The Wailin' Jennys knew they had a good thing going from the start The Wailin' Jennys knew they had a good thing going from the start
Destiny, fate, karma, kismet - call it what you will. When the Wailin' Jennys first got together, the planets aligned.
"Our voices blended really well together," Jenny Ruth Moody said recenttly from her home in Winnipeg.
"I think we were sort of surprised. We hadn't expected it. It sort of has felt right from the beginning, that it had an energy all of its own. It just seemed like it was meant to be, somehow. When you come across something like that it's really worth exploring."
Things sounded promising from day1. The acoustic folk trio's first gig - even before a friend had suggested their colourful name - was sold-out. They recorded a five-song demo three weeks later in a living-room and wowed delegates at the International Folk Alliance convention. The demo, tidied up and bolstered by a sixth song, became their first album; it charted on campus radio across the country.
One can only imagine what will happen now that Moody, Nicky Mehta and Cara Luft have releases their proper, full-length studio album 40 Days.
"In a way it feels like the beginning. I think it's just going to have more impact," Moody predicted.
The new album, recorded and mixed over the fall and winter, finds the Jennys writing their own songs, singing their heary-dash melting harmonies and playing a roster of instruments: acoustic guitar, dobro, piano, bodhran, electric guitar.
It's a reckless prediction, perhaps, but this trio could become the Dixie Chicks of folk. The fact they're still getting better at what they do is almost scary. Recording the new album, their producer David Travers-Smith challenged the trio to stretch and grow as musicians. (He set a good example by working 18-hour days).
"It was really intense, but a really great learning experience for all of us," said Moody.
While the album features a bevy of backing musicians, including Norah Jones' band member Kevin Breit on guitar and mandolin, the Jennys didn't want to get lost in the mix, or to have things too polished.
"We were very adamant that it should represent who we are and what we do live," said Moody.
Although all three women have had independent careers and recorded their own albums, nothin is sacrificed in becoming a trio. They share the workload, they bring along their own songs. It sounds like the perfect combination of individual expression and group dynamics.
"The fact that we're more experienced and a little bit older makes us a better band because a band is about more than music," says Moody. "It's about traveling, its about compromise, it's about heloing each other through hard times."
Asked to describe her bandmates, she says Cara is exuberant and joyful.
"She's got an amazing personality. She's funny, and as soon as you see her on stage, you see all of it.
Nicky is strong, wise and balanced between introspective and outgoing.
Moody says the other two would say she was "sheltered as a child and I need to be eductaed on 80s pop music," she laughs. They'd also describe her as "a bit of a dreamer, probably a bit of a romantic. I can be a little spaced out. A lot of people say that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I think we tend to agree."