Jann Arden is touring Canada these days -- but her mind, and maybe her soul, often journeys to Africa.

"When you to go Africa, you realize that you perish as an individual, you flourish as a group," says the singer-songwriter of a life-transforming trip to Tanzania with World Vision. Arden has kept her ties to the relief organization.

She has said Africa taught her to tell her ego to shut the hell up as she learned to listen to her spirit.

"Here we're taught individual status. It's all you, you, you, you.

"It's about one for one, not one for all.

"You feel ashamed when you go because you know how 'off' you are in the grand scheme of things and you wonder why you're unhappy."

Happiness and the lack of same have been themes in Arden's music since her first album in the early 1990s. Her third, and last on A&M, was titled Happy?

The new one -- Blood Red Cherry (on the Universal label) -- offers 14 songs proving the answer is "yes." At least some of the time it's yes. Some other times, it's maybe. At other times, it's as down as only someone as funny as Arden can be.

"There was an enormous amount of sadness, too. I don't think it's completely a reflection of my own personal life. I had a very interesting year last year, just a lot of changes from the Africa thing . . . I just thought I don't have anything to hide away. I just wrote down what I wrote down and let the chips fall where they may."

Arden didn't just have Africa working on her psyche. She broke up with her fiance in 1999. Blood Red Cherry had already been written, but, suddenly, she wasn't able to sing or eat or even sleep. "My parents had to console me and give me tranquilizers," she says. "That's what parents are for."

She wound up moving to a house not far from her parents' place and also near a bookstore where she feeds her passion for literature of all types.

It was a form of homecoming for the Juno-winning artist, born Jann Arden Richards in 1963. She already has a signature song in Insensitive and more than two million records sold.

Arden's tour, mixing her classics with the newer material, is at Centennial Hall in London on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. She's at the Sarnia Sports and Entertainment Centre on Friday, June 9.

One song on Blood Red Cherry, titled Another Human Being, is directly out of Africa. In the song, there's a detail about running from a "big hairy elephant." Arden says that's fictional -- but everything else, including details about a filthy watering hole, is true.

"That's what the Maasai drank. That was their drinking water . . . the cows are (urinating) into it," Arden says.

In the song, the singer is downing Evian brand mineral water and wondering "where the hell I am."

Arden knows where she will be this fall -- despite war in the Horn of Africa and turmoil elsewhere, including Zimbabwe.

"I'm going back in October. Tanzania where I go is fairly peaceful. But in Africa that can change on a dime," she says.

As much as she loves Africa and its people, Arden has only contempt for the dictators and dangerous men she sees ruling it.

Her famous comic touch pops out of nowhere when she does a devastating parody of Zimbabwe's leader, Robert Mugabe. The former freedom fighter has failed to discourage violent farm takeovers and invasions as a form of land redistribution.

"Look at Mugabe," she says before switching into an impersonation: 'I declare that we're going to give 10 per cent of the farmland to the peasants. and, oh, by the way they're not going to be compensated for their land. And I want this to be a law.' "

Then it's back to Arden, indignant. "Like, hullo, what university did you go to? They've been there for 300 years and they're feeding your entire country.

"These black guys are the first ones to tell you they don't know how to farm. They don't know how to work the equipment or work these big farms that these Dutch guys have had."

Despite this passion for Africa, Arden doesn't name Another Human Being as her favourite off the album.

She doesn't pick a tune her mom likes as her favourite, either. Arden's mom has expressed affection for Best Dressed, a romp about a woman setting out to romp solo if that's what it takes.

"My mom really likes that one. 'Oh that's got a good beat.' I don't think she's listening to what I'm saying . . .

"You have to understand that it's just nothing that I would say. It's not how I feel about myself. But she did."

Critics have noticed the slag-happy Janeen and the tough, funny I Only Wanted Sex -- which ends with the singer looking for a good truck to help move the stuff left over after the relationship has been kissed off.

It's also hard not be impressed by Waiting in Canada's take on celebrity and solitude or the calm and certainty of Piece of It All.

Arden has something else in mind, a sad, going-on-despairing song with cellos and a beat.

"My favourite song on the record is a song called Sorry for Myself," she says before going on to quote some of the track.

'I've been on my hands and knees/Crawling towards eternity/Looking for the piece of me/That always got away.'

"That's my favourite song. It's really autobiographical . . . it was really fun to sing 'cause it's so wordy, I have to just gasp . . . like it's hard to sing. It was hard text, so the physical singing of it almost matched what the text was, to make you gasp."

Biographically speaking, Arden's own love life has always been Topic No. 1 for interviewers -- despite her own interest in Africa and other causes.

"They always seem to be quite interested in who I sleep with.

"I wish I were sleeping with someone. I'm quite alone," she say with a bit of rueful laughter.

"My mom says: 'Well you have a very busy social life by the sound of it.'

I said, 'Yes, mom, I do.' "