Joanna Chapman-Smith:
The Lilting Voice of Lovely and Spirited Sensuality

By Rod Drown

The Lilting Voice of Lovely and Spirited Sensuality

Before I met Joanna Chapman-Smith I dreamed of a woman with a light purple hat – a third eye woman who, it turns out, wanders through time and music, sometimes unconsciously. This creative and intelligent lyricist with the lilting virtuoso voice expresses insight, intelligence and adventurousness through her music. She launches her second CD, Contraries, at the Ukrainian Hall in Strathcona on Friday evening, January 30th.

In the old days, when music was Kelly’s on Georgia, Sam the Record Man on Seymour and every Hudson Bay and Woolworth store had stacks of records and every LP had its 45 rpm chart topper, Arbitrary Lines would have been the hit single. It has a great tune that just keeps on going and getting better. It would have climbed up the charts in no time if she, living back then, had been a Carole King or, more recently, a Cyndi Lauper. Make no mistake, Chapman Smith can write a tune with the best of them; she has a natural gift for coming up with intrinsically attractive melodies. She is not afraid of a hook either.

In that vein, the third song on the CD, A Glass of Right and Wrong, is a very pretty and melodic work (though chord-wise rather complicated) in which she lilts her voice perfectly, with Dawn Zoe’s accordion dancing along in charming harmony and counterpoint. Following the overall Contraries practice of exploring the opposites, her delightful voice trips through such lines as:

I have a flare for folly and a talent for torment
What is fear if not my friend?
These feelings get me through and I
Don't know why but I think of you

I drank a glass of wine and I saw you looking *oh so fine* but I
Didn't think we had the time
So I just kept on dreaming how I'd
Make you mine

I try try to get it right but it
Feels so right to get it wrong
Why why get it right when it
Feels much better just to get along

She confirmed my sense that about half the songs on Contraries concerned a love affair’s trajectory. One of them, Tactile World, which has a sort of belly dance rhythm and instrumentation in its Eastern European or Middle Eastern beat, grew out of her three year love affair with a man who did not believe in sex before marriage. She found it a very difficult belief to accept and to live within. The song is full of lines invoking the attachment she feels to tactility and touch – of course with friends and, especially, lovers. Several art galley experiences brought the song all together in that it brought to her the realization that perhaps all beauty is meant to sensually experienced. She had been seeing a lot of exhibits and had wanted to touch the works but had found to her great frustration that the most desirable pieces were behind glass. Hence such expressiveness as:

With deep lines and one-of-a-kind this clay and marble art
Sets my senses free
Free to the touch - no laws, no lines, no glass, no guards
No lock, no key
This touch, to me, it means so much
Feeling

The CD’s title Contraries arose from the insights and lessons she learned at Simon Fraser University where, as a Fine Arts student majoring in Music with an English minor, she studied William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in her last semester. This particular work looks, in part, at the contraries of morality. Inspired by Blake's treatment of this theme, Chapman-Smith found out much about herself and the dichotomies of life by exploring several contraries such as right and wrong, the mind and body, and many others through the songs on this album. In a song called Melodies, with music reminiscent of Slavic or Greek folk dance tunes, Chapman-Smith explores such eternal pairs as permanence and impermanence, memory and oblivion, and love and emptiness:

Canvas / now there's colour
Quiet / in a chord
An empty hall / in a crowded room:
The day you said you'd stay
Melodies fading fast
Memories just flying past
Some of these will come at last
What's then left to say?

Beautiful music arises from this magical yellow East Vancouver house

Wondering if such a fine talent had a manager or an agent, I was a bit surprised to find that she did most of her own outreach for venues and performances. It sounds as if for the next several months she will be very busy putting Contraries on the national musical map. Chapman Smith already has one big tour, 2008’s Women In the Round on the Road (with Kate Reid and Sarah MacDougall), under her belt and it was, as they say, a learning experience. When she does her next one, she won’t make the same errors of the last one. For one thing they won’t be hiring a publicist who doesn’t do publicity.

“This was a problem,” Joanna, a dark haired woman in her middle 20s, wryly commented.

Yet she remains philosophical about that particular situation (and probably about others). It’s my impression that Joanna Chapman Smith is very trusting but I suspect there is a whip-willow strength within that slender and somewhat pensive looking young woman in the black fedora pictured on the inside cover of Contraries. I doubt if on her next tour she will be as willing to let certain things go.

Joanna Chapman-Smith gets additional employment from being a session musician, teaching music and playing for dance classes. It seems as though every experience may contain a song. For example, it was an incident she had while playing for a dance class of preadolescents that led to Carnival Song, which she co-wrote with her friend Bucky Coe. After the class was over, the mother of one of the little girls approached her and told Joanna that the girl’s teacher had told her that her daughter was weird – that, in a classroom exercise to use their imaginations, the little girl had wanted to think and write about Death! Having been classed as “weird” herself sometimes, Joanna reassured the mother that it was nothing to worry about, that her daughter would turn out fine. Reflecting further, she came up with a song about weirdness which, after a lovely piano opening, has such verses as:

You're not the only one
The freaks and the strangers will come
Where has the carnival gone?
Where has the carnival gone?

It was Coe who contributed to the repeating lines, “Where has the carnival gone?”, which Joanna felt completed the song perfectly.

If she wants to, this uplifted young woman can really go places. I wonder now if I or anyone else will get many more chances to interview her (as I did) – at home, in the high-ceilinged yet cozy kitchen of her communal place on Napier Street in East Vancouver, in that big yellow house featured on the cover of Contraries. Pretty soon we arts writers may be lining up outside wherever it is that big stars get interviewed. In a way I am sorry over such a possibility because I fear she may lose an inner beauty and radiance that resonates not just in her voice but also from her presence.

One of the secrets behind her fine voice lies in a daily regime. A working singer, Joanna Chapman-Smith engages in a ½ hour vocal practice to warm-up her up her voice and train her body to produce sound in an healthy, efficient manner. No doubt this dedication to perfection will pay off in her touring and performance plans for 2009. She told me she anticipates “lots of little tours, solo and with bands, a bunch of festivals in the summer – and hopefully a good stretch in June”.

To catch the latest updates of her performance schedule access her website at www.joannacs.com.

Other groups with which Joanna Chapman-Smith has been associated with can be accessed at www.myspace.com/womenintheround and www.lilycomedown.com.

Joanna can also be accessed directly through Grab News links page.