Canadian Musician - January / February 2020 | Page 18

AS HEARD ON THE...
Music Life Coach
JOANNE JANZEN
For the full conversation,
listen to the Dec. 4, 2019
episode
Shaun Verreault of
WIDE MOUTH MASON
For the full conversation, listen to the Nov. 6, 2019 episode
CM: You’ve primarily been an electric guitar player, but on
the new record, I Wanna Go with You, you primarily play lap
steel with a unique style involving three slides on your left
hand. How did you develop your playing style?
Shaun Verreault: It was around our second record, Where I
Started, where I actually started playing slide guitar. It started really
traditionally. Over time, I started using the other fingers on my left
hand to play simultaneously – not as much as Sonny Landreth, like
fingers behind the slide kind of thing, but I just started to think of
my pinky as being made of Pyrex, and my other fingers being like
normal. So, when I got this lap steel, I just couldn’t make sense of it.
The mechanics and the muscle memory of vibrato and pitch and
everything are completely different when it’s in your lap facing up,
versus when you’re playing standard-style guitar. So, I didn’t know
what to make of it and had it live in the studio for a while for people
to use on sessions.
Then, one day, I had a couple of slides in my pocket for playing
on sessions and I ended up putting one on one of my other fingers
and having this eureka moment: “Wait a second, now I can do
some of the other stuff I can do on guitar, but I can also do some
other stuff that I can’t do.” I can have contrapuntal notes moving in
different directions or have one be still and the other move. It just
seemed like there was a lot of promise in it to play the lap steel in
different keys, to play different chords on it, and to play chords and
melodies simultaneously that I couldn’t do any other way.
DELANEY JANE
For the full conversation, listen to the Nov. 27,
2019 episode
CM: Before launching your own solo
career, you were a top-line writer and
feature singer on some major electronic
dance records, collaborating with Ties-
to, DVBBS, Grandtheft, and others. How
did that happen before you even had a
manager, label, or publisher?
Delaney Jane: When I was writing all those
feature top lines, it was while I was in school,
so it was completely independent. Shaun
CM: You’ve kind of
created the concept of
a “music life coach” and
with your artist clients,
you cover a lot of areas,
from career strategy
and development to
mental health and
self-improvement. So,
ideally, where should
artists be in their lives
and careers when they
begin working with
you?
Joanne Janzen: Full-time
musicians tend to get the most out of this. What I find usually
happens is we all get into music because we love it, we’re very
passionate about it, but people are in it and they’ve created
some music and maybe had some singles out online or on radio
and they’re in a place where they feel, I wouldn’t say stuck, but
they’re not sure how to progress further… It’s usually there
where I am able to pick up and say, “Look at all this that you’ve
done; this is amazing. Where do you want to go from here, and
what is potentially stopping you? What are the beliefs? What
are the thought processes? What are the physical challenges –
money, time, connections, all of those things – and how do you
think about it?”
So, the ideal client for me is in that place and they do very
well because they sort of already know the business … and they
want to up-level to the next stage. My goal is to keep people in
this business forever. I don’t want people to ever walk away from
what their dream is of doing this full-time. I think people get to
that place and get really burdened with matching what their
dreams are with commerce and it gets really heavy. They’re just
not sure where to go from here and where to hedge their bets
or where to risk things. That’s what I do; I help them go through
that and increase their income and make sure everything is paid
for and all of those great things.
[Frank, producer and collaborator,] was
working out most of my deals, kind of acting
as my manager at the time. But yeah, I was
independent for years and it didn’t matter. It
was actually easier for the DJs I was working
with because they didn’t have to go through
a label and all this splits nonsense, which
can get really complicated and so it was
easier for everybody. I’m just amazed that
the trajectory just continued to spiral up so
that when I did drop my first real solo single,
“Bad Habits,” and pushed it to radio, it went
gold and is now platinum. That is so crazy
to me that that is the first single I put out
and we gained so much traction, but I have
awesome fans and they’re diehards.
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18 CANADIAN MUSICIAN