Jane Siberry is best known internationally for her moving ballad “Calling All Angels” with k.d. lang, which first appeared in Wim Wenders’ 1991 film Until the End of the World and more recently in 2021’s Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark.
In Canada, perhaps the song she is most identified with is a poetic, observational, experimental pop gem about gender norms, “Mimi on the Beach,” which clocks in at seven and a half minutes.
Found on her second album, 1984’s No Borders Here, the Toronto singer-songwriter shares that the lyric came to her when she spent time at the beach in Florida where her parents were living.
“That was the beginning of me expanding into more filmic music,” she says of the single, which includes two monologues and shifts between sing-songy and ethereal, rhythmical and hypnotic, with spots of subtle dissonance.
On the heels of her Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame induction earlier this month and the release of her 16th studio album, Season One: In the Thicket of Our Own Unconsciousness, Siberry looks back on her career and the creation of “Mimi on the Beach” 40 years ago.
I’m asking you to think back four decades. You’re telling a story, painting a vivid picture. You’re talking about gender roles, something that could apply today. What was going on socially at that time when you wrote it?
Yeah, things have changed so, so quickly, haven’t they? I mean, we didn’t even have the right words for gay or queer then, just beginning, and now we’ve gone all the way to trans.
Anyway, so at that point, I used to feel a little bit embarrassed that I came from middle-class, and I remember some music person saying, “You really should make up a different story.” And that really struck me that, “I don’t think so.” I think there’s probably a good purpose that I came from where I came from.
And then in the last few years, I understand now that, because I grew up in the suburbs and not in poverty, and not in Harlem, not here, I have a good understanding of how most of the world lives, in the Western world anyway, in a half-depressed state a lot of the time. And what that comes from, what stops that from happening, what connection is all about.
So this song came from me being in Florida visiting my parents and I was on the beach a lot of the time, just watching all these people my age. I was pretty judgmental and critical. I’m much less so now, thanks to just greater understanding in some way. But how the meanness and how acceptable that was, and how knee-jerk everything was, comments, and things that I didn’t care about, but that they really cared about. So that’s where all the braying images, and [the lyric] “press the button, take your cue,“ nothing’s real. It’s all something people have learned that doesn’t touch down on anything real, as far as the human heart goes.
You’ve got the line: “Well, typical, ‘til I make my speech, like you’re…
That was just funny. I wasn’t a big speech maker, but yes.
Like you’re telling us, the listener, that there’s something more within this song, and you’re about to tell us what it is.
Yeah. Yes. I guess I hadn’t even thought of that. But, yeah. For some reason, when I see my words in print, I really cringe, because it sounds like I think I know what I’m talking about, that I know it all, or something, but, in fact, I don’t mean to be, and I don’t want to be.
But anyway, it is a criticism [in the song — an observation of these people], and they had a party, and a girl arrived, beautiful, poised, white teeth, and we all leaned forward in the living room, with our drinks, during happy hour, to hear her regale us with stories of meanness. And everyone laughed, and thought they were hilarious.
The example in the song is when she would go pick up guys in bars, then go to the washroom and get a free drink. I thought it was really ugly, and I couldn’t understand why other people didn’t think that, too, which is, I think, how we are a lot of the time when we’re growing up. “Why am I thinking this, and no one else is?” It really makes you feel weird.
Is the lyric stream of consciousness?
No, a lot of it isn’t.
This wasn’t musings. You’re visiting your parents in Florida, you’re sitting on the beach, and you’re just writing. It wasn’t supposed to be just a stand-alone poem; this was going to be a song?
I already knew it was going to be a song. I wrote it on guitar, and I played it at a few folk clubs acoustically. But at a certain point, I realized I needed more space for splashes of words rather than stanzas, and those ended up often being monologues. So, I have two monologues in that one that I really needed to have in there to balance the song. That’s when I started playing with a band, and that’s when I started to get more freedom because I could say, “I need this kind of chord and this kind of groove, and then give me this many bars,” and then I would fit the words in there. And that was the beginning of me expanding into more filmic music.
Your label, Duke Street Records, gave you ultimate freedom to create a seven- or eight-minute song.
Yeah, but they never said, “No, you can only write four-minute songs.” I don’t know who would say that.
A&R definitely do.
