Sass Jordan's first love and inspiration was seminal American music and the artists that most reflected its influence. Her latest musical offering, GET WHAT YOU GIVE, is a celebration of the rough-hewn beauty of the genre. Partly recorded in Nashville with much-in-demand blues-roots expert Colin Linden (Bruce Cockburn, Colin James, The Band) in the role of collaborator, player and producer, the process was the exemplification of the simplest of musical partnerships and philosophies. As Sass describes it: "Tone on tone, wide brush strokes on a canvas, pulling the sap up from the roots of country/soul."
In this setting, the accomplished songwriter and singer, whose husky-toned voice People Magazine once described as "pained but indomitable," swaps the poppy vibe of her last studio album for a more rootsy, intimate sound that reflects her early propensity for artists like The Band; Little Feat; Delaney and Bonnie and Friends; Bonnie Raitt; and The Allman Brothers. Linden gives the singer plenty of elbow-room for vocal performances that have an impromptu feel yet are thick with gritty conviction. She is perfectly complemented by the understated contributions of session stalwarts like bassists Bob Babbitt (The Funk Brothers) and Garry Tallent (Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band); drummers Ken Koomer (Wilco) and Bryan Owings (Shelby Lynn); guitarists Colin Linden, Audley Freed (Black Crowes, Jimmy Page) and Gary Nicholson; keyboardist Richard Bell (Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band, The Band); percussionists Gary Craig and John Whynot; and vocalists Richie Kotzen and Derek Sharp.
“This is an exploration of the past 20 years of my musical life, mining all the influences more directly and yet more sideways than ever, because I'm working with Colin Linden who comes at the music from an incredibly fresh and new perspective for me. Working with him was a huge eye-opener and, strangely enough, more my natural way of working. I believe in the moment. The perfection is the moment; that's the raw material right there and for some reason that makes it that much bigger. The possibilities are endless. The sculpture is not totally carved. It's up to the listener to finish it. It's rough around the edges. It's much more like life. It's real. It's not all packaged and polished and Botoxed up. The bottom line is that it connects you emotionally with your history. I picked these songs because they definitely connected with me in those ways.”
Sass' collaboration with Colin Linden had its beginnings in the latter months of 2005 with an idea she had of recording a CD of songs by The Band.
"I talked to Craig Northey from the Odds, Colin James… everybody I talked to in Canada said you should talk to Colin Linden. So his name had been coming up in conversation and we talked to each other twice about doing a project together. As it turns out we had met back in the early '80s when he dropped by to see The Pinups, a band I was in at the time in Montreal. Finally, Colin and I had a meeting and this is the result of our subsequent collaboration."
Sass' constituency on this record is songs about human relationships, which is very much in keeping with the CD's title, GET WHAT YOU GIVE. Though this is the first time she didn't co-write the lion's share of songs on the album, the outside contributions on this opus don't stray far from the plot.
“As well as mining my longtime writing partnership with Derek Sharp, I revisited a lot of old friends and partners on this record: Doyle Bramhall II, Stevie Salas, Richie Kotzen, Audley Freed, Gary Nicholson… My belief is that relationships that last, only get better with age. They become so much richer with shared history, and hence another reason for the title, GET WHAT YOU GIVE.”
