Cherelle Jardine

For years a reel of two-inch tape sat in Cherelle Jardine's closet. On it was a version of the Rolling Stones' 'Let's Spend the Night Together' she had cut long ago at BullFrog Studios in Vancouver, with harmonies sung by her best friend, the Canadian singer-songwriter Rachel Page. Page has since passed away. When engineer Sheldon Zaharko had the reel baked and transferred at Hipposonic Studios, her voice came back intact, and Jardine had the spark for Something Old, Something New, her fifth solo album and the fourteenth record of a career that now runs past three decades.

Jardine was born in Toronto and grew up in the Goderich area of Ontario and later in Banff, Alberta. She first sat down at a piano at eight, in a friend's house, and wrote her first song at fourteen. She grew up in poverty with an abusive, alcoholic father, and songwriting became the one place she could go. She left home at sixteen and taught herself guitar on an instrument someone had thrown in the garbage, patched together with duct tape.

She moved to Vancouver to make music. After a short spell in 1992 with a band called AZ IZ she went solo, and with no money for studio time she worked for it, cleaning BullFrog Studios in exchange for the hours to record her debut, Born Naked, produced with Gerry Gagnon. The cover photo taught her a lesson she still passes on to younger artists: "never do a naked cd cover, it ends up biting you in the ass."

Something Good Is Happening, produced by Rob Begg, brought in a heavier band sound, and its closing song, 'Things You Do', took her back to BullFrog with producer Bart Gurr. Bleeding Water (2004) put its title track on British Columbia radio, and 'So Beautiful' was picked up as a second single. For Head Traffic (2006) she teamed with Ray Roper and David Wills of the Vancouver band Stonebolt, who produced the album with her. Part of it was cut at the Woodshed, Blue Rodeo's studio in Toronto, with Bob Egan, Bazil Donovan and the late James Gray sitting in, and her drummer Karl Watt played on two tracks. Proceeds from her video DVD for 'Nothing Left to Say', from that album, went to Kids Help Phone.

All of this happened while she was raising her daughter, Ajaye, and holding down a nine-to-five job. The Jardine home was full of musicians on party nights, and Ajaye was singing into the microphone by the age of six. Jardine also spent those years building the scene around her. In 1997 she co-founded the Pacific Alliance of Independent Recording Artists (PAIRA) and served as its vice president. She went on to become president of the Pacific Songwriters Association and sat on the boards of Women in Music and Richmond's Salmon City Music. Her concert series, Musical Expressions, ran for seven years with City of Richmond sponsorship, moving between Britannia Heritage Shipyard in Steveston in the summer and the Richmond Cultural Centre from fall to spring, and gave local players a regular stage. She booked the entertainment for the Steveston Maritime Festival, and she was nominated for Richmond's Ethel Tibbits Women of Distinction Award in 2005, 2006 and 2009, receiving it in 2011. In May 2012 the City of Richmond gave her its Arts Award for Cultural Leadership.

In 2009 mother and daughter formed The Jardines, a seven-piece alt-country and roots band built on their two voices, with keyboardist Marc Gladstone as musical director. Their first album was set to launch on February 12, 2010, on the main stage of Richmond's celebration of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony. The band went on to play the Merritt Mountain Music Festival, and crossed to England for a date at Liverpool's Cavern Club. Their second album, Someone's Stolen Tuesday, recorded at Vancouver's Sound Lounge in 2011 and co-produced by Jardine and Gladstone, leaned further into country-pop, and when Stuart Derdeyn reviewed it in The Province in October 2012 he wrote that the title track "should be a hit." In November 2013 mother and daughter went to Nashville to write for a next record with Jane Bach, Daryl Burgess and LeeAnn Burgess. The Jardines wound down in 2014 as Ajaye set out on her own path, which took her to Nashville and to the BC Country Music Association's Female Artist of the Year award.

