MySpace a place for friends

Shawn Conner, Vancouver Courier
Published: Friday, January 30, 2009

Ah, the life of a bohemian artist. Travelling, creating, talking all night about Godard and Kafka at cafés. And living with roommates. Four, in the case of musician Joanna Chapman-Smith--which makes five women (and a female cat) in a Vancouver East Side house, all sharing one bathroom.

No wonder she recently spent a couple of months in Toronto. "No, it totally works out," says Chapman-Smith, reached at home. "We all use it at different times anyway."

Chapman-Smith was raised out east, and then moved to Vancouver to study English at Simon Fraser University. "It was one of my few life attempts to never do music again," she says.

The attempt failed: Chapman-Smith lasted one semester before joining the music program, which offered an education in sounds and techniques from Africa and Indonesia. But the music on Contraries, her just-released second album, is influenced more by styles like Gypsy jazz from Eastern Europe.

"It's been around me the entire time growing up," says the dark-featured singer. "I don't know this for sure, but I imagine it's also part of how I look. People presume I'm already part of their culture, or want to share it with me. Anyway I've had a lot of Latin and Eastern European music thrown my way. I totally love it, the scales drive me wild."

Is there enough room in Vancouver for two klezmer musicians--i.e. Chapman-Smith and accordion player Geoff Berner? "There's more than two, so there better be," she says. "There are tons. But Geoff Berner came first, and he's one of the people I'm influenced by. We share the same drummer [Wayne Adams]."

On her album of mostly lighthearted, intimate-sounding folk-pop songs, Chapman-Smith spices up Contraries with accordion, cello and whistling. It also offers some thoughtful lyrics by Chapman-Smith, such as on "Arbitrary Lines," a song about easy categorization: "So what is pure/And when is right... Where do these lines first come from/Who marks them down and why?"

Her CD release show at the Ukrainian Hall Jan. 30 promises to blur a few lines with its multimedia format. For instance, one of the opening acts, Maria in the Shower, has "a demonic mime thing going on," according to Chapman-Smith. A local company called Mind of a Snail will "jam along" to her music with shadow puppets. And Chapman-Smith has drawn on her connections with SFU's dance program.

"I worked as a dance accompanist for three years, and it influenced the kind of music I was writing," she says. "So I'm excited some of the dancers have choreographed two of my songs."

Whatever happens, the evening is bound to be, in a term used by Chapman-Smith on her website, "radsauce."

"Just the word 'rad' is very West Coast," she says. "I remember in first year university hearing people say 'That's rad,' and I was like, 'Oh man. That's rad that you say 'rad'!"

"Radsauce," she says, is a recent addition to her vocabulary. "'Sauce' and 'bone' are my favourite suffixes," says the musician. So she'll make up words like "sweetsauce" or "sweetbone" or "damnsauce."

Does this mean she'll throw a few bones and sauces to the audience between songs at her CD release party? Chapman-Smith says, "I do not vouch for anything I might or may not say."

© Vancouver Courier 2009

Joanna also appears as a collaborator and accessory in the following projects:

Joanna Chapman-Smith
Lily Come Down
The Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret
Women in the Round
T. Nile
Madu Sari Gamelan

General Pics: