever, because I'm working with Colin Linden who comes at the music from an incredibly fresh and new perspective for me. Working with him was a huge eye-opener and, strangely enough, more my natural way of working. I believe in the moment. The perfection is the moment; that's the raw material right there and for some reason that makes it that much bigger. The possibilities are endless. The sculpture is not totally carved. It's up to the listener to finish it. It's rough around the edges. It's much more like life. It's real. It's not all packaged and polished and Botoxed up. The bottom line is that it connects you emotionally with your history. I picked these songs because they definitely connected with me in those ways.”

Sass' collaboration with Colin Linden had its beginnings in the latter months of 2005 with an idea she had of recording a CD of songs by The Band.

"I talked to Craig Northey from the Odds, Colin James… everybody I talked to in Canada said you should talk to Colin Linden. So his name had been coming up in conversation and we talked to each other twice about doing a project together. As it turns out we had met back in the early '80s when he dropped by to see The Pinups, a band I was in at the time in Montreal. Finally, Colin and I had a meeting and this is the result of our subsequent collaboration."

Sass' constituency on this record is songs about human relationships, which is very much in keeping with the CD's title, GET WHAT YOU GIVE. Though this is the first time she didn't co-write the lion's share of songs on the album, the outside contributions on this opus don't stray far from the plot.

“As well as mining my longtime writing partnership with Derek Sharp, I revisited a lot of old friends and partners on this record: Doyle Bramhall II, Stevie Salas, Richie Kotzen, Audley Freed, Gary Nicholson… My belief is that relationships that last, only get better with age. They become so much richer with shared history, and hence another reason for the title, GET WHAT YOU GIVE.”

THE BIO

Sass Jordan was born in Birmingham, England in the early '60s to a French professor and an actress/ballet dancer. The family, which also included younger brother Daniel, traveled the world before finally settling in Montreal in the late '60s. Along the way, a particularly memorable voyage on a Russian tramp steamer to India marked the beginning of a young girl's exotic adventure that played out, in part, in Pondicherry where she attended a Catholic girl's school and studied the Tamil language. A very youthful Sass made her screen debut in the subsequent NFB documentary, The India Trip.

Sass Jordan first made her name swingin' a mean bass and singing lead with late '70s Montreal New Wave quartet The Pinups, as she began carving out a reputation as a charismatic and exciting vocalist and performer. She embarked on a solo career in the mid-'80s, biding her time initially as she honed her writing skills by contributing material to recording projects by a number of high profile Quebec artists and by handling backing vocals for a variety of acts, most notably The Box. Between forays to New York to scope out the scene there, she became one of the first veejays in Canada as host and interviewer on a Montreal video show, the precursor to MusiquePlus. Her first album, Tell Somebody, filled with joy and naivete, was released in 1988 and brought with it multiple trophies, a Juno Award in Canada, and her first platinum CD.

It was an impressive debut. Her singing and performing talents were enthusiastically promoted almost from the outset by some of the legends of the music world including Gene Simmons of KISS, members of the bands Cheap Trick and Van Halen and the late chart-topping composer Michael Kamen, whose recommendation led to an audition for a lead role as the terrorist in the film Die Hard 3 opposite Bruce Willis. Along the way, there was also a friendship with late counterculture guru, Dr. Timothy Leary.

Into the '90s, and her sophomore disc Racine found Sass coming to terms with "the recognition factor" and a new lifestyle in the U.S. which, from her new base in Los Angeles, saw her gravitate to the southwest and its musical influences. That, combined with her desire to form a band with the swagger of Rod Stewart and the Faces, came together on Racine, the CD that brought her the title of Album Rock's Top Female Artist for 1992 from Billboard magazine and high praise from Creem magazine: "… she sings balls-out rock with a bluesy twinge that'd make Janis Joplin or Maggie Bell proud." There was also a duet with Joe Cocker on The Bodyguard, one of the biggest selling soundtrack albums of all time, and an acting role on the hit TV series Sisters alongside Sela Ward.

Fast forward to her third CD Rats and Sass is in crisis, though she's touring the world with artists like Aerosmith and Whitesnake with a few side trips of her own to exotic locations like Bali and Indonesia. During a five or six year span that began with her move to Los Angeles, she experienced what she dramatically characterizes as "the spiral downwards into the Black Hole of Calcutta." She fired her manager, weathered the deaths of some close friends, entered a financial crisis and endured a very difficult ending to a very difficult relationship.

