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Sass Jordan and Racine Revisited |
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Racine Revisited
is a fabulous new album from Rock singer and songwriter Sass Jordan. The
original album Racine was
first recorded in 1992 and Jordan refers to it as her most successful
album to date. The new album is not simply the same songs remastered or
remixed, but instead the decision was made not to go back to 1992, but
to record all of the songs again only this time as though they were
being recorded in 1975.
“We did that on purpose, because the question that I had to the people I
was working with was, why the hell would anyone want to buy a record
that they already have? We wanted people to talk about 2017 is the 25th
anniversary of the release of that record. That record was a big record
for me. I think it was the biggest record that I ever did. There are a
lot of fans that were directly affected in some way.
I said if we record it again, let’s put a twist on it. Instead of
bringing it up to date and making it sound all spangly (This word is a
Jordanism) fresh in 2017 why don’t we make it sound as much as possible
and to the best of our ability as if it was recorded in 1975. Let’s
record it as if we were in 1975.
There aren’t any click tracks and there isn’t any Auto-Tune. We adhered
as much as we could to the idea that it was 1975 and not 1992 and not
2017. That is when I would love to have made this record,” says Jordan.
“It (“Make You A Believer”) is the centerpiece of the album and when
that song came out every other song followed in quick succession (as far
as being written). When that song was written the record labels gave us
a tremendous and strong reaction, as well as the agent and the
publisher. They were like wow this is a knockout. We love this song.
The song felt
right. It almost wrote itself. I had gone to a party with my manager
Lisa and I met this guy named Ron Bloom who was a songwriter and a
producer (Jo Dee Messina, Air Supply) and he had produced a record for
Princess Stéphanie of Monaco (The
record was simply called Stephanie and was released in 1991.) It was
a hit record. Anyway, I met Ron at this party and he said I am going to
tell you what southern phrasing is. I remember going okay. Then he told
me this long story about how all of the southern Gospel singers and the
Memphis horn guys recorded at Muscle Shoals in Alabama.
It is all from that southern area like Tennessee, Alabama and
Georgia. The southern phrasing that he showed to me was the coolest
thing I have ever, ever heard. All of a sudden I understood Joe Cocker,
because you didn’t have to be southern to sing that phrasing. Clearly
I’m not. You just had to know what it was. You wouldn’t be able to
identify it unless you were a singer and you were really interested in
that kind of a thing. It stayed inside me percolating and it finally
came out in the song “Make You A Believer.” It is like it wrote itself.
It had been sitting inside of me stewing and getting ready and all of a
sudden it just burst out and that is the song that it burst out on. It
is one of my most successful songs ever,” she says.
When I was growing up I was listening to all of these insane records
like Big Pink by The Band or
the Allman Brothers Eat A Peach
(released in 1972). The Band wrote
Big Pink when they lived in a
house in upstate New York (the
recording took place in studios in New York City and Los Angeles).
The name of the house was Big Pink. I had all these romantic notions of
The Allman Brothers and Bonnie Raitt that they were all living in houses
together, with children and dogs and chickens. There was this hippy
dippy commune family environment and they were making the records as
they lived in these social experiments,” she says, explaining how she
envisioned that time in music.
Continuing, Jordan says, “That is precisely what I was trying to do
(envision that) and it is what gave me the energy and the excitement,
while Racine Revisited.
To be honest I think it is better than the original, because it sounds
more genuine to me. It sounds like a weird thing to say. The songs are
grown up children now. They are all adults. I see songs as children and
with some of these grown up children I wanted to see what happened in
their lives. One of them became a banker, one of them is living on the
streets and one of them is married with children. What happened to these
kids? That is how you explore them.
I have been living with these songs for twenty-five years and
playing them live for twenty-five years. When I originally wrote them I
didn’t get a chance to perform them before we recorded them. Some of the
original arrangements did not lend themselves to live performances
particularly well and they had to be tweaked live. We took the live
versions that we have been doing for years and we used them instead on
this new recording.”
