Jess Moskaluke has been to the top of a lot of mountains lately.
Only a couple of weeks ago, she took home one of the most coveted trophies in Canadian music - Female Vocalist of the Year at the Canadian Country Music Awards - for the second time in two years.
Then, for the video she just released this week for new hit single Kiss Me Quiet, she is seen triumphantly atop peaks in the Cascade Range in power shots that could have been clipped from Lord Of The Rings.
"They are in B.C. We were mountain hopping all day, not far from Vancouver where we shot the party scenes. When a director will himself get behind the cameras and take a lot of the shots, you know you're in good hands," she said, loving the way Kiss Me Quiet's sweeping vistas and cheery social scenes all came together.
Three years ago you could be forgiven if you'd never heard of the 25-year-old from Langenburg, Sask., but today she is one of the leading lights in the nation's music industry. In it's 33-year history, only 14 women have gotten their names on the CCMA for the nation's top female, so dominated has that field been by the likes of Shania Twain, Michelle Wright, Terri Clark and Carolyn Dawn Johnson. Moskaluke is now etched on the trophy twice - the same number of times as powerhouse acts like k.d. lang and Carroll Baker and it was never won by the likes of superstars Renee Martel, Lucille Starr, Sylvia Tyson, or someone named Anne Murray, so she has made some history for one so young.
It was the song Cheap Wine & Cigarettes that first drive her to the top of the country scene. Ironically, she isn't a smoker and points out that the lyric talks about how memorable the taste of cigarettes is, and she can attest. She took the customary couple of drags most young people do to see what all the fuss is about, and that was all it took to stamp out her smoking curiosity forevermore.
"It was terrible," she reported.
She also doesn't fancy martinis that much, despite the campy scenes in her video for Night We Won't Forget released earlier this year. She and the video crew were having so much fun conjuring up black-and-white imagery of the flapper era for her character in that song-film that adding martinis seemed like the right thing to do to complete the picture.
"I'm more of a whiskey girl," she said. "I'm not a picky person, but I love red wine and I love whiskey."
Not picky is a perfect phrase for her musical tastes as well. She kicks out the country like a combine spews wheat, but her voice is so smooth and powerful and her personality so sensitive to the lyrics and melodic timing that she could sing a grocery list and make it sound like a gourmet meal. She always completes her musical phrasing, never letting the words of the lyrics fall below the surface of the notes she's singing. She has complete control of her vocal instrument.
She demonstrated her diversity for the world to see on her YouTube channel. She was posting a new cover song almost every day, a few years back as her career was just launching. She gave her take to songs like Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, Set Fire To the Rain, How To Save A Life, Drops Of Jupiter, Pink's song Try, even a cleaned up version of Nicki Minaj's Starships.
But these were more than just a young singer's glorified karaoke moments. She owned these songs. Her duet with Madilyn Bailey on Lights would be enough to impress original artist Ellie Goulding, and when she and guitarist Snuffy Walden laid down their version of Tracy Chapman's Fast Car it became a whole new, updated story of a girl dreaming and planning her escape from a downtrodden life.
If she's duetting on YouTube with Snuffy Walden (12 Emmy Award nominations, 10 BMI Awards including a Lifetime Achievement trophy, etc.) then you know you're dealing with someone special.
Of course for Moskaluke it also meant a change was going on in her personal life. Country musicians pride themselves, industry-wide, for being in better touch with their fans than any other big-business genre of music, but she admitted it was surreal to watch the autograph lineups in front of her go from a few people to throngs, in some situations. She is getting recognized and approached by strangers, now, in random places. It's flattering and she is not complainging, she said, but it comes with a cost to the privacy.
"Whether or not you are having a terrible day, or the best day of your life, you have to make sure that fan has the best experience in that time with you that you can give. You have to be the kindest person you can be at all times. My problems don't matter in that moment," she said.
She gets her first moments with a Prince George audience this week. Moskaluke is the special guest of Paul Brandt and Dean Brody on their Road Trip Tour hitting CN Centre on Tuesday night.
