ON THE COVER
THE MANY JANN LIVES OF ARDEN She's a singer-songwriter, broadcaster, actor, author, speaker, and now, reality star. She's funny. Her childhood was tough. And death doesn't scare her. BY DAVID HOLT
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What’s good, what’s bad? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Jann Arden knows this. Both her parents were musical. When she was young, her mother used to sing her to sleep. When she was older, they would sit at the old family piano together, the one that had escaped the loss of her grandparents’ farm to a bad hand at a poker game. Growing up wasn’t easy. “My dad was an angry alcoholic,” says Arden. As a 10-year-old, she escaped to the basement after school, listening to records and learning to play her mother’s old Horner guitar. In a matter of weeks she was writing songs. “By the time I was 16, I’d written hundreds of songs,” she says. “Most were terrible. But good things can come out of bad things. Dad’s drinking helped launch my songwriting.”
PHOTO BY: CTV'S JANN
At her home near Calgary, Arden just returned from Europe. She is on the road more than 200 days a year, because, as she says, “people won’t come to hear me sing in my backyard.”
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