Listen here, sister

Compilation gathers 16 of Atlantic Canada's favorite female artists

Melanie Doane, a candidate for this summer's Lilith Fair, doesn't think the popularity of women singer/songwriters in North America is a phenomenon.

"I think it's finally happening the way it's supposed to happen," says Doane, on the phone from Toronto. "Now it's just the norm. It'll stop being a phenomenon. It'll be, oh, isn't that great music and not, oh look, it's another girl. Isn't she cute? It'll be just listen to this powerful person."

Doane is one of 16 Atlantic Canadian women on My Sister Sings, a new compilation of songs by Atlantic Canadian musicians including: Halifax-born, Vancouver-based Sarah McLachlan; Acadian singer Marie-Jo Thério; Cindy Church, born in Bible Hill, now in Alberta and a member of Quartette; Newfoundland's Pamela Morgan; Gaelic singer Mary Jane Lamond; Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster; singer/songwriter Shirley Eikhard, living in Toronto, raised in Sackville, N.B.; P.E.I.'s Tara MacLean; New Brunswick blues singer Theresa Malenfant; Newfoundland singer/songwriter Colleen Power; Halifax a capella group Four the Moment; and Halifax singer/songwriter Laura Smith.

Lunenburg-based producer Stephen MacDonald started to think about this album two years ago, before Lilith Fair, which was Sarah McLachlan's enormously popular 1997 series of summer concerts featuring women artists, before the album Women and Song, and before the North American supremacy of Canadian women superstars Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion, Alanis Morrisette and Shania Twain.

MacDonald was inspired by an Irish all-women compilation, A Woman's Heart, but today he wonders about this "phenomenon" of Canadian women at the top of the music charts.

"There's a phenomenon happening with women in pop music. Women are happening nationally, internationally and locally and here's an album that is part of that."

Lamond agrees but says it's very hard to know why. "I think Lilith Fair has a lot to do with it," she says from her home in Glendale. "We went through a time in pop music when the sound was a lot harder and there was a lot of alternative music.

"In the case of Lilith Fair I felt it was people wanting to hear music that tends to be more melodic, more kind of emotionally-based. It's very difficult to answer the whys and wherefores of pop music."

Power says there have always been a lot of women singer/songwriters. "There is a growth in that women are getting more of a chance to work. It's a phenomenon in that they are getting more records and airplay."

My Sister Sings is named for Doane's song which starts the album, a song about a sister who "has no voice in this world/She can't be heard but my sister sings/She understands that in this world/It all must change so my sister sings."

The song is about the need for people to connect with their feminine side, says Doane, whose next single off her new album, Adam's Rib, deals with some of the same ideas.

"As a society I feel we are more in touch with our masculine side and in this song I was trying to say I think there was a time when we were in touch with our feminine mother and feminine nuturer, and if all of us could tap into that a little further we could help our society go through what it's going through."

Doane, who grew up in Halifax but lives in Toronto, is really happy her song is the title of the album. "It's female voices and that's what this song's all about and I love that."

MacDonald didn't set out to make a feminist album and this one isn't. There are all types ofmusic: blues, pop, soul, folk, country. The songs are about women, love, music and a struggle for self-worth and self-esteem in a difficult world.

All MacDonald aimed for was a contemporary pop album of songs that he liked, and an album that would make the listener feel he or she was at one concert.

"It was like personal choice. I wanted songs that would go together and not be drastically different. They would flow together and not sound like they were coming together from two totally different universes."

Hence, the songs are not big production numbers full of synthesizers. They are more modest and acoustic. "There were other Tara MacLean cuts I liked but they were big and didn't fit in and I wanted it to be a fairly simple, not overly complicated sound.

"From day one I changed the order one million times but I always had Melanie first and Laura at the end. Laura's song (I Go There) is such a reaffirming song about image and being happy about who you are. It seems a positive note for a woman at the end. I used them as bookends and switched others around."

MacDonald, who used to produce the Cape Breton Summertime Revue and run Festival Centre Bras d'Or, has loved music since he was a kid and has made his own compilations before he got into it as a business.

Born in Truro, he moved to Sydney when he was five and was raised in a musical family. He never studied music except for piano when he was in grade six. "I conveniently broke my arm and never went back."

