Sarah Jane Scouten – Confessions
Light Organ Records – 22 November 2019
Sarah Jane Scouten’s upbringing was a little unusual. Harmony singing was a more commonplace activity than watching television. As a result, Confessions is an album that plays to her gifts as a singer and her ability to find songs that bring out both the storytelling and her roots in discovering music in places like the Sacred Harping singing of Kentucky, and Louisiana two-stepping. Not bad for a girl raised in Bowen Island, British Columbia. Her songs and storytelling befit a woman who has been a three-time Canadian Folk Music Award nominee.
Her disc of confessions recorded with producer Andre Wahl deal with revelations and relationships from her own life. Bass and electric piano form the opening salvo of I’m A Rattlesnake. The song seems to be filled with bile to spare for a former lover, “I’m a rattlesnake, don’t you tread on me, if you don’t like bite don’t make me bare my teeth.” Succeeding verses take the theme even deeper as the full band burns with venom.
Ballad of a Southern Midwife is a bluesy take on her own back catalog from ten years ago. Organ and electric guitar blaring Sarah sings, “Grandfather loved Jesus, grandma so did she. I was a wicked baby my father told me. Set fire to the church house at the age of three, was born a woman and not supposed to be.” She also feels it’s one of her most relevant songs, “This song is about the overlap of religious intolerance and sexual oppression and a woman’s fight to live on her own terms, regardless of the consequences.”
There is a brutal honesty to some of her lyrics. You Are The Medicine offers a clear-eyed look at a former lover from a perspective fully appreciative of what she currently has, “If he is the drug you are the medicine, his is the love of one who is reticent.” It’s an upbeat little tune with little more than a guitar until the chorus when the keyboards come in to add shading. Album closer Crossing The Bar comes from an old poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Gentle guitars carry the tune, “May there be no sadness or farewell when I embark … I hope to see my pirate face to face when I have crossed the bar.”
Confessions takes the emotions of Sarah Jane Scouten putting them on display for everyone to see. What makes this collection most remarkable is her ability to share the details of her life in a way that makes us all a little stronger, and a hopefully a little more understanding.