Janette Geri – The Bastards Daughter

“The Bastard’s Daughter” features a superb set of new original songs…an intimate collection of songs that trace the path through loss to liberation. Beautiful vocals, vibrant arrangements and glorious textures, her albums are winning her acclaim around the world.
2. Track Listing:
1. High Country
2. Little Ship Song
3. Feels Like Home
4. Rag and Bone Dream
5. Dragonfly
6. Just Tired
7. Sure I Could Fly
8. Down The Road
9. Oh Love
3. Artist Bio:
Janette’s music is a potent mix of Soulful Blues, Jazz and Celtic, delivered with total honesty and rare warmth. A voice truly remarkable, rich in beauty and power, she delivers songs of substance with grace, souring passion and great tenderness. She is a compelling performer, earthy, playful, weaving a spell around her audience with original contemporary and traditional songs. As a strong solo act she can mesmerize her audiences with soaring and assured vocals, rich guitar work and a wicked sense of humour, creating an unforgettable energy and great range of moods.
“Her gift is obvious from the opening notes of any of her songs, but what she also brings to her performances is an all encompassing enthusiasm for Music that is conveyed to the audience the moment she walks on stage. It is an instant Love Affair. She takes no prisoners. This is the kind of stage presence you have to be born with … Janette’s music stops people in their tracks instantly.” Tim Quinn, Quill Publications/Mighty Quinn Management UK

Janette Geri – The Bastard’s Daughter
CD review by Ian Dearden

This lovely, lovely album is a genuine tour de force by Janette Geri.
Recorded after a move to the Dandenongs in Victoria, the album features nine originals by Janette Geri, who also engineered, played and sang everything on the album, with the exception of lead guitar duties on four songs, where Aaron Burton and Phil Smith provided some tasty licks.
This is, by the way, no “two guitars and a voice” album – it features full band arrangements for virtually all the songs, including drums, bass, keyboards, guitars, lead “instruments”, and swathes of “stacked” backing vocals!
In short, it is a project that required significant expertise in all areas of songwriting, arrangements, instrumental ability and singing.
Let’s start with the singing.
Janette Geri has an easy and delightful vocal style – the closest reference point would be Mary Chapin Carpenter.
A fellow worker, with significant musical knowledge, who heard this album on my office stereo, immediately interrupted my listening pleasure to ask who this singer was with the beautiful voice.
Fine praise indeed!
In the liner notes, Janette speaks of “moving to the mountains looking for peace and healing” and the songs bear witness to that search for a better place, both internally (High Country) and externally (Feels Like Home).
There are testimonies speaking to inner torment (Dragonfly) and despair (Just Tired, Oh Love), but the prospect of redemption lingers tantalisingly within reach (Sure I Could Fly).
This is an album which reaches deep down, wrestling with shadows that from time to time, beset us all.
Despite, or perhaps because of that, the outcome is nurturing and enriching, a testament to the power of music to sooth and heal even the most troubled soul.
In short, it is an exquisite album that repays repeated listening and speaks at some level to all of us.