But he actually has a sister who sings, and has always loved listening to music. "I always had a record collection, I always had a good sound system in my car, I always surrounded myself with music.

"I used to like to put together from my own albums compilation tapes like variety tapes. It was just like a hobby. I would even do little covers for them on the computer, I'd do it up real fancy."

In 1989 he was reading the newspaper and noticed that Tourism Nova Scotia had given 1989 the theme of The Sounds of Nova Scotia.

"I thought I should do a commercial product that ties in with the theme. Rita was soaring then and the Rankins were getting started. I asked the province if I could use the title and even their artwork. It took off right away."

He also released The Sounds of Nova Scotia, Vol. 2, Songs of the Sea, Celtic Colours which tied in with last fall's Celtic Colours Festival, and The Cape Breton Collection, of Cape Breton Celtic music. Now he's thinking of taking a rest from compilations.

"Compilations over the last 10 years have become a very big part of the business and record companies have upped the ante. They have made it more expensive to make. It's just getting to be a very busy, cluttered and financially difficult proposition."

The cover of My Sister Sings is a photograph of a plate of a yellow songbird, made by another one of MacDonald's sisters, Nancy Blanchard MacDonald, a potter in Jemseg, N.B.

"From the outset I had an idea I wanted to use an Atlantic Canadian woman artist and I was asking for suggestions and going to art galleries and looking through books. Meanwhile, I had this set of plates my sister had given me for Christmas two years ago. One suppertime it was staring me in the face. She uses this bird motif; birds sing. She's an Atlantic Canadian artist. I'll use my sister."

For MacDonald, My Sister Sings began with getting Sarah McLachlan, whom he's seen perform but never met.

"I thought it'd be such a bonus if I could get her and I thought it would help with the others. I figured start there and that wasn't much trouble at all. There were no real hurdles other than keeping at it. They were quite particular about what the product was about."

MacDonald chose McLachlan's song Mary from her Fumbling Towards Ecstasy album.

Nettwerk, McLachlan's record company, suggested part of the proceeds from My Sister Sings go to a women's organization. MacDonald agreed and chose Atlantic Women's Fishnet, a network of women in the four Atlantic provinces who work to address the concerns of women in coastal communities affected by the crisis in the fishery. Nettwerk also recommended another one of their singers, P.E.I.'s MacLean, whom MacDonald had heard at the ECMAs in Charlottetown.

Some of the singers on My Sister Sings are still at the beginnings of their career like Colleen Power, a singer/songwriter originally from Freshwater, Placentia Bay. She performed at 5 a.m. at the 76 hour jam during the East Coast Music Awards in Halifax this winter. "There were a lot of people there," Power recalls. "I guess it was the 24-hour bar! For me, just by myself with acoustic guitar after a few bands had played, I was mortified. The response was good."

Power's song on My Sister Sings is not her own. It's from the compilation, 11:11, Newfoundland Women Sing Songs by Ron and Connie Hynes. Power sings Mary Got a Baby about a young woman, Mary, who gets pregnant and is rejected by her community. Power's own songs are different, and she is soon going to demo them with the hopes of getting a solo album.

Other singers on My Sister Sings are on the edge of the big time.

Doane wasn't in Lilith Fair last year, but thinks it'll happen this year. "That's what I've been told. It's something that looks good. This record has opened a lot of doors."

This record is Adam's Rib, recorded in Los Angeles for Sony, and about to be released in Canada, with a U.S. release set "maybe" for the fall. Doane's first Sony record Shakespearean Fish did not go south of the border.

Since September Doane has been living in New York, where her husband, actor Ted Dysktra, has been performing in Two Pianos, Four Hands.

Once Adam's Rib is out, she'll tour across Canada. When the album is released in the U.S. she'll tour there.

"This is kind of a big deal."

Whatever happens this spring and summer, with Dysktra now on his way to the Kennedy Centre, Washington, for a month of Two Pianos, Four Hands, Doane says she and her husband will make a date to meet at least for one night at White Point Beach.

"We always make sure we get here (to Nova Scotia). Last summer we went to White Point Beach Lodge. I just about died and went to heaven. Even if it's just for one night we'll go to White Point. Fly in and meet each other."

(The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, April 2, 1998)