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Sass Jordan

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Sass Jordan

Sarah "Sass" Jordan (born 23 December 1962) is an English-born Canadian rock singer from Montreal, Quebec. Her first single, "Tell Somebody," from her debut album of the same title won the Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist in 1989. Since then, she has been nominated three more times for Juno Awards. Her album Rebel Moon Blues hit #5 on the Billboard Blues chart. Released 28 April 2023, her latest is a live album from 1994 when she toured with Taylor Hawkins on drums called Live in New York Ninety-Four.

Jordan was born in 1962, in Birmingham, England, to French literary professor Albert Jordan and former English ballerina Jean Lanceman. When Jordan was three years old, her dad moved them from France to Montreal for a position as a professor at Concordia University. In 1986, Jordan made her recording debut on the Bündock album Mauve as co-lead vocalist on the song "Come On (Baby Tonight)". She soon began working as a session vocalist for other Montreal-based acts, notably for The Box. Jordan appeared as a vocalist in the music video for The Box song "Closer Together", although the vocals were recorded by Martine St. Clair. Local acts began recording songs written by Jordan, including the Canadian hit single "Rain" by Michael Breen, which was featured on his 1987 self-titled album. In her early teens, Jordan regularly sang and played guitar with a group of friends in Westmount Park. By the age of 16, Sass Jordan began performing with bands at clubs in downtown Montreal, eventually becoming a vocalist/bassist for high-profile local band The Pinups.

Jordan was first inspired to pursue music after hearing The Band's 1969 track "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" on the radio. Jordan's parents only had classical music in the house, and she has described hearing The Band on the radio as a "revelation." She has cited Rod Stewart, Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, David Bowie, Tears For Fears, Anthrax, and American soul singer Al Green, as among her musical influences.

My biggest influences were males. I never really liked female rock singers. I really like bluesy type stuff. My favorite female vocalists are people like Bonnie Raitt and of course all of the black singers like Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin, but that's a whole other genre and if I could have sung like that, you would never have caught me dead doing this. The male singers who were my biggest influences were people like Steven Tyler, Robert Palmer and Paul Rodgers. These guys have such command of rhythm and it is rhythm that makes a great singer, just like it is rhythm makes a great guitar player or a great bass player or a great drummer. It is astounding how underrecognized that is. It is all about rhythm, freezing rhythm and timing. Obviously pitch and the ability to turn a phrase that matters too, but it is rhythm. You can find that artificially in this day and age with technology like beat detective and with the recording technique, so you can move the track over slightly, so it melds in the pocket, mathematically, but a true singer does it naturally. We didn't have that technology when I started out or when any of the guys that were my biggest influences Lou Gramm, Robin Zander, Rod Stewart and Lowell George, the slide guitar player from Little Feat started out.

Jordan's debut album, Tell Somebody, was released in 1988 on Atlantic Records, featuring the Canadian chart hit singles "Tell Somebody", "Double Trouble", "Stranger Than Paradise", and "So Hard". "They played the "Tell Somebody" video on Much Music a lot," said Jordan. "I remember going in two weeks from relative obscurity to being recognized as the girl in the video." During the 1988–89 chart run of "So Hard", Jordan was also represented on the Canadian charts with her remake of the 1965 R&B classic "Rescue Me", which had been recorded for the soundtrack of the film American Boyfriends. As a result of her quick rise to fame, Jordan relocated from Montreal to Los Angeles in January 1990 to try breaking into the American music market.[citation needed]

Jordan's second album, Racine, was released in 1992 on MCA Records. Recorded in Los Angeles, Racine is Jordan's highest-selling album, with global sales estimated at 450,000 copies, and yielded the Canadian hit singles "Make You a Believer", "I Want to Believe", "You Don't Have to Remind Me" and "Goin’ Back Again". "Make You a Believer" and "I Want to Believe" were ranked on Billboard magazine's Mainstream Rock chart. Racine has sold 100,000 copies in Canada.

In 1992, Jordan recorded the duet "Trust in Me" with Joe Cocker for the motion picture The Bodyguard, after star Kevin Costner heard Jordan on his car radio. The soundtrack album for The Bodyguard would sell in excess of 45 million copies worldwide.

In 1994, Sass Jordan released Rats which she has cited as her favorite album. Rats yielded Jordan's first song on the Billboard Hot 100 with the single "Sun's Gonna Rise". However, Rats failed to build on the momentum of Racine, and Jordan subsequently was dropped from the MCA Records roster. Jordan then began recording for Aquarius Records, acquiescing to the label's request for a more mainstream sound for the albums Present (1997) and Hot Gossip (2000). "Those are probably my least favourite records," says Jordan. "I think there are some great songs, I just don't like the production at all."

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