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Jann Arden is about the most low-key celebrity around.
In the opening moments of her phone interview with the Sun, for example, the distinctive sound of a toilet flushing could be heard.
When she walked the red carpet at her induction into Canada's Walk of Fame in Toronto earlier this month, all Arden could think about was how awkward she felt.
"It makes me feel physically sick," says Arden. "I've maybe done it one or two other times in my life. I don't do it. Then I was looking at other people, they just eat it up. They love it. I wish I had that kind of comfort level. I don't."
Arden had said she wouldn't have minded meeting some of the other honorees -- like actor Eugene Levy and Late Show bandleader Paul Shaffer -- while perhaps steering clear of Pamela Anderson, with whom she seemed to slightly clash over the East Coast sealing issue at this year's Juno Awards. In the end, she didn't.
"I wasn't about to launch up to somebody and go 'Hey!' I just didn't have it in me," says Arden. "We had a group picture at the end. I don't consider myself like that."
Known for her smooth singing style and hilarious concert banter, Arden is currently touring the country as part of the Chatelaine Presents: My Life, My Way speaking series. Arden will address a crowd at Ottawa's Westin Hotel Saturday at 11 a.m.
"They're challenging and they're fun and they pay you," she says. "But I have no practical things to tell people. I have no 'seven steps to success.' I don't really have any of that."
In fact, to hear Arden talk and to read her online diary, it seems she is still struggling and searching, even in her 40s. Even so much as eating a bag of peanuts or trying to find time to work out, online, peppers her humour with an overarching feeling of slight melancholy.
"I don't know anyone who isn't. How can you not be?" she explains. "We're on a planet, hurtling through space. How can you be here and not be perpetually confused and perplexed?"
The diary, which Arden checks into no matter where she is on the road, came about as a way to boost traffic at her website.
These days about 50,000 people a week are reading it.
"It's fun for me. I'm able to track my own life through it. I mean I don't write about 'Hey, I slept with Robert Downey Jr. today,' I don't launch into that sort of thing," she said. "But as far as meandering and pondering, where I've been travelling, I think it's important to keep people coming back to the site."
Despite her success, Arden says "self-loathing is really an everyday event for me."
Once famously told by an American music executive she was "25 lbs. way from superstardom," Arden jokes her mom suggested she rebut him with "I don't really feel like gaining any weight."
Arden went on to sell a million albums in that country. Though she'll tour south of the border with successful Canuck crooner Michael Buble this summer -- before heading into the studio to record a new album -- one believes her when she says doesn't need any more attention than she already gets.
"I like my mediocre banal career ... I don't aspire to be that bombastic -- it's not like that for me. Bigger, better, longer every time you come out, I don't have it in me," she says. "It's not my personality. I'm not particularly competitive, I love music, it takes me where I want to go."
Arden, who didn't sign a record deal in Canada until she was almost 30, feels vindicated she found success on her own terms.
"I've had a career despite so many things that really were working against me. I got here on my merit and my intellect," she says.
"It wasn't based on some kind of iconic sexuality it wasn't based on that I was fashionable, that I was tall and pretty, it was based on my mind ... I've won, and I knew I won a long time ago, so it's very satisfying."