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Jane Saunders' new album, "In His Hands" is a gift to anyone who loves songs of deep sincerity, sung honestly and beautifully. There are rare singers who do more than simply sing other peoples' songs - they inhabit them. Jane is such a singer. Her professional reputation is unquestioned. With a manner that demands nothing, she commands the respect of her peers and musicians alike. When Jane Saunders takes to the stage, she does so with an understated power that caresses an audience in song.
There are great singers who know it and make sure you know it with their force of delivery, vocal gymnastics and power-patter. But you just get the goods with Jane. Maybe part of the magic comes from her sense of music - any music - as a divine gift. Maybe it comes from the years of being raised around music as part of the landscape, like timber and grass, cottages and fruit sheds. Something real and rustic, with character and grain, something that was part of the family. She grew up in an Open Brethren family who met weekly in a little chapel in the Hawkesbury foothills of the Blue Mountains. Music meant something, music was part of the journey, music and belief went hand in hand.
Sure, there were the LPs and cassettes you'd expect in a Blue Mountains farmhouse record collection. Nashville, Kentucky, Carolina. Steel guitars, flatpicking, fiddles and mandolins. These were the colours of her musical world. But beneath the colours, beneath the hew, lay the real essence that captured her imagination and awakened her exceptional voice - The Songs. As life broadened, Jane picked up the textures of the great singer songwriters - Springsteens, Youngs, Taylors, Fogelbergs, Denvers. Artists who are truly unique become that way through being a palate, where the shades and tones of the masters are blended to create a brand new, captivating picture. Jane's discography to date reveals that journey.
But the latest episode in the unfolding story of Jane Saunders goes back to the wooden chapel at Bilpin where, week after week, enduring song met enduring truth. With neighbours and extended family, Jane would sing the hymns that inevitably brought tears to her grandfather's eyes, comforted the community in its losses and became the musical expression of their shared faith. Simple, enduring melodies. Grand, timelessly true statements, enfolded in tender poetry. Songs sung by apple growers that soared into eternity. "In His Hands" has both the humility and transcendence of the music that echoed out of that little assembly and drifted among the fruit trees and eucalypts on those dusty Sunday mornings.
Jane Saunders' respect for the song and its writer is an integral part of what makes her tick as a singer. The interesting thing is that this new album is a collision of her unswerving song sensibility with her deep faith in Jesus. In a mixture of nature, nurture and divine accident, the two have been part of the fabric of her musical world right from the very beginning. What makes "In His Hands" so exciting is that the two - Jane's heart belief and her refined musical essence - haven't yet met on recording. Until now.
So you'd expect tenderness, honesty and depth. You'd expect heart, truth, gravity and hope. You'd expect beauty, purity, vulnerability. But when the expectation gives way to the sound of Jane singing, from the heart, about the things that matter most to her - that's when you realise this is a very special recording indeed. It is Jane Saunders going deeper than ever before into the vulnerable and wonderful zone of inhabiting a song with fearless conviction. The threads of narrative are woven with sublime tenderness. The abstract is sung of in such a way as it takes on flesh and blood. The songs breathe, live, soar. Jane is in an acoustic universe and her voice is the sun around which its planets spin. And yet at no point does "In His Hands" lose its accessible humanity. These songs - the words, the melodies, the emotional and spiritual intent - really, really matter to Jane. She sings them in such a way that you can't help feeling that because they matter to her, they matter to you, too.
I expect "In His Hands" will become Jane's defining album. I hope many will say of this 13 songs collection, "It's the place where I met Jane Saunders." And regardless of where one might cast one's generic musical preferences - gospel, acoustic, folk, country or whatever - "In His Hands" will be an album that becomes recognised as a truly magical Australian album. That's why "In His Hands" is such a gift, waiting to be treasured by any who care to unwrap it.
Colin Buchanan, Heathcote, NSW.
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