LF It’s like people think they can hear the Paris in my music, and I say that’s you, not the record. If I said I made this album in Beirut, maybe they’d say there’s a falafel sound in it… but, as it stands, they hear the crème brûlée. Paris was a blank space; I didn’t have any relationship with it. If anything, the advantage was I didn’t know a soul there and nobody knew me, and I didn’t know it and it was an anonymous fog. 

JA I look at your website and I want to blow my own boobs off because you don’t stop… 

LF [Sings] “I don’t stop and it don’t quit…” It becomes an advantage, I guess, to be homeless, to be rootless. You get this new perspective on places. The pangs of missing the garden and the leather boots beside the back door start to fade, and you just start to live where you are, which is somewhere different everyday.

At this point, I feel like I’ve got wings instead of legs, and I’m getting blown around by the winds. Anytime I hear generalizations about places, my back kinda gets up because a place is what you experience, who you happen to meet, what blocks you happen to walk down. My current fixation is to be in a town and to feel like I am floating through it, like I’m taking a few psychic snapshots, and then on to the next place.

JA But it’s fun testing out all these new foods, new beers and new ales everywhere you go.

LF That’s true! 

JA And just maintaining your health. I don’t think people understand how unbelievably difficult it is to stay well, especially when you have a voice like yours, which reminds me sometimes of a snapped bird’s leg.

LF Broken glass and a snapped bird’s leg! 

JA There’s a quality when a person breaks their voice that they never ever shake, and you’ve got it. It’s right there when you hit those higher tones. It’s lovely and beautiful, and it’s what set you apart. It comes from having emotional train wrecks too. It’s hard to listen to this music and not comprehend on some level that you’ve been heartbroken.

LF Well, I mean who hasn’t? 

JA I haven’t. I never had my heart broken in my life . [Laughs] Now, what the hell is “Mushaboom” [a song from Let it Die]?

LF Mushaboom is a little village on the eastern shore outside of Halifax.

JA A real honest-to-God place?

LF For about 20 minutes, I thought maybe I could live there. Me and my fellow were driving around and dreaming of living on a farm, and there was this amazing house that was for sale for some sickeningly low amount of money. It had lilac bushes surrounding the whole house. It had blueberry patches. It had a little apple orchard with a little tree house built in it. It was on the waterfront at the end of the bay; across the bay was a national park where no one could build. The house was over a hill away from the road, so you couldn’t even see the road. The inside was tricked out like the inside of a boat because some lobster fisherman had owned it for 30 years. And 20 minutes later I had written the song. 

JA I want to tell you, from one writer to another, that the economy of the words that you chose and how you painted that picture is what’s gonna keep you going in this industry. It’s gonna make you an even better writer at 38 and a brilliant writer at 48 and an iconic writer at 58. You should be really proud of that.

LF Well, thank you so much. 

JA I’m gonna wrap this up, but just a couple of wacky questions.

LF Yeah, okay! 

JA If you were a flavour of Campbell’s soup, which one would you be? 

LF Tomato.

JA If you could kiss anybody, who would it be? 

LF It would be the guy who could watch my back and who’s gonna stick it out, and he’s a mystery. Him… or Jude Law.

JA I always say either William Shatner or Cate Blanchett, and it really f***s people up. Longest relationship you’ve ever had?

LF Just pushing two years. 

JA Have you ever had a one-night stand?

LF I wrote an epic tale about that, a song called “One Evening.” 

JA Aha! 

LF I can’t say yes, I can’t say no, but I knew a little bit to write about it.

JA I think it was Mae West who used to say [mimics Mae West’s voice], “The only thing better than one night stand is two night stands.”

LF What? 

JA I think she was referring to the little tables beside her bed… It’s okay, honey. My mother is still trying to get things I said four years ago. What’s your favourite part of your body?

LF My calluses.

JA Thank you, my darling.

With eight CDs (including her current self-titled album), 14 top-10 singles, eight Juno awards and more than 2 million albums sold worldwide, Jann Arden endures as one of Canada’s most talented songwriters and performers.

Onetime Peaches collaborator Feist released her first solo album in 1999. She was instrumental to Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People in 2003. Her latest, Let It Die, was recorded in Paris.

Photographed by Frances Juriansz on June 4, 2005 backstage at Fashion Cares in Toronto.