44 Facts About Jane Siberry

Jane Siberry performed the theme song to the television series Maniac Mansion.

On 30 August 2005, Siberry was awarded the 2005 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in music by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Jane Siberry Stewart was born in Toronto in 1955 and was raised in the suburb of Etobicoke.

Jane Siberry would take her subsequent surname, "Siberry", from the family name of her maternal aunt and uncle.

Jane Siberry learned piano from the age of four, predominantly teaching herself and developing her own concepts of notation and structure.

Jane Siberry began performing in folk clubs in Guelph, linking up first with singer Wendy Davis and then with bass guitarist John Switzer in a group called Java Jive.

On leaving university, she supported her work as a solo performer by working as a waitress, earning enough to finance and tour her debut album, the folk-influenced Jane Siberry, which was released in 1981 on Duke Street Records.

The album provided another hit single, "One More Colour" and won the 1985 CASBY for best album, with Jane Siberry picking up the award for best producer.

In 1986 Jane Siberry signed with Warner Brothers subsidiary Reprise Records, which picked up her American contract from Windham Hill, while honouring the existing Canadian arrangement with Duke Street Records.

Jane Siberry was marketed as part of the "high art" end of rock music, alongside artists such as Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel.

Jane Siberry embarked on a tour of Europe and the United States to promote The Walking.

In spite of the efforts of both label and artist, The Walking was ultimately less of a commercial success than The Speckless Sky, with Jane Siberry failing to make her mainstream breakthrough.

Jane Siberry moved towards more simple and direct song forms, jettisoning electronic art-pop in favour of more acoustic styles drawing on country and western and Latin music.

Jane Siberry's sixth album, When I Was a Boy, was completed in 1993 after a three-year writing and recording period during which she'd undergone changes in her personal life and in her musical approach.

Jane Siberry met with a disastrous rejection by the audience.

Later in 1993, Jane Siberry collaborated with Holly Cole, Rebecca Jenkins, Mary Margaret O'Hara and Victoria Williams on a live concert of Christmas music, which was broadcast on CBC Radio on Christmas Day that year before being released in 1994 as the album Count Your Blessings.

Jane Siberry came to the attention of a new audience when her song "It Can't Rain All the Time" was included on the soundtrack for the movie The Crow; time spent with Peter Gabriel at Real World Studios resulted in three more songs and she sang on the Indigo Girls album Swamp Ophelia.

Jane Siberry edited and reworked the recorded material into fully realized songs, most of which featured various perspectives on innocence.

Jane Siberry took this new band on tour across Canada and the United States and professed herself pleased with the results, but Reprise Records were less pleased with the album sales.

In 1996, Jane Siberry founded her own Toronto-based independent label, Sheeba Records, on which she has released all of her subsequent material.

Jane Siberry had demonstrated the greater creative freedom she had as an independent recording artist via her other 1997 album, A Day in the Life.

Jane Siberry took two years to restore Sheeba's precarious fortunes, during which she kept busy.

Tree: Music for Films and Forests documented a concert in which Jane Siberry had sung songs linked by the concept of trees, as well as adding a couple of songs she'd contributed to film scores.

Jane Siberry released a third book via Sheeba in 2000, New Year's Baby.

In 2002, Love is Everything: The Jane Siberry Anthology was released on Rhino Records: a double-CD album combining material from her Duke Street, Reprise and Sheeba eras and summarizing the first twenty-one years of her career.

Jane Siberry retained one travelling guitar, but none of the other instruments featured on her albums and in her concerts.

So, Jane Siberry is my name again until further notice, but I feel richer from having been Issa for three years.

On 3 June 2006, somewhere in northwestern Europe, Jane Siberry changed her name to Issa: revealing this change of identity to the public a couple of weeks later on 24 June 2006.

Jane Siberry told The Globe and Mail that she chose the name Issa as a feminine variant of Isaiah.

Jane Siberry stated that her older music would remain available for sale under the name "Jane Siberry", but her new material would be released as Issa.

Jane Siberry began with a poetic meditation on science and life, and then opened the floor up to questions from the audience.

Jane Siberry talked about her recent adventures in decommodifying her life, her change in name, and her new conception of herself as an artist.

In December 2009, she notified her fans that she had recently changed her name from Issa back to Jane Siberry, feeling that the process of working under a different name had run its course.

In May 2010, Jane Siberry made her entire back catalogue of music available as free downloads in MP3 and AIFF formats.

In March 2011, Jane Siberry advised her fans through her mailing list that the third album of the "Three Queens" trilogy was almost ready, and that she intended to release a fourth disc as part of the collection.

In 2014 Jane Siberry used crowdfunding to raise funds to produce Ulysses' Purse, a limited edition CD.

Jane Siberry is featured in the Corey Hart single "10,000 Horses", which was released on 8 April 2014.

Jane Siberry's music is most commonly compared to artists such as Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Toyah Willcox, Anna Domino, Suzanne Vega and Laurie Anderson.

Jane Siberry has drawn from a wide variety of styles, ranging from new wave rock on her earlier albums to a reflective pop style influenced by jazz, folk, gospel, classical and liturgical music in her later work.

Jane Siberry has cited Van Morrison and Miles Davis as being strong creative influences.

Jane Siberry has often criticized the competitive power of commercial radio and the recording industry.

Jane Siberry has placed three singles in the Canadian RPM Hot 100:.

Jane Siberry has contributed tracks to a number of movie soundtracks and compilation albums:.

Jane Siberry sang backing vocals on the 1994 Indigo Girls album Swamp Ophelia and on the 2003 Emmylou Harris album Stumble into Grace.