Jann Arden relaxes at Edmonton's Hotel Macdonald during a stop in Edmonton last week. (WALTER TYCHNOWICZ, Sun)

Since Jann Arden's striking, some might even say hot, publicity photos for her new album went out, her dramatic weight loss has been at the forefront of interviews.

Losing weight and keeping it off, as anyone who's done so can attest, is a challenge that demands change. For the record, though, she says with a laugh, the Arden Diet is little more than a lot of running and a good diet.

Arden was at Fairmont Hotel Macdonald recently as part of a press tour for her new album, Uncover Me, which sees Arden covering her all-time favourite songs. It's out today.

She'll be back in Edmonton May 7 for a gig at the Jubilee Auditorium.

Asking Arden about her weight loss is inevitable, though she reddens somewhat over the flab flap.

Turning 45 next month, she's naturally happy to be so much slimmer - to the tune of 50 pounds - but finds it sort of ironic, too.

Arden says she only feels different because people have begun treating her differently.

"I feel like I've got a long way to go, but I was never that hard on myself before," she says, adding that she simply jogged and watched the Food Network. "Only to see what I could eat if I jogged another 15 minutes.

"Now, people don't recognize me and it's very bizarre. I've actually had some of my fans get mad at me because they think that I've sold out, saying that I can't deal with the pressure of an image-driven business.

"I'm like, 'Have you followed my career at all over the last 20 years?'

"I've only ever just been myself and I've had a very successful career, despite what anyone could have pinned on me insofar as image goes.

"When you're famous, the reactions are kind of strange anyways, but the reactions now are different. Men treat me differently. I feel more self-conscious than anything."

It's a quality that came to inhabit the recording process for Uncover Me, if only because Arden wanted to do justice to songs that were so influential to her upbringing.

They are tunes like Carly Simon's You're So Vain, Petula Clark's Downtown, Janis Ian's At Seventeen and, almost more fitting to its bleak lyrics, a stripped-down take on Pat Benatar's Love Is a Battlefield.

She jokes that a more apt title for the collection of covers - and one new single, Counterfeit Heart - might have been Songs That I Sang in My Parents' Basement.

But an early master for Uncover Me found a critic in the form of her friend and big-time talent agent Bruce Allen.

"He phoned me after he heard it and he was so mad," recalls Arden. "He just said he'd never been so disappointed by anything in his life."

While tunes from the first master like Moon River were accomplished and done faithfully, they weren't songs that held much, if anything, personal for Arden.

So, when she finally set her mind to more resonant selections, staying true to their meaning and arrangements kept her up at night, especially the 30-plus takes she took to nail Karen Carpenter's Solitaire.

"I don't think the songs make any sense as a group, yet somehow they make all the sense in the world.

"That's the one thing that's kept me in the music business - is that it's one of the few things that still affects people in a very primal way. We can't replace it with anything else.

"The style and instrumentation has certainly seen its various combinations over the years. How we make the music has changed. But for what it does to us emotionally, the backdrop that it provides to our lives - I like that part of it.

"I've always been really proud to be part of something that can change so much yet not change at all, how it affects the human soul and inspires us."