It doesn’t make any sense to decide for the song how long it should be. Unless you’re writing commercial music, that’s fine. I have, I think it’s a 19-minute song, but it’s about addiction, and it’s a journey that requires certain parts, or it’s not complete. So it should be dictated by the song. I mean, it’s creative. It’s music. For me, it’s the one place where I get to do anything I want in my life, and sometimes I’m in the studio, upset with something, and I say, at least here I can do what I think is right, at least as a songwriter. Thank God.
Talk about the arrangement. There’s your beautiful voice telling this story, leading us in, very sing-songy, and then there’s this undercurrent of something a little rock ‘n’ roll, a little urgent. In spots, it’s not dissonant but almost chaotic or urgent. Subtly.
Yeah, which hopefully made sense. I started working with the band, all fine musicians, so we also brought in a Fairlight [CMI, digital synthesizer]. Rob Yale was one of the first people to have Fairlights, and so we were using samples, and that just opened another whole world for me.
And then, the co-producers, Kerry Crawford and Jon Goldsmith, did a lot of work. They worked with John Switzer and I. And how we got that hah hah hah hah hah, which was similar to Laurie Anderson, fortunately or unfortunately, because it wasn’t meant to be so derivative, but it does sound… And I think [deejay] Liz Janik at CFNY had just brought Laurie Anderson’s songs to the world. It was coming from that time. And so we let that be as it was, even though it sounded a little bit close to something else. But it really just came from a rolling bass part on the guitar when I wrote it. And then there’s a part where we go into the « Mimi and me. »
And then, I don’t know if you can tell, but on the word ‘me’ I go up into seagull sound. It’s pretty shocking. I do it for the audience sometimes. « Mimi and me, » then [Siberry squawks, like a seagull]. I’m one of the live seagulls. Ken Myhr is the amazing guitarist. Blows my mind every time I listen to it. Anne Bourne on the keyboard. And it’s also connected to the feeling, « Mimi and me, » and then when you hear birds cry, maybe that’s where you heard the trying to create a sense of chaos or things changing or dimensions buckling. Ken’s guitar on it is incredible. And then John Switzer’s bass and Al Cross’s drums and then the Fairlight, which was what we used to give those big drum sounds every now and then. That’s what they were used for back then.
What studio were you in?
We were at Manta Sound. Duke Street’s studio because Andy Hermant, who owned Duke Street, owned Manta. So, from starting at teeny studios, I was able to go into a big studio and learn a lot of chops just from working in a big studio with a great engineer, John Naslen. I was very lucky that way. Even then I’m thinking how all these other people around me who are way better musicians and songwriters and I just somehow got pulled into the limelight and didn’t really understand how the universe works. But everyone has their own lessons, and sometimes you’re meant to learn it in the limelight, sometimes you’re meant to do it completely differently somewhere else.
Did you know you had something special when you completed the song?
I don’t know. I can’t recall.
Are you surprised that all these years later, that’s the song people most identify you with?
Yeah, I do from then, in Canada anyway. Yeah, surprising. It was a fluke though because it got a lot of video play and we had one of the first videos. So, against all odds, a strange song got brought to the fore, which is beautiful. I love that. We were so new to videos that they actually had a shot of Mimi on the surfboard holding a bottle of Coca-Cola. No one really had thought about rights and stuff like that. I don’t think you should do that [laughs].
You could release “Mimi on the Beach” today and it would still stand up.
I don’t know if people today would be open.
It was unique then and it’s unique now.
Yeah, I guess so. Because a lot of stuff I do now I think is really interesting, but there hasn’t really been a place for it, even though I’ve been working. And the music industry has evolved and evolved. But it might still need a fluke to be popular today if it came into the eye today. But now I understand flukes. Flukes are not flukes. They’re the way the universe works.
Oh, in the video, I wanted Mimi to be an androgynous boy, actually. I really didn’t want her to be Mimi. They didn’t really want to have a boy and that was the DOP’s girlfriend. So it wasn’t really my image of what Mimi should be like. She should be non-gender because that was too much of a focus pole that she was a girl and I didn’t mean that. I just meant anyone. We’re all trying to help each other stand up and live our lives with more safety or confidence, or whatever the word is.
Well, that was definitely ahead of its time.
As an aside, though, I’ve been thanked a number of times by people who had the courage to come out because of that song. So maybe it all worked out perfectly. But it wasn’t meant to be a coming-out song, but it looked like it and gave courage to people, which is pretty cool.
