It's always odd to just talk about yourself. Usually people get to know each other over time, over coffee, overnight...

But generally, people get to know each other in conversation. So, writing about myself here is kind of one sided, eh? But since you clicked on "About Jayne", I'll do my best to tell you about Jayne. My problem is I don't want to bore you by telling you too much information or the wrong information.

For instance, if you didn't care what I was doing before music, I wouldn't want to waste your time by telling you I was a television reporter who used to do some pretty wild stuff... like parking myself and a videographer in the middle of a crack neighborhood to see who would come and talk to us instead of threatening to kill us. And I wouldn't want to tell you that another time SWAT threw me behind a dumpster so I wouldn't get shot by a sniper. Or that I interviewed four Ohio Death Row inmates and a week later an outsider like myself was stabbed to death by one of the prisoners, or during an assignment I saw a man commit suicide just as I was getting out of the news car and there wasn't anything I could do to stop him, or that I joined an air search for a missing hiker and had to hang out of the side of the smallest airplane in the universe to shoot video over the Red River Gorge in Kentucky while scared beyond bladder control that I would fall out, or... well... you may not be interested in that or what I was doing a few years before at Ohio State while majoring in Broadcast Journalism...

	The intrepid Georgie

...like working at a head shop disguised as a place that sold "waterbeds & stuff". That was the name of the store and it was the "stuff" that I sold. Or that one time while walking home from Waterbeds & Stuff I saw a white object moving around on my steep roof. Once I got closer I could see it was Georgie... my sweet, aging but still vivacious lasapoo dog standing there wiggling and wagging all of her 11 pounds... seeming oblivious that she was a paw away from a fatal fall. She never fell. I crawled out of that same opened window and rescued her.

...Or that I actually got the nerve to first perform at some open mic night at OSU and then apparently had a little bit of nerve left to play Rocky Top (yes, I did). Or that one time I was doing an open mic night and nervously played Neil Young's "Needle And The Damage Done" while some guy in the crowd screamed "SLOW DOWN!"

...Or prior to that I spent my junior and senior years of high school at a boarding school in Michigan called Kingswood/Cranbrook where most of my friends got kicked out but not before we had some pretty hilarious moments... such as stealing the keys to the entire school and having a contact on the "outside" make copies and then rushing to get the real ones back in place before anyone noticed they were gone and then using our set to break into the Dean's office in the middle of the night to remove all negative information he kept in folders about us and our friends.

...Or using the keys to let ourselves into the room that had the final approved proof of the YEARBOOK and replacing a picture they picked with a different one of "us" in our PEC underwear which stood for Penis Envy Club... a total joke of a club started after learning about penis envy in Psych class... and for the rest of our senior year the administration, who was disgusted after getting word on some sick group of girls calling themselves The Penis Envy Club, was convinced that all the bad stuff going on at the school was the work of the PEC and they "must be stopped" but they never could figure out who was in it... until page 27. The yearbook came out on graduation day.

But turning the real life pages back from this point will change the tone here. Not so much about carefree times or laughter or joking around, or keys that could unlock some mischief. Instead, what happened before this point is permanently engraved into my soul and has truly molded me into the person I am today and formed my art and gave me a voice, and has taken me to the floor with sobs and has made me desperate for some completeness to a void so deep in my heart that it's felt everyday, even now -- decades later.

Less than a handful of years before boarding school, I was a 12 year old little girl sitting at my mother's bedside watching her die from breast cancer. I sat there for an entire year and soaked her struggle to survive into my pores... trying to memorize her face and her voice and her touch and her words and her "I love you's"... and never being told she was dying. Never being told what was wrong. I thought she had injured her hip.

I was a mama's girl. A timid, intense, soft spoken little girl with a big understanding that there must be something more happening here than a "hurt hip". There must be a reason why my sister and I would awaken suddenly in the middle of the night to my mother's screams and think maybe there was a mouse in her room scaring her. And then as quickly as the screams sliced open the night, the silence folded in around us with a quiet that was too thick. A quiet that was just too quiet. What we didn't know was my father was trained to give our mom shots of morphine when her pain became unbearable. The screams, the morphine, the quiet. The two little girls huddled together in bed afraid and confused.

During that 7th grade year, I would go to school and do normal kid things. But when I got home, I sat in my mom's room on a furry white couch parallel to the side of her bed. Sometimes our new puppy Georgie would sit with me as I watched a nurse named Hazel take care of my mom. Neither my mom, nor Hazel could persuade me to leave the room... or to go outside and play with my friends. I wanted to sit there and breathe it all in. I guess I was stamping as many memories into my brain as I could... the good, the bad, the ugly, the tender... because it was my mom and I was only 12 and I wanted to be with her. I needed her.

