The modern rock and roll success story: Girl studies microbiology and works in a café. Girl finds herself unfulfilled and moonlights as a singer. Girl funds first album from accumulated tips of café patrons (See? The early entrepreneurial edge). Girl's album finds rock and roll executive who signs her to larger label. Girl gets critical attention with follow-up album. Large tour. Couple of awards. That sort of thing. Girl makes next album, attracting big name guests which help propel album into next bracket of the label's feeding chart. Girl's growth as a composer, performer, and producer is evident on this last album. Girl leaves label to start her own Internet-based publishing company.

What? (insert Scooby Doo double take)

More modern than you may realize. Following the Seagrams/Universal Festival of the Piranha that dominated the music news last year and the continued disappearance of brain cells among the remaining executives ("Limp Bizkit is really moving albums. They must know what these kids want. How can we tap that? I know, let's make Fred Durst a Vice President at the label!"), the sole remaining outlet for the truly creative and expressive may be through such ventures as Jane Siberry's Sheeba site. Having survived a bumpy second year (the terrible twos are not just for flesh and blood creations any longer), Sheeba has become truly grounded as the glittering cornerstone to the Siberry empire.

Getting there wasn't a simple skip through the park, though. "When the label surprised me out of the blue that they wanted to renegotiate, it slowly dawned on me that I could leave if I wanted to," Jane relates during a stopover at the Sheeba offices between dates on her Pilgrim Solo Tour. "When I did decide to leave, I felt so free. I didn't have any idea of how trapped I was until that point. And now I'm even more claustrophobic. Not because of Sheeba. But I'm even less likely to enter into things where someone else can determine my future. No, I didn't expect anything like this. I thought it would be easier."

Siberry the Musician had to become Siberry the Business Manager and Siberry the Order Taker and Siberry the Post Office Runner and so on. Not a whole lot of time could be spend recording music when the life of the business was at stake and Jane took some time to refocus and redirect herself. Sure, she was free of the major label shackles, but she was now responsible for every aspect of her career. Daunting? Terrifying? Or just challenging? "There is an entirely different value system [when you are selling yourself]," Jane says. "When you know things inside and out, that is when you want to take more responsibility for things and to change them. A lot of musicians are seriously handicapped when it comes to business transactions and aren't able to state clearly what they want for their efforts. Being a responsible business person goes hand in hand with being a more responsible person. It is really healthy for musicians to be more involved in their art."

And Sheeba has been busy this last year. Since straightening out the turmoil of the first two years, Jane has been able to focus again on the forward progress of her ship and this last century was sealed with the release of her New York Trilogy--a triple (well, quad) disc set of live material culled from a series of shows done in New York City back in 1996. A phenomenal outpouring of material and arranging resulted in performances spread out across the dying months of autumn. Thematically arranged, Tree, Lips, and Child are a triptych encompassing the range of Siberry the Musician.

"I've spent a lot of time in Northern Canada and I thought it was about time to start sculpting that into form [for Trees] and it ended up being mostly about water," she laughs. Including "It Can't Rain All the Time"--the song written specifically for inclusion in Alex Proyas' film, The Crow--Tree is an aquatic journey, a dense, liquid exploration of the effects and necessity of water in one's life. The songs were culled from her earlier works and, taken in their new ordering, show off an underlying thematic commonality to Jane's work. The unconscious structure to the artistic vision is made clear through the course of this album.

And the final double set of Child--a "gathering of the scattered Christmas energy" as Jane introduced the evening to the audiences gathered for those December shows. Combining all the elements gone before--spoken word, her luscious stories and rich arrangements--with traditional Christmas songs and some darker tales, Jane seeks to bring all of these elements and the separate acts of her career into one room for several focused energetic hours. While Child had been previously released back in 1997, it can only be properly placed in the progress of the Siberry oeuvre now that the other nights of the Trilogy have been mastered and released. With the New York Trilogy, Jane is able to look back on these last years and see that Phase One of Siberry the Escape Artist has been completed.

"I'm much more capable now," she says. "I've worked alone. I've worked with large bands. So everything has become much more refined. I don't know if what I hear in my head is any different, but my skills at manifesting that [sound] have grown. I never really wanted or expected to be an entertainer so to speak, but I think I have really grown in that way as well. And my values have changed. I feel like an entertainer. I feel like I have a job to entertain, so I work very hard at being in a good space before a show."

And that space extends to the audience as clearly evidenced by the laughter and enthusiasm that oozes out of the New York Trilogy, and by the command exerted over the gathered listeners during her recent Pilgrim Solo Tour. It's hard to imagine her not wanting to be a performer, because she is so effortlessly able to entertain.

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