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Jann Arden
Jann Arden
(Universal)
It's easy to find yourself in a rut -- doing the same things, seeing the same people, thinking the same thoughts.
That's especially true if that rut has served you well, if you owe much of your success to approaching life, or aspects of it, in a similar and familiar fashion.
Why change if there's no reason to, if there's no external forces pushing you in another direction?
Over the past few years and the past few CDs, Jann Arden has followed the path of least resistance, delivering song after song of adult contemporary melancholia and heartache.
She had her corner of the market and her audience and her sound and her style, and seemed content to play out the string.
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She even trumpeted the fact that her last album, Love is the Only Soldier, was written and recorded in her pajamas.
The problem was, it sounded that way -- she sounded too comfortable and it was hard not to hear it and react to it as indifference.
Luckily, though, sometimes in comfort comes freedom -- the freedom to change just because, the freedom to explore for no other reason than your own peace of mind, the freedom to move forward because you know the past will always be there.
On her portentously self-titled new album, Arden has discovered that freedom and, in something of an artistic rebirth, released her most adventurous and most successful album since she first began more than a decade ago.
With longtime songwriter partner-guitarist-producer-friend Russ Broom, Arden has crafted a beautifully textured, extraordinarily rich collection of songs that draw from a well other than the one filled with the tears of pain, sorrow and longing.
There are still some of those moments amid the 12-songs here -- especially the all but defeated Why Do I Try -- but instead of driving the disc or, as with recent releases, weighting it down, they're merely one colour amongst many.
In her words and the music's varied tempos and styles, she allows that sense of hard-earned freedom to be heard in a more positive way -- from the entirely unfettered pop hits Calling God and Where No One Knows Me to the electronically tinted, fully submerged Life Is Sweet and the gorgeous duet remake of I Would Die For You with fellow Canadian diva Sarah McLachlan.
Arden, for one album at least, is out of the rut.
And she's very much in the zone.