Lori Jordan

“The first time I heard Lori perform, I told her ‘Get thee to a recording studio, now.’” That was Greg Sherret, music director at Vancouver’s JR Country FM 93.7, speaking to RPM in July 1988. Lori Jordan took the advice.

She booked time at Profile Studio in Vancouver with producers Larry Wayne Clark and Ray Garand and cut ‘Up to No Good’, a song Clark had written. Herman Frühm, keyboardist with the Winnipeg bands Mood Jga Jga and Crowcuss, played the piano solo, Jacqui Jasper and Jordan sang the backing vocals, and Don Ramos engineered, with Steve Feindel mixing at Ocean Sound. Clark’s Brainchild Music issued it in 1988 as a 7-inch (IR-5602) with the same recording on both sides, indicating a radio-promotion pressing. The sleeve thanks the Write-On ’87 committee for making the project possible. Write-On ’87 was a Vancouver songwriting competition run by the Institute of Communication Arts and the Pacific Songwriters Association, with more than $25,000 in prizes.

Clark was a well-connected choice. Over his career his songs were recorded by the Statler Brothers, Lee Greenwood, Chris Young and Buddy Jewell, and in 2011 he was inducted into the British Columbia Country Music Hall of Fame.

Radio picked up the single. ‘Up to No Good’ entered RPM’s national Country Singles chart in early September 1988 and climbed for the next several weeks, reaching No. 77 on October 15. The following year the British Columbia Country Music Association named Jordan its Most Promising New Vocalist.

In the early 1990s Jordan fronted her own band on the club circuit, singing and playing acoustic guitar, with Jay Buettner on guitar, Colin Kadey on keyboards, harmonica and rhythm guitar, a bassist Kadey remembers only as Rob, and Rob Lowen on drums. “We toured together out to Manitoba and back,” Kadey recalled, “and played most of the local rooms.”

Her debut album, One Night, arrived in the summer of 1994 on Saddlestone Records, a label based in Delta, B.C. and Blaine, Washington. Don Thompson produced and engineered it at Studio 56 in Langley, and its first single was ‘Money Talks’, written by Toronto’s Frank Turner. Jordan launched the album on September 7, 1994 at Gabby’s Country Cabaret in Langley while touring British Columbia and Alberta, fresh from the Merritt Mountain Music Festival and the Salmon Valley Music Festival, where she shared the top of the bill with Michelle Wright and Joan Kennedy.

-Robert Williston