Sitting down with Jann Arden is like visiting with a long time friend. When I walked into the trendy downtown bar that was arranged for this interview, she immediately came up to give us a hug and offer a "refreshing beverage." She then began to ask about my life. Perhaps by this point she was tired of talking about herself, but it is the genuineness of Arden that has made her so wildly popular.

When we last spoke to Jann (March 2007 issue) she was promoting her cover album Uncover Me and embarking on a tour, with the plan being to return to the studio and release a new original album in 2008. Instead, Free, her 8th album was released in September.

"The album title Free couldn’t be truer, as I made a lot of changes. I have new management now, I am with Bruce Allen which is fantastic, I am actually having to listen to somebody. It has taken an enormous workload off of me because I have someone making decisions for me that should have been made a long time ago - but that is my fault. There was this two year time that I was straddling because I knew I had to make some changes. It is like when you end a relationship, it is easier to push everything you don’t like to the side and you have to make them hate you and break up with you. It didn’t work, it was like, holy shit this is never going to dissolve itself.  That is what the gap was, I just didn’t feel passionate about it, I didn’t feel like writing anything. I didn’t like the direction I was headed. I thought, if I am going to be so non-committal about this all maybe I shouldn’t be doing it."

She made several changes, most notable, parting ways with long time collaborator and comedic foil Russel Broom.

"We had made some great records together but it felt like I was standing still, I needed to move on and we didn’t work together on this record. I worked with a producer named Bruce Liddel who I have known for 20 years. He does a lot of film scores, his music is very orchestral and that really comes out, there is a lot more strings and keyboards on this record for me. Then just working with a new band, I moved into my new house... that was the gap. I am so glad I took that break because I feel invigorated about this now, I feel like I have something left to say. "

An Intimate Evening With Jann Arden will be out on tour with dates in Calgary November 23rd and 24th, and Edmonton the 25th and 26th.

"The tour is going to be amazing, the set is bigger and more glorious then I have ever had, I have been pretty low key on my live shows. Bruce wanted to step it up a notch, he thinks very globally. I am listening to what he has to say and learning from him and learning about myself again. Bruce doesn’t have any track record though, he has sucked with everything," she says sarcastically.  "Who the fuck is Michael Bublé? Anne Murray? Bryan Adams? Never heard of them."

She admitted that picking a set list for the tour has been difficult. "I don’t even know how! I did though. I am doing 6 songs off the new record, and then I have a few obscure gems that I have never played live before. It is really stripped down, there are a couple of songs that are just by myself. There are some hilarious slides of my family, people I have talked about for years but people have never seen. I will have a big screen, very different for people. I am going to try and cover a lot of the singles in a very different fashion. People will leave pleased and there will be some surprises. I don’t think we are concentrating so much on the new album that they will feel dislocated from it. They will hear enough of the old stuff that they will really like the new stuff as well."

It is amazing that the world didn’t implode when Arden toured with crooner and funny–as-hell Canadian, Michael Bublé.

"We were all through Europe, Australia and the states with him twice. I was like, what am I doing here in Radio City Music Hall?  I set Michael up every night, telling people he was 4’6" and came up to my crotch which was very convenient for me. I made fun of him every night but he has stolen so many of my jokes now it is unbelievable. It was very humbling for me. Michael was good to me, he was very fair. When I have been doing this for so much longer than him, when you are opening for someone so much younger than you and a newer act, you do learn a lot, you do get back to your roots. I sat there and played my guitar in a trio thing so the songs were presented very much in the way they were written.  People loved us, in some venues we were selling 200 albums a night. I was like, holy shit, we are out of that. I don’t have any more. I had an opportunity to write with Michael because of it (Lost which is also included, sung by Arden on Free).  It was a glorious experience. He is just one of the best entertainers in the world, I saw his show 100 times and he is so fucking funny."

The new album features 11 tracks that continue with what brought Jann success in the first place, songs of heartbreak and sadness and songs of hope and joy. Much of the album was produced in Nashville with the support of up and coming act SHEdaisy.

