the pod bay door

:: The first time I saw Jessica Owen (then known as Jessica Schoenberg) play was at a folk club in Edmonton in 1992. I was very impressed. At the time, I was playing guitar in a local band, and we decided to call Jessica to ask if she would open for us at an upcoming gig. She agreed, and we met sometime later at my office at the U of Alberta. Some months later, I was playing and jamming with her whenever I could, and eventually became her guitarist during the mid-90s (although to be honest, I chose to play with her as well – playing with her was too much fun to pass up!) In February 1994, we spent two cold nights at a recording studio in a house in St Albert, laying down 9 of 10 tracks for her first album, Sounds Like A Plan! In April of that year, we played to a full house at The Next Act to celebrate the release of the album, which was available on cassette only.

I was and remain very proud of the work we did on her first record. I realized afterwards that I had strong arranging skills that hadn’t been utilized before, to that degree, anyway. So why am I telling you this? Jessica has a new web site, redesigned from scratch, and within you will find Jessica’s Story, which includes mention of the album.

That’s not all. I’ve had requests over the years from people who wanted to listen to my guitar playing online, and to date I’ve uploaded no tunes that featured me performing. Jessica has solved a bit of that for me by uploading three of the ten tunes from Sounds Like a Plan! One of those tunes is Heartbeat, which remains for me one of her most powerful and dynamic tunes ever, and one that I play from time to time when I play one of my acoustic guitars. (NOTE: You will need Windows Media Player to listen to the .mp3 files.)

If you want to hear my guitar. backing up one of the best singer/songwriters around, go to Jess’s site and listen. When you’re done, be good to yourself and support an incredible independent artist by buying her latest album, Ever So Slightly Rearranged. My (very objective) review might help you decide!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2003 at 09:37 and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.