Just a few years before, we moved to Dayton from a neighborhood in Springfield, OH. The family right next to us and the family across the street from us both had mothers around my mom's age who were also dying of breast cancer. And they did die. And so did their husbands from other conditions... leaving our neighbor friends orphaned. A lot of sickness and death and sad kids on Latimer Drive. Children without parents. A coincidence or an environmental thing perhaps, but the results have been devastating.

Thankfully, our father is still very healthy to this day.

	First day of Kindergarten
	My sister Leslie, Mom, and me

But it was here in Springfield, Ohio that my mom had been diagnosed with six months to live on my first day of kindergarten. I was five. My sister was 7. She was 30. Her name was Faye.

Before my mom became too sick, she and my dad would take us to see musicals as special treats for our birthdays and I remember being totally wrapped up in the music... always the music... and learning all the songs and especially loving the musical "Oliver!" which to this day is still my all time favorite and the reason I would jump at the chance to write the music for a musical one day.

My love for music grew as my mom would generously listen to me every time I sang "Where Is Love" from "Oliver!" while she was driving, or cooking, or just being a mom. She would listen and then sing along with me... and then teach me more songs from other musicals.

And it was during this time that I started going away to summer camp where I took a few guitar lessons and once came home with a large gold star for the "most improved" camper. And I was always the one eager to join in singing around the campfire, or to make up songs at night in the cabin or the one who asked my counselor one summer to constantly play guitar and sing to us.

And upon returning one of those summers, my mom showed me her new guitar. And she let me play it as she herself was learning to play. I still have her guitar.

My mother loved music and passed that appreciation on to me. I'm so thankful for having had her and for those short years we spent together before she became too ill. They were few, but they were mighty years. And even toward the end, she still had the strength to make sure I knew I was loved by her.

She died when she was 37 and when I was still 12.

And before she died, she did a few things to try and bring out the best in me. She knew I was soft spoken and tended to sometimes stay on the outside... watching instead of participating. And now thinking back on it, I believe she made some critical moves to try to nudge me from my safety nets. For instance when I was 11 and then 12, she helped me take part in two separate speech contests. After I wrote out my speeches with not too much help from her (although I'm sure she had to restrain from editing too much) I practiced everyday in front of her and she would coach me into a better delivery and made me feel like the best speaker in the world. And during that final year of her life... when she was constantly being taken for radiation treatments, I was told she would recite my speech while in the tube. My speech. My mom getting radiation. And I was gaining self esteem.

And rewinding a few years from there, I remember sitting with my mom at the side of a pool one summer day as I watched her get up to tell the life guard that it was OK to throw her 6 year old daughter into the deep end because otherwise she didn't think little Janie would ever trust herself enough to swim... which they agreed to do, and did... and I swam. And I swam.

I was thinking about that pool incident on a Thursday night back in 1993 as I was getting dressed for my first band show ever at Canal Street Tavern in Dayton, Ohio. Before grabbing my guitar and heading out the door, I took the only ring I have of my mom's and slipped it on. I wanted to have her on stage with me that night to help me into the deep end and proudly watch me swim out.

I think of her often as I perform and wonder what she would think. And then I wonder if I would have even become an artist if it weren't for the pain. It's obvious to me that all of my experiences, especially losing my mom at such a young age and seeing my neighbors' parents die, have shaped me into the artist I am... for the good... for the bad. Everything in our life adds a different color and brush stroke to our personality and it has taken me all of these years to understand some of my colors and some of their textures and some of the shapes they've made. I'm not there yet, believe me, but I'm trying to see the art in it.

I'm a mother myself now. As of this writing my son is almost 3 and my daughter just turned 5. I'm thrilled to be in a relationship again involving a mother... this time it's me in that role. I feel so privileged and overjoyed to be that person in these two little ones' lives. For me, there isn't anything more important. To an extent I've put a "pause" or a "comma" in my music career because of it, but that's a sacrifice I am so willing to make. I know how quickly a mom or a dad or a child can be ripped away from you and I don't want to waste a moment. There isn't a single moment to waste.

In the meantime, I'm truly enjoying performing and was more than thrilled to get back into the studio to record the newest CD, Sutures. I needed to do that. And I need to perform and I need to write. And I need to be a mother. It's all part of Jayne. It's all "about Jayne"... since you clicked.

Come and say hi at a show. I like two sided conversations better. Or write.

Until then...

Jayne