EDMONTON - Welcome to Weird Tales From The Jazz Festival Circuit, starring Holly Cole, the hardest working song stylist in Canada.
She's on the bathroom phone from her non-smoking hotel room in Winnipeg, smoking "incessantly" and sitting in her father's pyjamas on the toilet seat, as she tells it. Cole just woke up to find out the only working phone in her room is in the loo. The phone cord is a foot long and the connection is crackling. She's incensed, "No! Not another (expletive) phone (expletive). I'll go crazy!"
A knock on the door interrupts us before we even get started (after having failed to set up this interview in four previous attempts). It's a message that she's supposed to be on the phone with me. Par for the course this day.
Appearing tonight in the Jubilee Auditorium for Jazz City, Cole has been running non-stop since she finished her latest album, Romantically Helpless, another pop-jazz masterpiece. She's giddy as she relates a bizarre scene at the Winnipeg Jazz Festival last week where she accidentally wandered into the middle of opening act Marc Jordan's concert.
She walked into the theatre, heard piano playing and thought it was the soundcheck.
"I guess I was oblivious as to what time it was," she says. "I walked out in the middle of the stage and it was their concert! The whole audience was there. I'm standing there with my cowboy hat and sunglasses, my coat and my bags and I look out and I go, oh, my God, it's the show! And nobody stopped me! It must've been like some weird Fellini movie. I was stunned. Then I just turned my head and saw the whole audience and they're just gazing at me going, 'That's weird. There's some weird girl with a cowboy hat.' I tried to make as graceful an exit as I possibly could. And he was doing a ballad, too, of course."
That hilarious episode aside, Cole says she's happy dealing with her breakneck schedule. It's all her own doing, of course. She wouldn't have it any other way.
"I create mayhem if it doesn't exist. As soon as I get comfortable, I immediately become uncomfortable with that. Even with my records I do that.
"I change them all the time. I see artists get in a rut. I see that it's comfortable and they're good at that, but then it becomes stagnant and not inspired. Sure, the craft is high if you're good at your rut, but if it's not interesting for you, it's not interesting for the people, either."
Cole takes great pains not only in selecting her songs, but interpreting them to the point that they effectively become her own.
"If I didn't reinvent the song, I wouldn't do the song, period," she says.
"It's not just for the sake of it. It has to want that. You can't just give me any tune. It has to be something that makes sense, being a creative outlet for me. I do enjoy challenging preconceived notions about songs, both for the people listening and myself. If I can find a subtext in a song, boy, am I ever happy."
Not content with the demands of her singing career, Cole has taken up the drums. Strictly for fun, of course.
"It's nice to have something I feel really passionate about that is really for me and no one is critiquing it. It's just me in my living room playing drums. And I'm OK at it, so far, but I want to get great. I work hard."
We could see a side project before too long. Cole has formed a George Jones-style country band called Half Jaw (named for her beloved 13-year-old German shepherd, Rhoda, who recently had jaw surgery).
The Big Valley Jamboree beckons.
"That would be great. I'd wear a big blond wig and no one would know who I am."
And you can bet she won't be walking on any stage unless she's supposed to be there.