When Sass Jordan released her debut record
Tell Somebody in 1988 on
Atlantic Records there were not a lot of women solo Rock artists or
women fronting Rock bands who were well-known.
The former Billboard Female Rock Artist of the Year says, “Women
generally are not accepted in the Rock genre. It’s not really a big
genre for women. There was Chrissie Hynde. There were quite a few, but
not well-known and the reason is it was such an aggressive genre and
culturally we were not ready for females to show that kind of aggression
and rawness when I was starting out. I think it is changing dramatically
now. Now all the Pop stars are soft porn stars. It is bizarre to me.
There is a lot of that in “Rock” too, but I see very, very few women and
men that I would consider to be any good. I do this, so it takes a lot
for me to think someone is good. (She
laughs).
My biggest influences were males. I never (really) liked female Rock
singers. I really like bluesy type stuff. My favorite female vocalists
are people like Bonnie Raitt and of course all of the black singers like
Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin, but that’s a whole other
genre and if I could have sung like that, you would never have caught me
dead doing this. The male singers who were my biggest influences were
people like Steven Tyler, Robert Palmer and Paul Rodgers. These guys
have such command of rhythm and it is rhythm that makes a great singer,
just like it is rhythm makes a great guitar player or a great bass
player or a great drummer. It is astounding how underrecognized that is.
It is all about rhythm, freezing rhythm and timing. Obviously pitch and
the ability to turn a phrase that matters too, but it is rhythm. You can
find that artificially in this day and age with technology like beat
detective and with the recording technique, so you can move the track
over slightly, so it melds in the pocket, mathematically, but a true
singer does it naturally. We didn’t have that technology when I started
out or when any of the guys that were my biggest influences Lou Graham,
Robin Zander, Rod Stewart and Lowell George, the slide guitar player
from Little Feat started out.”
That sense of rhythm is very evident when Sass Jordan sings “Going Back
Again,” which sees her revisiting her roots growing up in Montreal,
Canada. Sass Jordan is not just a good Canadian Rocker; she is a good
Rocker period, End Stop. She deserves to be mentioned in the same breath
as the best Rock singer / songwriters to ever perform on stage or to
record in a studio. Her vocals on “Going Back Again,” are both gritty
and melodic, as she reminisces about her hometown.
“The story (behind) “Going Back Again,” is I had moved to Los Angeles
and all of my roots and everything that was familiar to me was gone. It
doesn’t seem possible, but interestingly enough, moving from a place
like Montreal, Canada to Los Angeles, California there is a culture
shock. It is not the same culturally at all. I grew up with the French
influence and in Los Angles (the influence) is Mexican. It is a whole
different mindset and a different vibration. It is the west coast. It is
even like that in Canada. Vancouver is nothing like Montreal. They are
just different worlds. It is a different pace of life. “Going Back
Again,” was a way for me to be grounded instead of feeling like a
stranger in a strange land. My geographical references in the song that
I sing, “I am going back someday
/ Down by where the river meets the ocean,” well the river does not
meet the ocean in Montreal, but it did sound good in the song and that
is why I used it (Editor’s note:
But the St. Lawrence River does in fact run through Montreal and joins
the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean),” she says.
“You Don’t Have to Remind Me,” is a ballad about a love that ended and
trying to struggle with both being alone and seeing someone else in the
arms of your lover. As several of the songs on Racine Revisited do this
song boasts incredible guitar solos. Also, like so many of the songs on
this album the only thing that keeps you from believing that this was
recorded live before an audience is just that the absence of any sounds
from an audience. Jordan talks about the song, “I wanted something
that would allow me to showcase the intense emotion that we all
experience over relationships gone badly and this is what we came up
with. My dear old pal, Parthenon Huxley contributed the line, “I don’t
need you to bring it home,” because for the life of me, I couldn’t think
of a line there!
