The area was treated to a very white Christmas, and now a local singer-songwriter hopes you'll have a White new year as well.
Jerusha White, already a seasoned music veteran at her age of 18, has released a set of new singles and has a full album on the 2014 agenda. Her home is in Fort St. James but she has strong ties to Prince George and other communities across the Central Interior. She hopes to soon reside on radios everywhere with the material that has just been released to the iTunes, Emusic and CD Baby download sites.
The new singles are called Other Woman and I'm Crazy, but you will also spot her past releases, two seasonal singles called Christmas (Crazy How It Is) and Gingerbread Boi that came out a year ago.
White was also part of the Ava Loon children's music group that performed locally and released the album I Can Go Anywhere in 2006. It is also available on iTunes.
She is grown up from the Ava Loon days, but still newly across the adult threshold, so songs about some "other woman" scenario seem heavy for such a youthful heart, especially when you consider she writes her own material.
"It actually doesn't apply to any one person," White said. "I do that a lot in my writing. The melody drives the song, and the words come later, out of what I'm feeling from the music. It doesn't necessarily pertain to anything real in my own life."
She has attempted to write directly from biographical situations, a technique many writers find essential even in realms of fiction, but found herself banging into the walls of realism. She did better work, she said, when she "was free to go with it" when an impression or fantasy insinuated itself in on her thinking.
Even when she is paying homage to a musical legend she can't stick to a linear script. The song I'm Crazy is, as the title hints, a disciple of the great Patsy Cline but you wouldn't know it to listen. The two charts and lyric sheets appear unconnected. Cline's is golden age country; White's is jazzy swing.
"I never got into Patsy Cline, I was more into Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston, and Patsy Cline just wasn't in the mix, but one day I heard her song Crazy and it just stuck with me, I couldn't get it out of my head for a while, it really impressed me," she said. "I knew I didn't want to do a cover, but somehow I wanted it to be involved in what I was doing, so I wrote this as a sort of a tribute piece. It has nothing to do with the subject matter of that song but it was an influence on me."
Like Patsy Cline, White has a singing trait not every vocalist has. She projects the words rather than singing the lyric as solely a melodic device.
"That comes from my classical training," she said. "I was blessed with an amazing voice coach, Rebecca Gulbranson in Vanderhoof, and she was very strict about enunciating the words and singing the meaning of the words. She really enforced the need for the singer to develop the musical skills and storytelling skills on each song."
Under the same roof is further evidence of this presentation discipline. White's sister, Chevy, recently portrayed the lead character in a musical theatre presentation of Anne of Green Gables. Having the house steeped in Avonlea inspired White's own creative side, penning a song soon to be released based on her imaginings of what life might be like for the husband of nosy neighbour Rachel Lynde.
That song will be part of the album as it receives final engineering touches at a sound studio in Edmonton. She recorded the tracks there and in Vancouver and got the help of Vanderhoof's most famous former resident. International mega-musician Jim Vallance (songwriter for artists like Bryan Adams, Aerosmith, Bonnie Raitt, Tina Turner, KISS, and many more) is now based in Vancouver and through hometown connections agreed to give her early tracks a critique. It turned into an ongoing conversation.
"I might be able to tell Don [Rudland, her manager] or the studio musicians 100 times what I'm hearing in my head, but I don't have all the artistic vocabulary to get it across sometimes," she said. "I talk to Jim and he instantly knows what I mean and how to translate that to everyone else. He gets it totally. He has been such a gift."
White is keeping album release plans and Prince George concert dates close to her chest, but both will happen soon. You can tune up for both by downloading the advance singles now.