By the late '90s, though, she had risen like the Phoenix as she met her future husband, musician/songwriter Derek Sharp, and slowly emerged from the abyss. She moved from Los Angeles to a farmhouse in Ontario and, in November of 1997, she gave birth to daughter Stella. She subsequently recorded two more CDs: Present and Hot Gossip, both of which reflected her lightened mood and changed outlook on life as she began to take an on-going and deepening interest in alternative lifestyles and to broaden her horizons as an artist. As an actress, she was featured in the Toronto and Winnipeg productions of The Vagina Monologues before heading for New York to take on the lead role of Janis Joplin in the off-Broadway hit musical, Love Janis. In 2003, the year she took on duties as a judge on the TV ratings blockbuster, Canadian Idol, Jordan shared the stage with The Rolling Stones, AC/DC and others as part of the history-making SARS relief concert in Toronto.

THE SONGS

Shuffle (Derek Sharp/Sass Jordan/Colin Linden)
"'Shuffle' was Derek's music. He was trying to write a song in the vein of The Band and Little Feat because I told him that's what I wanted. So he wrote this great piece of music, not reinventing the wheel in any way, just the straight up goods. We had started recording and we had four days to finish. Colin woke up one morning and had pieces of the lyric. He came in and, while the boys were learning one of the other songs, he gave me what he had and I finished the lyric.”

Have You Ever Seen the Rain (John Fogerty)
A cover of the 1971 hit from late '60s West Coast swamp rockers Creedence Clearwater Revival. “I originally cut 'Have You Ever Seen the Rain?' back in 2000 for a record I was doing for Aquarius Records. Unfortunately, I sounded exactly like a female John Fogerty and I thought, what's the point in doing that? It was the same record. Drummer Randy Cook suggested a change in tempo and he started playing and somebody started playing the guitar. I started singing and everybody joined in and it just sort of happened. We redid that version on this record because it was very compelling. I love taking a classic like this and reworking it in a way that the results end up surprising me.”

How Do I Get It Right (Sass Jordan/Richie Kotzen)
Guitarist Richie Kotzen (Poison, Vertu, Mr. Big), co-writer on "How Do I Get It Right?" is a solo artist in his own right who, in the past, had provided background vocals on Sass' Rats CD.
“I was in Los Angeles earlier this year to meet some friends who were doing a small television show and I wrote this song with my friend Richie Kotzen. He sang on the track, and also on 'The Feeling’s Gone' and 'Natural Disaster.' He's like a guitar god and a soulful, white boy singer. I heard a couple of the songs he had written recently and I'm thinking, 'Hey, that's exactly in my vein.' We got together at his house one afternoon and within about three hours we had a demo of the song right from scratch. I was sitting at his kitchen counter and he was sitting on the island in the middle of the kitchen of his beautiful house in LA. We went and recorded it at his headroom-inc studio… beautiful place. When we were writing the song and the lyric, we had gone out to Poquito Mas to get something to eat and we were talking about those relationships in which you just know before you get started it's going to be another one of 'those'. But you hope that this time it'll be different and it's not the same devil disguised in another outfit. That's the thought behind the line, 'Maybe I'm addicted, maybe I'm just an addict for you.' Richie knew just what I was talking about so we just had the greatest time writing it. Colin loved it. It has two drum tracks on it, very Allman Bros. Let me tell you exactly what I see. I'm in North Carolina, probably around Raleigh-Durham… it could even be in Charlotte. It's 1973; we're out in the country. It's like a commune of hippie types: long hair, flowers in their hair, children everywhere, beer, Gregg Allman. It's Eat A Peach. It's the Allman Brothers, 1973. It's like an afternoon hoedown. There are acoustic guitars and drums are set up on the lawn. There are peach trees and kids running and screaming, everybody's half-tanked. You can smell the fresh cut hay. It's a very Southern vibe. You know that Bonnie Raitt record Street Lights where they all went and lived in the farm house out there? That's exactly the vibe. Not the lyrics, just the vibe. Delaney and Bonnie and Friends. Bonnie Bramlett is a singer that I deeply admire and her daughter, Bekka Bramlett, I love: a really fantastic singer. There aren't too many female singers that I love… Nikka Costa, Mavis Staples, Gladys Knight, Chaka Khan, Ann Peebles, Nanette Workman, Angela McCluskey … I guess there are more than I thought!”

I Want More (Sass Jordan/Derek Sharp)
“This is a song that Derek and I wrote recently. Derek is one of the most enormously talented songwriters I've ever met. He has such an amazing musical sensibility. His songs are very much more that polished gem-type pop song that can be difficult for me to sing well, because you have to have a certain type of voice to sing them. I'm an in-your-face, bluesy, rootsy, off-the-wall, rocky singer. This song is so Traveling Wilburys. It sounds like George Harrison. Me and Colin tried to think of how to make this fit with the rest of the record. We figured, with the guitar, instead of George Harrison we'd go more Lowell George; still a George, but just a different approach. It's such a sly lyric. Other writers will tell you, we don't write lyrics, we channel them… except the shit ones. Those are the ones WE write.”

