As a child in London, Ont., Meaghan Smith loved to sing and perform. Trouble was, she had a serious case of stage fright. So, her musical dream stayed just that – a dream – while she went off to school to become an animator. Smith’s musical talent was kept to herself. So how is it, in 2008, she is signed to a major label in the U.S. and is distributed across Canada by another?

It all happened pretty fast for the folk-pop singer whose music, steeped in traditional pop and jazz, but with flourishes of current sounds, is now being heard by audiences coast to coast. When Smith was studying to become an animator a few years back, she began holding small concerts for only two or three people at a time in a stairwell at her school. Eventually, some of her teachers began coming to the shows and soon enough, an audio engineer at the school offered to record some of her songs. When Smith moved to Halifax for an animation job, it was a new chance for her to try her hand at music without a lot of pressure. She had nothing to lose in this new city where no one knew who she was.

“And now, four years later, I kind of worked through (the stage fright), and I’m still working through it, but I can get up on stage now and I actually feel really happy to be there,” she says.

Smith and her band mates, including her husband Jason Mingo (who also plays with Steven Bowers and Charlie A’Court), were driving from one show to the next in Ontario when she spoke to East Coast Noise recently.

Smith never expected to be performing for a living, but that’s just what she is doing. After developing her sound in Halifax, she recorded her first EP, Lost With Directions, with CBC in 2004.

In 2007, while attending seminars at the Atlantic Film Festival, she met some film and TV producers from California. She gave them samples of her music, hoping for nothing else but some constructive criticism. Instead, the move helped launch her career.

“I expected nothing, I was just hoping they’d write back and say something like, ‘You should work on this,’ or whatever,” Smith says. “But I heard back from all of them, and across the board, they said, ‘This is fantastic. We want you to come to Los Angeles, and we’ll  introduce you to this record label and to this huge guy and this huge producer …’

“I didn’t even have a manager at the time. So I started scrambling to find a manager and setting up meetings.”
From there, Smith began getting offers. She eventually signed with Sire Records in the U.S., which is distributed by Warner Music in Canada.

“I had no idea what to expect, truly. I wasn’t expecting any of it, so I hadn’t been researching it.”

It’s been a learning curve for Smith, but she’s relishing it. Her first release for the label, The Cricket’s Quartet, was recently released. It features four songs and an accompanying video for each one.

While the EP is a great little listen on its own, traditional jazz and pop mixed with some scratching from Montreal DJ Kid Koala and some other more modern flares, Smith promises it’s only a sample of what’s to come.

The full-length follow-up, The Cricket’s Orchestra, will be released early next year. The EP and album were both produced by Les Cooper, known for his work with Jill Barber and others.

Smith has always been attracted to “old-timey” sounds, which she describes as “whimsical.” She says much of today’s music sounds too produced and “sterile.”

“It’s just really real,” she says. “Listening to those old recordings from the ‘20s and the ‘30s and the ‘40s and even the ‘50s, things were really legitimate and real. There was no overdubbing, there was no punching in, there was no pitch correction. It was really pure, a bunch of people in a room, sitting around a microphone just playing their hearts out, and I love that legitimate feel to the music.

“I really like that old-timey sound, but I’ve updated it and added a modern twist.”

In the ever-changing music industry, many musicians are taking a do-it-yourself approach or they’re signing to small independent labels. But that isn’t for Smith.

“For the kind of career that I want to have, you know, having a major label is going to work for me. It’s not going to work for everybody, but for what I want to do, I think it’s going to work really well.

“And so far, it’s been completely up to me. I have a say in everything, so I chose the director of my videos, I chose the direction of my videos, there’s no one telling me what to do at all. It’s absolutely fantastic, it’s a real team effort. They’re just really interested in getting behind me as a person and my music and just bringing that to the world.”

She says the Internet allows bands to do things however they want, whether it’s with the help of a major or indie label or it’s completely independent.

Smith has residencies planned in Canada and the U.S. over the next few months, but she has at least one Atlantic Canadian gig planned for next month.

Smith and singer-songwriter Matthew Barber (older brother Jill) will perform at Moncton’s Capitol Theatre on Saturday, Nov. 22.

“It’s great, I really, really like it,” she says of being on the road. “It suits me really well. My husband is in my band, so I never feel homesick or like I’m missing anything. And I really enjoy just travelling and seeing new places and getting to hang out with my band members.”

There’s a great deal of work ahead for Smith, whose career is beginning to snowball.

“I’m just expecting to be very, very busy and probably not spending much time in the house that I just bought,” she says with a laugh. “But it’s alright, I’d rather be busy.”