I was friends with Timothy Leary. I met him about four years before
(1992) he died. I met him on his seventieth birthday and we became fast,
fast friends. When I wrote “You Don’t Have to Remind Me,” he wasn’t dead
yet, but his energy was with me. I told him that I had written it for
him, even though it is not about him. It was like a little gift to
Timothy. He loved that record when it came out (the original
Racine).”
It is obvious that Sass Jordan is really relishing touring this album
and when we talked to her just before Christmas (2017) she said, “I just
did my last show and this tour has been called the Racine Storyteller
Tour. We have been having the time of our lives and so have the people
who came to see the show. It (consists of) two forty-five minutes sets.
I wrote a bunch of stories about the making of
Racine and about my life in
that time period, 1991 – ’92. I tell a story and then I do a song. Then
I tell another story and we do another song. There is an intermission
and then we do it again for another forty-five minutes. I swear to God
the joy with people laughing and crying and standing ovations it has
been extraordinary and the band said these are the best shows we have
ever done. They all love doing the show. It is semi-acoustic.”
Racine Revisited was released in 2017, because it is the 25th
anniversary of the release of the original album Racine. We wondered how
Sass Jordan has changed or evolved over the years.
“I don’t even know (she laughs),
1992 wasn’t even the same century.
I was a young person trying to find my way I was in a position at
the time that was kind of unusual, because I was doing a job that got a
lot of attention. The negative part of it I suppose would be the
negative attraction that success in this business has for people who
just want to hitch their wagons. There were a lot of people around me at
that time and it was difficult sometimes to weed out the ones who had a
more negative agenda. I experienced a fair amount of disillusionment I
suppose.
As I have become more mature, more experienced and wiser, I am much more
able now to figure out the good vibes from the not so good vibes.
It is much easier for me to understand that.
The other thing is at that time (1992) I didn’t even know how to say no
that’s not good for me. No I don’t want to do that or whatever.
I thought that you had to say
yes to everything, because I had this programming from the time and
culture that I grew up in when you had to make sure that everybody liked
you. No matter what it does to you, you have to do everything so
everybody is happy and to forget about you. It was a kind of programming
that was a part of me and it took a long time to figure that one out.
You want to take control back of your life. You want to do what works
for everybody to the extent that you are not paying the personal price
for it. I think that is the biggest difference between the Sass of 1992
and the Sass of 2017.”
As for her relationship with her fans, she says, “Social media has
revolutionized everything, as far as being an artist and being able to
be directly in touch with the people who enjoy your work. It is
immediate and it is not a letter that somebody sent by snailmail, like
in the olden days. Twitter is instant, Instagram is instant and Facebook
is instant. You have the ability to communicate directly with people and
to access them with the same ease that they can now access you. I prefer
today, although there were a lot of things about the olden days that
were pretty wonderful and most of that was money. There was a lot more
money that was available. The record sales, people used to buy records
and the record company would help you with tour expenses and stuff like
that. You could earn a lot more money that way, but now there is a lot
more direct money available, because you can deal directly with your
customer aka fan, so you can get rid of the middle man in a lot of ways.
There are pros and cons to everything.
Racine Revisited by Sass Jordan is a classic album, which may sound to
say when the original Racine was classic as well, but the new old sound,
the songs that were tweaked from the way they were first recorded in
1992 and the fresh, live feel to the album make this a “must have” for
any serious Rock music fan.
Please take time
to visit
Sass Jordan’s website and you can follow Sass
Jordan on her
Facebook page here.
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The
album opens with “Make You A Believer,” a powerful, vocally driven song,
backed by strong guitars from Chris Caddell and Derek Sharp (The Guess
Who), electric bass by Rudy Sarzo (Queensrÿche, Ozzy Osbourne) and
booming drums and percussion courtesy of Brent Fitz (Alice Cooper,
Streetheart. It is a song that can best be described as Gospel meets
edgy Rock and Sass Jordan says that would be a good way to describe her
vocals, as well with some Blues mixed in for good measure. 