Terminally Yours (Sass Jordan/Stevie Salas)
Guitarist Stevie Salas (Rod Stewart, Colorcode, Mick Jagger) has been one of Sass' closest musical collaborators over the years having been guitarist and co-writer on her CDs Racine and Rats, the latter which he co-produced. Jordan also contributed vocals and vocal arrangements on Salas' Electric PowWow and Back From the Living CDs. They have also toured extensively together. They wrote "Terminally Yours" in the late '90s.
“Stevie and I have been collaborating since the beginning of the 90s – and this was a song that we wrote later in that decade. I just love it. Lyrically it expresses so much of the unbearable paradox’s that romantic relationships can contain”

Torn In Two (Gary Nicholson/Benmont Tench/Jessi Alexander)
Garland, Texas -born Gary Nicholson, the co-writer of "Torn In Two," is one of Nashville's top tune wranglers, who has just been nominated for induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also a two-time Grammy winner for projects with Delbert McClinton. Benmont Tench is keyboard extraordinaire with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and one of the most in-demand session players in the business. Jessi Alexander is a Nashville-based songwriter and recording artist.
“Gary is another writer I really admire… and I love the man. He had given me a demo of a bunch of songs he had written and I kept hearing that song on the demo. I knew I wanted to do that song. It's totally up my alley; a bar room belter. One of the guitarists on this track is Audley Freed who's another person from my past who suddenly showed up. Audley had a band called Cry of Love with which I had worked for five months back in 1996 in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. For various reasons, it didn’t work out, but I really enjoyed the whole experience. He went on to play with the Black Crowes, both of the Robinson brothers individually and with the Dixie Chicks. Colin said, 'There's a guitar player I'd like to use on the album', and to my complete surprise it was Audley! So there was Audley, Colin, and Gary Nicholson, who's also a guitar player, in the studio. We weren't planning on doing that song but, seeing that Gary was there, I figured this was as good a time as any to give it a shot. So we're scrambling for the lyric… Gary's getting his son to run over with the lyrics. Richard Bell is on the keyboards. We went through it two or three times and it was hair-raising. The whole moment was magical. The lyrics of that song really resonate with me and my girls.”

Love's Like Rain (Colin Linden/Jim Weider)
Woodstock, New York-native Jim Weider, co-writer of "Love's Like Rain," was lead guitarist in The Band between 1985 and 2000 and has performed/recorded with artists like Bob Dylan, Graham Parker, Dr. John, Keith Richards and Paul Butterfield.
"To me, this is just another classic Band song. That was the attraction for me. Colin brought the song in and said, 'Do you want to do this one?' I said, 'Are you kidding? Yeah!' Halfway through the second take of the song, I suddenly heard the old Staples Singers tune, 'Respect Yourself', in my head – so I threw in a little tribute to Mavis in the vamp.”

The Feeling’s Gone (Richie Kotzen/Doyle Bramhall II)
“With 'The Feeling’s Gone,' the first thing that appealed to me was the guitar figure. It knocks me on my ass. It's so deep-fried Southern. It's so Texas, which resonates intensely with me. That guitar lick instantly transported me to my roots. It's a classic, and, lyrically, I've totally been there. Richie Kotzen also recorded it on one of his records.”

Trouble (Sass Jordan/Colin Linden)
Sass had originally written the lyrics for "Trouble" and sent them off to Doyle Bramhall II to see if he wanted to write the music.
“Doyle said, 'Oh yeah, I'd love to write the music!' but he never got around to it as he was super busy working with Eric Clapton and Erykah Badu. When Colin and I were trying to figure out what songs to do for the record, I showed him the lyric. He just pulled out the guitar and started singing it. What was really weird about this particular song -- you know we're both sort of artsy-fartsy, spiritual people -- was that we strongly felt the presence of Rick Danko of The Band. We were actually weeping as Colin was singing it. Rick was one of Colin's close friends and me being such a fan of The Band to the point that I can say that they're one of the main reasons I'm a singer. It was one of those hair-raising moments. I love the song because of that experience, and Richard Bell’s insanely great keyboard playing... Colin KICKS it with the slide solo.”

Natural Disaster (Sass Jordan/Derek Sharp)
"'Natural Disaster' was a really interesting metaphor for describing the utter devastation one can feel from relationships, again exploring one of the recurring themes here. I think the reason I am so interested in relationships is that they are so vital in helping one to explore one's own depths. Relationships are always a microcosm of the macrocosmic relationship with oneself, projected outwards.”

Even (Sass Jordan/Derek Sharp)
"'Even' is a song that Derek and I wrote in about five minutes. It's just a classic blues progression, although Richard Bell makes it sound like it's New Orleans to me. Another one of my great loves is that New Orleans rhythm and sensibility. Dr. John and Professor Longhair and Leon Russell, though he's not from there, he's from Oklahoma but, to me, he's very Big Easy. Here's this classic blue progression and me singing completely wrong for the track. This really shouldn't work, but it totally does."