JORDAN
Sarah

• 1. Recording career

Sarah "Sass" Jordan is a British-born Canadian rock singer from Montreal, Quebec. Her first single, "Tell Somebody," from her debut album of the same name 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 and her latest album, Bitches Blues, is available June 3, 2022.

Recording career

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.

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."

Sass Jordan's success as a judge on Canadian Idol encouraged her to return to recording in 2006, with the release of her album Get What You Give, recorded at the Nashville studio of Colin Linden, who served as producer. Guest artists on the album included bassist Garry Tallent (of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band), drummers Ken Coomer (Uncle Tupelo, Wilco) and Bryan Owings (Shelby Lynne), guitarist Audley Freed (The Black Crowes) and keyboardist Richard Bell (The Band, Janis Joplin).

In 2009, Jordan entrusted her husband Derek Sharp with producing her album From Dusk 'til Dawn. The album was recorded entirely in only three weeks and was mixed Los Angeles. In discussing the songwriting for From Dusk ‘til Dawn, Jordan explained, "I was thinking about how human beings seem to be more sensitive and worried about things from sunset to sunrise. When you're alone is when the fear of death really hits you, and I was trying to write songs that were related to the fears of the middle of the night."

In 2011, Jordan recorded the studio project album S.U.N.: Something Unto Nothing featuring Brian Tichy and Michael Devin of Whitesnake, and Tommy Stewart. The album began when Jordan reunited with Tichy at his Santa Clarita home studio to write songs. Something Unto Nothing marked the first collaboration between Jordan and Tichy since Rats. "Burned" was the first song that Jordan and Tichy wrote together for the project, which soon evolved into a full album.

In 2017, 25 years after the release of Racine, Jordan recorded Racine Revisited featuring reimagined versions of the songs from the original 1992 album. "We pushed the sound back to the Misty Mountain Hop days of the 1970s and made it as if we were actually recording back then," said Jordan. "We would all live together in the studio and record live off the floor without Auto-Tune or click track or anything like that". Of the recording process, Sass Jordan said that Racine Revisited was "the most fun I’ve had in a while making a record."1 "Instead of taking Racine from 1992 to 2017, we went from 1992 to 1976".

In 2020, Sass Jordan released Rebel Moon Blues, her first blues album. Rebel Moon Blues features covers of blues classics, as well as the original "The Key". In discussing "The Key" on SXMCanadaNow, Jordan said, "That song was written about three weeks before we went into recording. Derek and I realized we should have at least one song that we wrote together on here, and so we came up with "The Key". The whole song came together in an hour. When it's meant to happen it really just flows out." Rebel Moon Blues was critically acclaimed upon release, with American Blues Scene writing, "After three decades in the business, many singers lose that certain something that may have launched their career. Not so with Sass Jordan. Not only is her voice as muscular as ever, I think, like fine wine, it's improved over the years." The album debuted at #5 on the Billboard Blues Album Chart.

Her latest album, Bitches Blues, featuring the song Still Alive and Well, was released on June 3, 2022.