Page 20 - Real Style September 2018

Jann Arden
don’t even understand the process at all. I know some people are very articulate about how they write their songs and how they go about it, but I have no idea. Maybe it’s because I don’t read music, so I have no theoretical understanding of music at all. I don’t even know what chords I’m playing. I play by ear and it seems to work fine.”
Even when it comes to the music business, Arden says that she has nothing to do with it. “I live in rural Alberta. Once in a while I’ll show up at the Junos, but I don’t know anybody. I’m not a big jammer. I don’t sit in my living room and play guitar with 10 people. It’s just not what I do. I’m not comfortable. I wouldn’t even know how to do that. Mine has been such a soli- tary experience and I like that. It’s what I’m comfort- able with,” she says.
With Arden, you get a real sense that what you see is what you get. She tells it like it is, without sug-
arcoating things. She’s even
the first to admit that music is
not the centre of her life, and
is actually just a little piece of
it. For the last few years, after
her father passed away, she has
been focused on taking care
of her mother, who was diag-
nosed with Alzheimer’s. Arden
even wrote a book about it, called Feeding my Mother, which came out last fall. Arden says that her mother is now in a nursing home, but that “she thinks she’s at home. We made her a little room, which looks al- most exactly like her living room at home. I consider myself very lucky that I can afford to have her where she is. I don’t know what most families do. They suf- fer greatly being caregivers and I mean it’s just awful what they go through. I mean, I looked after my mom here for five or six years and it did me in.”
Still, even with her mother being in a nursing home, Arden visits her every other day. As for writing the book about her experiences with her mom, Arden says she wrote it “because I was mind boggled at how many people were going through the same experience. I think I felt really alone with it all. Alzheimer’s has a lot of shame attached to it. You feel very embarrassed. There’s a lot of fear. I call it my book of mistakes. It’s
a book of things I didn’t get right. And when I finally figured it out, I encouraged people to not figure it out as late as I did. Do something before that.”
With all her experiences Arden has a treasure trove of life lessons to tell the world, which is evident in her journals If I Knew, Don’t You Think I’d Tell You and I’ll Tell You One Damn Thing And That’s All I Know, and her memoir Falling Backwards. Still, even with those, there is more to be said. Even if it does come in the form of a new sitcom that is only loosely based on her life. “It’s a fictional version of me,” Ar- den says about her upcoming CTV show called Jann. “It’s about the music business, but it really focuses on my fictitious family that are dysfunctional and crazy. I have a feeling people are really going to relate to it and have a good time with it.”
While Arden doesn’t anticipate her career end- ing anytime soon, she does acknowledge that she is
fighting a “biological clock” and can’t do it forever. “I will simply be dealing with how my vocal chords are aging,” Ardan says, “and that they just won’t be able to do what they now do. I think when I get to that point where I’m actually having to change keys or even thinking
20 Real Style September 2018
“I’ve gone into the arts
to keep trying things,
to keep pushing myself
further.”
about that, I’ll stop. I’ll bow out.” But even thoughts of a future without music doesn’t seem to get Arden down.
“I’ve gone into the arts to keep trying things, to keep pushing myself further because we’re all going to drop dead anyway,” Arden says. “You might as well swing the bat as hard and as long as you can while you’re here. And help other people when you can, be- cause at the end of the day, living a life of service to other people and to animals and to just not be so hyper focused on what you do is important. I think that’s really made a difference for me this last decade, and my parents taught me that. Their illnesses really woke me up and I think made me into a person that I always aspired to be. And I’m grateful for that.”
We’re grateful too, and although we have enjoyed everything she’s accomplished so far, we look forward to seeing what comes next from Jann Arden.