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Warnes promises intimate concert experience
Credits her success to 'never being bigger than the song'
Peter North , Freelance
Published: Thursday, September 25, 2008
JENNIFER WARNES

When/where: Edmonton, Saturday, 7:30 p.m. at Festival Place (sold out), Monday at Winspear Centre, 8 p.m.

EDMONTON - After 40 years of unwavering commitment to songwriting and singing, one can safely assume that Jennifer Warnes believes there is much to be said for quality over quantity.

Blessed with a remarkable voice and driven to write lyrics with a complete emotional connection, the acclaimed artist has produced only eight albums and a handful of singles, including Right Time of the Night and I Know A Heartache When I See One in the '70s.

Warnes' powerful, nuance-filled performances on three standout songs for the films Norma Rae (It Goes Like It Goes), An Officer and A Gentlemen (Up Where We Belong with Joe Cocker) and Dirty Dancing (I've Had The Time of My Life with Bill Medley) kept her in the limelight during the '80s, as did her 1986 recording Famous Blue Raincoat. It saw Warnes injecting her soul into some of her favourite Leonard Cohen songs.

She has marched to the beat of a different drummer. If branded by some as difficult, Warnes makes few apologies.

"I learned from renegade thinkers. I was mentored by friends like Jackson Browne and haven't succumbed to the sleaziness of the business. I have a cynical edge. We do live in a basket of snakes here," says the 61-year-old, who makes her home in Los Angeles. She hasn't recorded or released a new album since The Well in 2001.

Over the course of a 40-minute conversation, the gracious singer touched on elements of her life that ranged from the recent release of the 20th-anniversary edition of Famous Blue Raincoat, to her days as a youngster under the tutelage of two nuns, to insights about her parents.

She is a poet herself and has cradled the works of celebrated poets including Cohen, which has likely had an effect on her economy of words. Her long-time Canadian poet friend and collaborator shared his advice with Warnes when she was preparing the anniversary edition of Famous Blue Raincoat. It will include three previously unreleased studio tracks and a live version of Joan of Arc.

"Leonard told me he thought it was a ghoulish haunting of the vaults and that the best stuff was already on there," laughed Warnes.

Asked if another album is on the horizon, Warnes talks of "archiving the last 40 years of my recorded work" and "scanning 13,000 photos in the last six years."

"They are starting to speak to me and something will come of that."

Last year, she contributed a stunning interpretation of Blue Mountains of Mexico to the Ian Tyson tribute album The Gift. She and her road band have been working up the tune for her Alberta performances.

Warnes also speaks of religiously taking stock of and reviewing one's day.

"If you are attracted to something it needs to be spoken to. I've been going through my dad's eight-mm honeymoon films, at times frame by frame, and crying. There's a gracefulness of the past that I long for," adds Warnes, whose father died of a heart attack when she was only in Grade 4. It was around the same time that Sister Mary Mark Lowenstein pointed her in a direction that became a lifelong journey with song.

She was essentially taught to "never be bigger than the song." Warnes says her fans can expect "very intimate concerts. Quiet little sets where we concentrate on the song's meaning. It's another maiden voyage."

Indeed, this is a rare chance to catch Warnes, who hasn't been on the road for six years. And she's coming to a city where she has a bit of history.

Three decades ago, she performed a few times on the Tommy Banks television talk/variety show. In the ensuing years, she would return to town to buy her knitting wool at a little shop in northeast Edmonton.

It's one of a few Canadian connections. She laughs when talking about her "famous blue dishes" from Montreal and her "golden lab retriever" from Ontario.

"And I was born in Seattle so my blood will be happy in the chill."

© The Edmonton Journal 2008

Concert Review: Jennifer Warnes
Tom Murray, Special to the Journal
Published: Sunday, September 28
Jennifer Warnes, with Steve Postell
Where: Festival Place, Sherwood Park
Last night
EDMONTON - It's hard to imagine what might have happened to Jennifer Warnes if she hadn't by chance met Leonard Cohen at the start of both of their careers.

Something really awful, no doubt - as anyone who ever had to sit through the heyday of the unbearable Up Where We Belong would attest. Ms. Warnes is a professional, perfectly fine with recording bland, middle-of-the-road crap if it should fall on her doorstep, but also capable of probing interpretations of other songwriter's material - especially Cohen's.

That's the dichotomy you work with when you see Jennifer Warnes - and something you have to consider, regardless of whether you might debate that Up Where We Belong is actually a good tune (wrong!). Her catalogue has equal parts treacle and treasure in it - and thankfully her sold out performance at Sherwood Park's Festival Place last night saw her leaning to the latter for choices.

From the perspective of someone used to mainly hearing her glossier recordings Warnes was frankly a revelation in performance. Not only a tasteful singer - with nary a hint of expected over vocalizing - Warnes' voice is also much warmer, helped along by a talented trio providing organic aural backdrop. No drums, just keyboards, guitar and bass, with occasional touches of accordion, mandolin and lap steel, allowing Warnes plenty of open space in which to work.

The singer-songwriter - who will also be performing Monday night at the Winspear - pulled together an impressive set list full of surprises and apt, intelligent cover choices, light on the better known tunes but still full of crowd pleasers. Her own efforts - The Well, Lights of Louisianne - were slight in comparison to Dave Mason's Words or Allen Toussaint's It's Raining, but still satisfying. The bombastic '80s movie blockbuster hits (Up Where We Belong, Time of My Life) were mercifully missing - though her sidemen may have made them somewhat more palatable - but she did get in a grooving, subdued version of her first number one, Right Time of the Night.

The centerpiece of the evening was a song left off the original release of her massively successful album of Cohen covers, Famous Blue Raincoat, only now seeing the light of day on this year's re-mastered (with extra songs) release - the epic Ballad of the Absent Mare. Fourteen verses long with no chorus, hung on the bare bones of a piano line with Jeff Pevar providing spare country bass line, it could have dragged miserably but it was actually quite enthralling, even magical, the hushed crowd hanging on every word.

© Edmonton Journal 2008