JANE SIBERRY

Acceptable food rots while we are chased from bins behind restaurants, chased from sleeping on the street, chased from relieving ourselves unless we pay for food or gas, until finally we are so hungry, sleepless, smelly, constipated and beaten-down that we simply die of lack of will to live.

I'm not a household word. The climate for original music is always a bit difficult.

I'm just opening the doors. And a lot of this is new to me - thinking about it, and letting go again and again and again, trusting that if I'm meant to continue working as a musician, it'll happen. If I'm not, then pull out the life support.

I have had the good fortune to experience both the limelight and the traffic light as a musician. I did my first recording on my own and it was available at concerts. The second to seventh were released on small and then large labels. My eighth to 14th were done under my own steam once again, but with the benefit of the Internet.

I was raised on pop music. Anything classical ran together in a complicated blur.

I brought a Border Collie back home to Vancouver from Wales - where some of my ancestors are from - and needed to challenge him in other ways than just being my pet. So I investigated sheep herding and took a few lessons, and decided I was probably learning more than my dog!

Harmony is when the sum is greater than the parts. A happy exaggeration.

I'd like to see the Second Coming in every one of us. That we all be Jesus. That we all embody that consciousness.

I started feeling it was wrong to withhold my music for money - as strange as that might sound!

The gym of life has a free membership. Build powerful life-muscles through family gatherings from hell. Do you really want to be a happy, peaceful blob?

Music is gathering. Taking our scattered thoughts and senses and coalescing us back into our core. Music is powerful. The first few chords can change us where no self-help books can.

We live in a world where the laws are getting so tight that management has changed to micro-management to quantum-management to paralysis.

Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.

I am a musician. I didn't know I would be so when I was young. I do know that I have always heard music in my head that I wasn't hearing somewhere else and I 'needed' this music. And obedient to the laws of nature, I created into this vacuum.

'The Taxi Ride,' from my second album, is one people want to hear a lot. I'm consciously trying to walk on the sunny side of the street, to really lift myself into a place of greater positivity, and that's a sad song.

I am part of an age-old profession of musicianship. I believe these times require grounding, real-ness and fun. Let's do it. Whatever happens is all good.

I try to make my music have the quiet spaces of folk, the intimacy, and the energy of rock.

If you ask someone if they like music, they look at you strangely. It seems to be a universal given. Like asking someone if they like breathing. It is like breathing. Or air, rather. Flowing without and within. A matrix within which our lives are set. The setting for the tableware of our beings.

I felt old when I was young and I feel younger now. Maybe that's a trick of my mind, but I'm springier and lighter.

I found it stimulating to study the sciences. It was a side of understanding the universe that I hadn't been exposed to.

It's all about consistency, and what makes a child or a dog secure: order, clarity - all those things.

I think, because I'm an artist, part of my job is to be a barometer, an antenna. It's in the air and it resonates with a lot of people to lighten up.

I've always loved acoustic music because I've always loved to hear someone's words or just watch them and just get into them. The distancing thing about rock is it's so assaulting.

So many of my friends are still trying to get record deals, and I've had one for 10 years now, where my only goal is to make the best music I can make. I've been very lucky. I have great faith that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, and whatever happens is going to be absolutely right for me.

I think we're returning to more of the original vibration of music and creativity through the removal of this distortion called the music industry. That's where we're heading. And it'll cut out a lot of music if people ever expected to make money.