This is a love tragedy. Some may think that the heartbreak is the tragedy. I believe heartbreak and love go hand-in-hand - everything we love we will lose. The tragedy here is when someone decides to never open their hearts again after they have lost a love. 

All The Kings' Men - demo

*FREE DOWNLOAD* just press the down arrow in the menu - just above this sentence! 

With sweeping sounds and palpable emotion, one might say Redwood conjures an ethereal folk genre.

The original demo recording released in November 2014 was nominated Song of the Year at the 2015 Vancouver Island Music Awards.

This official studio version captures an essence of the ending of a beautiful long distance relationship. Lyrics speak of a strong soulful connection, with imagery inspired by a road trip up the West Coast back from San Francisco - sitting in the still blackness of the Redwoods at midnight with a canopy of stars above. The swelling sounds within Redwood speak to the movements of two hearts letting go.

Redwood

Tune in to hear me speak with Pam Edgar on CHLY Songwriters in the Round. We talk music, creativity, grief, and debut my single Redwood (11:29), along with two live performances: All The King's Men (19:56), and Heart & Soul(27:32). Enjoy!

CHLY Studio Session & Interview: music, creativity & grief

We have become un-tethered from our rhythms, seasons, life transitions, rites of passage, death, birth, ancestors and future generations. Our life path has many markers, many transitions where we grow into a new way of walking in our world. This is a song about a girl growing into a women and into old age, navigating the world with different perspectives at each stage and honoring her connection to nature and those that came before.

Heart And Soul

Nested within this life of mine, I find myself occasionally lost, directionless, and in that haze, grasping for things outside of me that might give me some sense of home, belonging, comfort... only to find, that these things have always been exactly where I am - in my heart.

Lo & Behold

We love good endings. Ones with resolve, connection and hope. Life doesn't always have that in store for us. Love and heartbreak are two sides of the same coin - to be vulnerable is to love and to face the fact that this love will eventually come to an end and lead to heartbreak. This is not tragic, it is the necessary thing we do to live. The tragedy is when we are not able to open our hearts again to new love.

All The King's Men

We all have them - you know, those patterns that seem to keep us stuck - those things we do that subtly undermine our heart's longing and keep us smaller than our desires. Those things that keep our dreams out of reach. This is a song about saying goodbye to those patterns, and returning to our-self with love so that we may expand beyond the stuck-ness and step into our wildest dreams that we are all so worthy of.



Not Your Hero

Not all songs are born of us, but rather through us. A moment of openness to capturing a story and message that was sheltered in the ethos surrounding me - a clarion call for our times to remember where we came from and that we are one.

Light And Stardust

Grief is an expression of love. To love our world fully is to also feel fully the pain that our world is in. Feeling this pain is a vital part of remaining open, responsive and filled with vitality so that we may continue to act in the name of a more sustainable and just future. We are given so many means to numb out, to forget, and to become apathetic and powerless to effecting change. To grieve is in itself a defiant act of resistance against the numbing of corporate greed, consumerism, and exploitation. Let's RISE UP in our love for our future. <3

For full album - This Regal Heart: 
https://shaunajanzmusic.bandcamp.com/album/this-regal-heart


This Regal Heart

Rise Up

A moment of opening to receive that ‘something else’ moving through me, for me. Capturing the words I so needed to hear, and now turning them into an offering of song that so many of us need to hear. I have always felt a strong connection to the night sky, our cosmos, and she has been a source of comfort, strength and belonging since I was a young child.

Echo

Shauna is “perhaps something of an unusual combination in the music business – a grief support worker and educator who found music as a method for creative release, but turned it into an upstart and promising career” (Nanaimo Daily News, August 2015). And the passion she has for her work translates into her songs in themes about the strength of the human heart and resilience of the human spirit – about reaching into the rough and beautiful places that are a catalyst for transformation and love.

As a self-taught guitar player, her unconventional approach and folk-soprano voice has garnered her appreciative audiences and quick recognition ever since. Her first single in 2010, Simple Beautiful, turned heads as far as the U.S. market. Following that, in 2012 she released the album Divinity, recorded within the folk duo Vital Hands, which also received attention in the Vancouver film industry.

Most recently, Shauna released a self-recorded EP in November 2014, and her song Redwood was nominated “Song of the Year” at the 2015 Vancouver Island Music Awards. Her full length studio album This Regal Heart was released June 2016, recorded at yourSOUNDSCAPEstudio in Victoria and mastered at Gotham City Studios, Vancouver (Sarah McLaughlin, Heart, Delirium).



"The irrepressible Shauna Janz took the stage. She blew me out of the water with her confidence and musical expertise...her beautiful voice with the amazing range. She regaled the audience with her humour, charm and talent. Shauna has an incredible vocal range, hitting the high notes most singers only dream of." Sheila Pratt, Founder of Victoria Music Friends.