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Jill Barber has shifted gears a little bit on her new album, Chances (Outside Music), from folk songstress to jazz chanteuse, singing sultry, romantic tunes that would fit easily in the set of a lounge singer in the 1940s or ‘50s. It’s not a great leap for the Ontario native, who developed her career in Halifax, releasing a few award-winning records before a recent move to Vancouver, B.C.

She called the change a “sidestep” when talking to East Coast Noise last week.

“I think that I have been leaning that way and there have been hints of heading in that direction,” the Juno nominee and ECMA award winner says.  “But I don’t feel that I’ve moved away from the folk thing, I think I’ve moved more towards where my strengths lie.

“I‘ve dabbled in a few different styles, and you know, I’m a singer-songwriter, I will always be a singer-songwriter. I think I still identify as folky in that I still write all these songs on the acoustic guitar, it’s just that we’ve sort of decorated them a little bit more.”

Barber worked once again with musician/producer Les Cooper, who also produced her 2006 record For All Time (Outside). While that album played to Barber’s folk and country leanings, Chances leans toward her jazzier side.

“(Les) and I have been kind of following a similar path,” she says. “When we made For All Time, we were both really getting into the old traditional country, we were kind of going through an old country phase, and I think you can hear that a little bit on that album.

“We sidestepped, I think, on this album. When you go back far enough, old traditional country and jazz kind of meet somewhere maybe in the ‘40s or ‘50s or ‘60s. When you look at someone like Patsy Cline, it’s jazz, but it’s country. We kind of sidestepped from country and looked to where that sort of met with jazz, if that makes any sense.”

Barber can’t pinpoint the time she fell in love with old jazz standards. She recalls purchasing an old record player in an antique shop a few years ago, and she began picking up old records in junk shops, which led her to discovering some pretty obscure material.

”I kind of had access to all this old music that a lot of people had left in their basements or thrown away,” she says. “I guess I fell in love with how that music made me feel, which is really dreamy and romantic and kind of like, ‘life is beautiful.’

“Whether or not this is true, it seemed to speak of a simpler time or something. There was a certain quality of love and romance that I don’t think you find in modern music. There was that sort of timeless quality that I try to emulate with this album.”

She nearly wound up recording some of those old classics for this record. Chances was nearly a covers album, as Barber had been considering a collection of covers of her favourite old songs before she eventually decided to write originals.

“I’ve been wanting to make a record like this for a long time. But the singer-songwriter in me … it didn’t sit right. I kind of instead tried to challenge myself to try and write an album that could stand beside those sort of classic old standards, but that is new music, that’s contributing new music.”

Three of the album’s 10 songs, the title track, “Old Flame” and “One More Time,” were written with renowned singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, whom Barber has toured with extensively.

She says writing with Sexsmith makes her worker harder on her material. It helps that they both come from similar places in music, but she says where she can reference many old songs, Sexsmith can sit at a piano and play them start to finish.

“He’s a musical encyclopedia,” she says.

From Banff to Toronto, Chances was recorded at Blue Rodeo’s Woodshed Studios and at the famed Glenn Gould Studio. In addition to Sexsmith, the Good Lovelies, The Sojourners also appear on the record providing beautiful backing vocals.

Barber, Cooper and the other musicians spent six months working on Chances, which was released just last week. Barber, who says she is a pretty sensitive person, always finds herself a little anxious before the release of an album, curious what the feedback will be.

“It’s an anxious time for sure,” she admits. “It’s an exciting time too, though. There’s a whole bunch of emotions. I wouldn’t know, but it’s probably not unlike bringing a child into the world.

“For six months I have total control over this thing. It’s my project and I put everything I have into the project, my heart and soul, and it’s the world that I control. The day it gets released is the day I give up control. I’ve taken it as far as I can possibly take it. The rest isn’t up to me.

“So, it’s an anxious time, to see how my little album makes out on its own in the world.”

Barber has several dates lined up on the East Coast, beginning with a songwriter’s circle tonight at Sackville United Church in Sackville, N.B. She’ll be touring the East Coast for the next few weeks before heading out west again. Check out her website for all the details.

In December, Barber will be heading to Australia where For All Time has just been released. She’ll be playing festivals and opening for Hawksley Workman on his tour.

While she’s living on the opposite coast these days, Barber says she still keeps Atlantic Canada close to her heart.

“Oh yeah, yeah, especially this time of year, which is my favourite time of year in the Maritimes. It’s pretty hard to beat. Halifax is a city that’s very close to my heart.

“But I’m kind of enjoying the change. It’s just sort of a change of scenery. But I’m still on the road as much as ever, or I will be, and I get to go back to the Maritimes in the next couple of weeks. I feel like I’m getting the full country perspective being out here.”

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