"I have worked in Nashville quite a bit in the last few years and these two great women I wrote with both went through divorces. When you are sitting in a room with other people I really had to learn to listen and think about their ideas, which were so undeniably good that as a writer I couldn’t be narcissistic and say, I am going to go with what my idea was. Co-writing is really symbiotic, what you end up with is so cool. It is almost like having three people do a painting. It was a great experience learning about their lives. One of the girls remodeled everything in her house because she just didn’t want him there. In the song Free, one of the metaphors is that you are tearing down wallpaper, busting out walls, changing your hair and having a relationship with your maker again. I love the sentiment of feeling better now that your stuff’s out in the yard. I think that is funny. I can just picture this woman standing there with all this fucking bad shit sitting out there," she said.

"It was a joy to write this whole record, it took place over the last two years and been finished since May. It took three months to record, a couple of months to mix, and the most fun I have had on a record in a decade. I did feel very liberated. I felt very helped, Bruce Allen made it very possible to not worry about all this bullshit that goes around, that I had always been in control of. All of the decisions had been mine so it felt weird to just be responsible for doing music, it was a fantastic feeling and I think you can hear it in the songs themselves. The SHEdaisy girls are singing all over this and the backup vocals are so lush and rich. I have been doing my own backup vocals for years. Live, this is going to be so much fun to do. I have Keith Scott, who has been playing guitar for Bryan Adams for 18 years, Alison Cornell who played violins for Shania Twain for many years. I can capture so many of the Nashville guys I had play on this record and do justice to the recordings. There are seven of us now."

A song that will be recognizable to fans is You Are Everything with which Arden closed her shows on the 2004 Love Is The Only Soldier tour, and was briefly available on Puretracks.

"I did it live towards the end of the night and I loved the song. I wrote it at that time and really wanted to perform it because I wrote it after I had finished that record. So this time I said to Bruce Liddel that I wanted to revisit that song and put it on our record. I have gotten so many e-mails from people who say things like, my husband and I were looking for that song forever and we played it at our wedding. I love how it turned out. I think people were really happy to find it."

When we interviewed Theo Tams for our July issue, he spoke about how Arden left a message for him at Toronto station EZRock. She admits she didn’t watch the show but is flattered to be both an influence, and from the comparisons to Tams.

"It was explained to me who he was and that he had done Good Mother. I was sent the link of him doing it and thought he did a very nice job. To me it is very flattering and I hope he does well. For a young man to choose that song to do is very perplexing for me because it is a very vulnerable song.  It is an honor but it feels weird too. It can be very isolating, I am not aware of what is going on around me. About every six months I have to ask Chris (assistant) what he is listening to that is cool? I will scour MySpace and look around, look at the indy stuff in iTunes. To influence anybody, I can’t get my head around it, I am very touched. I know the people that influenced me growing up, and I would never have had access to them. Social networking has changed things so much. I just got a message from (gay singer songwriter) Jay Brannan (whose cover of Good Mother can also be found on YouTube), I don’t know how he found me but it got to me. I was impressed with his version too. I am thinking Good Mother? What in the hell are you guys choosing that song for? I thought it was the stupidest song I had written in my life. I hear these young guys do it and think it is an odd choice."

Arden takes advantage of the internet to send her music to a new audience, using YouTube, Twitter, Myspace and Facebook. On YouTube especially there are several covers of her songs.

"Isn’t that weird? I spent one weekend looking at all of them, Jay Brannan, people from the Philippines. It freaks me out but some of them are so cute. There are two dorky guys who did Insensitive and they were so serious about it. They went to such lengths to shoot this little video and I watched it and my heart just broke because it was terrifyingly bad. I have seen lots of Unloveds, Insensitives, Good Mothers. I have seen more Japanese cartoon people to I Would Die For You than I would care to see again for the rest of my life. There is already an Asian cartoon for A Million Miles Away.  Who sits and does this shit?  YouTube is crazy, I like it. I have to get on board because it is not going away and is what it is, but I don’t mind it."

And just like that, our time was up and Jann had to head off to perform at an office as a promotion. Her enthusiasm is infectious and I found myself greatly looking forward to seeing her take the stage again, after far too long.

"I am very glad that we got together. I am really excited about the tour. I don’t know what Bruce Allen has in store for me next year but I am just going to make sure I have a good bra, strap myself into it and go out there and have some fun, know what I am saying?"

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