ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MARCH 23, 2000
By Steve Newton
When Sue Medley picks up the phone in Toronto, the Courtenay native is still abuzz from the big record-launch party thrown at a Hogtown bar the night before. Such music-industry schmoozes are common, but what Medley did at the bash, which was to celebrate the release of her new CD, Velvet Morning, must have raised a few eyebrows.
And raised ’em way up.
“I was stressed about it because we were doing this double-trapeze act in the middle of the floor there,” she explains. “I thought, ‘Oh God, please get me through this without falling on my head.'”
So what’s up with that, you may well ask? Having just released her third album, does the two-time Juno winner plan to scrap her musical career and run away with the circus?
Nope. She just likes being airborne, and who can blame her?
“It’s fantastic,” she enthuses. “Oh, I just love it so much! It’s such a challenge physically–and mentally too, because you have to focus when you’re up there and concentrate on every move. But boy, it’s a rush, to say the least.”
Medley caught the highflying bug after she moved to L.A. a year and a half ago. Her manager introduced her to 67-year-old Hollywood stunt trainer Bobby Yerkes, who’s got a trapeze set up in his back yard. Now Medley goes for lessons every Sunday, and she’s progressed to the point where her trapeze skills are showcased in the video for her new Canadian single, “Gone”.
As well as causing would-be Flying Wallendas to watch their backs, Medley has been making strides on network TV of late. Three songs from her new CD have aired on the hit series Dawson’s Creek, and at the time of our chat she’d just heard that the producers plan to use “Gone” as well.
One of the songs that was featured on the show was “Break the Chain”, which Medley cowrote with original Eagles member Bernie Leadon.
“I met him a few years ago when I was living in Nashville,” she explains. “He had written just the music part of this song and he said, ‘Sue, I think you can do something with this, whaddya think?’ So I took the little cassette home of the guitar part and basically in one sitting I wrote the melody and the words–they just seemed to come very easy for that song.
“And I just love it because it’s just a simple, gentle kinda thing, that there’s no big hook, there’s no big crashing ‘ta-da, here’s the chorus!'”
Leadon isn’t the only roots-rocker who’s been lending Medley a hand in recent years. Judging by the credits on Velvet Morning, it appears as though she has most of John Mellencamp‘s band on there as well.
“A lot of ’em did play on it,” she points out. “Just before I moved to L.A. I was living in [Mellencamp’s hometown of] Bloomington for a couple of years, and while they were making their last record, Andy York, John’s guitar player, would come in after their long, 12-hour sessions and would work well into the night with me on this record And same with [longtime Mellencamp guitarist] Mike Wanchic, too. I’ve just gotta say those guys went way above and beyond the duty of a friend.
“And what was really fantastic about that whole process was that it was the first time I’ve done a record without a record company, so it really enabled me to fool around, to go, ‘What do we like, what do we not like?’ Then it was all done, and about six months after that I hooked up with Egg Records out of Indianapolis.”
Music from those Bloomington sessions will be showcased when a solo Medley opens for Inuit vocalist Susan Aglukark at the Vogue Theatre on Saturday (March 25). After all her time spent in the American heartland, Tinseltown, and Music City, U.S.A., she still likes being in B.C. best.
“That’s always gonna be my home,” she stresses. “Everywhere else is like a second home, so–whether it’s Indiana or L.A.–who cares?”
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