Gladstone, who held the keyboard chair in Doug and the Slugs for the band's last seven years and joined Prism in 2010, became her husband and her most constant musical partner. In 2011 the two of them and singer-songwriter Scott Jackson formed Stone Poets, a Vancouver trio with Jardine on vocals, guitar and mandolin. They called their sound modern folk, and their shows ran on three-part harmony and the stories the band told between songs. The debut EP Trippin' on Daisies (2011) was followed by Angels and Devils (2013), More Angels and Devils (2015) and Smoke and Mirrors (2018), the singles 'Gleam and Beam' and 'The Great Divide' in 2019, and the 17-track HUM∀N in January 2024, which publicist Eric Alper called "what the world needs right now." Stone Poets have toured Canada and California, played Vancouver Island MusicFest in 2022, and in 2025 won International Band of the Year and Silver for International Video of the Year, for 'Beauty of It All', at the International Singer-Songwriters Association (ISSA) Awards.

In 2015 Jardine and Gladstone started HEAD, a heavy electro-rock project in which she performed as Lyric and told her own childhood through a character named Alberta. Gladstone produced, played keyboards and co-wrote. The albums Afraid to Sleep (2016) and Dear Father (2018) faced the abusive, alcoholic father head on, at full volume. "I am a chameleon, allowing my muse to guide me," she has said, and HEAD was the loudest proof of it. The project came to an end during the pandemic.

From 2018 to 2021 she hosted Make a Scene Canada, a radio show and podcast on Pacific Northwest Radio devoted to independent musicians. In 2023 she and her Stone Poets bandmates joined Bruce Coughlan of Tiller's Folly, Gord Maxwell of Chilliwack and drummer Greg Stuart to form Peacenik Collective, a group built around the peace-and-love spirit of the 1960s. Its first single, 'Back to Love', came out on January 21, 2025. With Gladstone she also performs as the duo Hand Over Heart, bringing live music into care homes and seniors' residences across British Columbia, and she sings alto in Earth Wind & Choir, a 25-voice Vancouver collective of working professionals. She writes, directs and edits the music videos for her own songs and for Stone Poets, works as a voice actor, and is co-producing Here for the Healing, a documentary about Earth Wind & Choir, with actress Lynda Boyd.

On Something Old, Something New, Studio 17 producer Colin Weinmaster co-wrote and produced the new songs: the sunny, '60s-flavoured 'It's a Beautiful Day', the protest rocker 'Lay the Weapons Down' and 'Love's Gotta Get Louder', written with Weinmaster and Daryl Burgess as an answer to the anger she was seeing in the news. That last song grew into the Love's Gotta Get Louder Community Challenge, which asked Canadians to share the good they were doing in their own communities. Weinmaster also produced her take on John Phillips' 'San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)'. On the rescued 'Let's Spend the Night Together', Al Harlow of Prism added electric guitar, Weinmaster wrote new horn parts for Tom Keenlyside, and Jardine sang a fresh lead over Rachel Page's original harmonies, with Arlen Park joining in.

The title track, 'Something Old, Something New', was written by the late Doug Bennett of Doug and the Slugs with Gladstone, Chris Murray Driver and Jay Wittur, and it had only ever existed as a demo. Hearing that tape, Jardine brought Gladstone, Driver and Wittur back into the studio to finish it. She also revisited 'Sweetest Sin' from Smoke and Mirrors, a Stone Poets song the band had never played live, and three songs from Someone's Stolen Tuesday: 'I Want More', 'Five Years Ago' and 'Someone's Stolen Tuesday'. She sang new leads and reworked lyrics on those, keeping the original steel guitar of Michael Flunkert, the mandolin of Ricky Francisco and the electric guitar of Douglas Liddle.

The album reached streaming services on August 22, 2026, the weekend of the ISSA Awards in Atlanta, Georgia, where Jardine took Bronze for International Songwriter of the Year and Silver for International Video of the Year for 'It's a Beautiful Day'. CDs and vinyl were set to follow at a Vancouver release celebration on October 30, 2026, with Al Harlow, Gord Maxwell, Marc Gladstone and many of the musicians from her long career on hand.

-Robert Williston