Jenn Grant
Saturday, May 13, 8pm
Rebecca Cohn Auditorium 6101 University Avenue
$27-$32
Breaking apart a peanut butter cookie in the sunny window of a cafe on Gottingen Street, Jenn Grant glows. The singer-songwriter has just returned to Nova Scotia after weeks of touring behind her sixth album, Paradise.
It's a beautiful, subtly adventurous record that traces the intangible connections between love, life and nature—she's celebrating its release with a show at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Saturday.
Describing her vision and songwriting process, Grant's words grasp for a feeling that seems to exist beyond the limits of language.
"I think that paradise is an achievable thing for people, and sometimes you have to make choices about how you see the world and how you can add to those elements in the world to find your paradise," she says. Paradise "can also be a physical place—I'm from PEI, and we have a trailer in PEI on this little piece of land that my mom left us, on Paradise Lane. So it's also borrowed from that place, which kind of feels like a whole other universe to me when I go there."
The songs on Paradise allow us to enter Grant's other universe: While rooted in a folk tradition, her lyrics and melodies achieve an almost otherworldly feeling.
"They're always like these movie reels, or alternate realities," says Grant of her songs. "I sometimes feel stuck in the world, and I love the world, but I sometimes look to other places to find that magical beauty that sometimes feels lacking."
Grant says she and her three-piece band look forward to bringing that magical beauty to a special hometown crowd from the Cohn stage.
"This is the four of us, we've been on tour for two months, we love each other, and we want to play this record for you," she says. "It's the perfect thing, I think."