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JEN CASS: When Not Trying Cases, 
This Bay City Trial Attorney Is Touring
the Country With Her Inspired Music

By Scott Baker

While she's well known around the United States folk circuit, Bay
City's Jen Cass is virtually an enigma in her own hometown.

Word on the street has spoke highly of this national-touring musical
treasure, but up until a few months back, Cass was mainly known as a trial
lawyer in the Bay City judicial system. It wasn't that she was hiding out -
the road called and she answered, but it all has changed for her musically
since the release of her acclaimed CD Skies Burning Red last spring.

A headline billing last fall at Bay City's State Theater opened her up to a
wider local audience which was followed by a Tuesday night performance at
The Big House on Bay City's Midland Street soon after.

While she plans on opening up more to the Tri-cities in 2004 as part of her
outstanding tour itinerary, Cass has her sights set on bigger things in the
folk festival circuit. Skies Burning Red was produced by longtime Mary
Chapin-Carpenter producer/collaborator John Jennings and has allowed her to
enter the realm of the modern day Woody Guthries' and musical crossovers.

"It came out April 4, 2003," said Cass. "I recorded it at Bias Recording
Studios in Springfield, Virginia in late 2002 and we finished it in the
very beginning of 2003. Bob Dawson did the sound engineering and John
Jennings produced."

Skies was her sophomore effort, coming seven years after her debut CD,
Brave Enough To Say was released. As luck would have it, her wish came true
by getting her dream producer, five-time Grammy winner Jennings to help
create the new disc.

"I don't think anybody thinks that you can just Email a producer," shared
Cass on how she scored the music giant.  "It's pretty astounding that
anybody would Email you back. At that point I really didn't have an
established track record at all.  I've done a lot of touring and been all
over the country, but I really hadn't developed any sort of following, or
any sort of rhythm touring either. I was kind of randomly touring, which
doesn't work nearly as well as having a plan."

It came down to Jennings believing she had the songs and therefore made the
time to produce something he believed in.

"I'd done Brave Enough To Say and it was probably around '99 that I was
starting to think about doing another album. I had a whole bunch of songs
and I really wanted to get them heard, but I didn't want to do it unless it
was going to be some sort of new experience for me. I had already done the
straight-up independent project with straight-up independent artists coming
in being your studio players. And I really wanted to do something that was
different and more professional than that."

"So I went through my CD collection start to finish and pulled out every CD
that even years later I could still sing every word to and that resonated
with me for all those years. I pulled them all out, laid them on the
ground, and flipped them over, read through the liner-notes, listened to
them all back-to-back and tried to find what tied them together. What're
these great albums? Why do they still speak to me after all these years?
And what I found after doing that is that almost every single one of them
had John Jennings in some capacity. He was either a studio player or he was
the producer or it was his album. So I kind of made the realization that I
had to have John Jennings. It just had to be John Jennings - there was
nobody else,"

Cass figured she could research her idea on the Web.

"I got on the Internet and through a series of weird coincidences,
basically I didn't stop trying, I finally got an Email address. Of course
now if you search John Jennings on the Internet, you just get his Email.
But back then it wasn't so easy. So I sent him an Email and said, 'Look,
this is what I've done. I have this CD out. I have this number of songs
that I want to record and I have gone through the CD's that I love and
you're in all of them and I just can't imagine doing this project without
you. So how does a relatively unknown singer/ songwriter get to work with
somebody like you?'

"And I thought, he won't write back. But much to my surprise about two or
three days later I got a very nice Email from him and he is the nicest
person. He's so talented and willing to share all the things that he's
learned along the way. He just said, 'Send me your stuff and I'll see if I
like it.'

"So I sent off this package to him and again thought I wouldn't hear
anything. And again three or four days later I get this Email back that
he's got the new songs and he really likes it and wants to know what else I
have."

While Cass was surprised by his response, she made due by recording quick demos at home of more new material. "I thought what can I send him? I stood in my living room and sang into a really bad old mic that I had and tried to get some sort of recording for him of the new stuff. I sent that all off and then I waited a long time, about a year.  Occasionally, I'd get this little note that said, 'Still working on it--still looking at it.' And I knew he was still basically trying to decide if he wanted to do the project." In the meantime, Cass was living in Seattle and was going to interview for her current job in Bay City. "I came back to Michigan to interview for the public defender job I'm doing now and I checked my Email and it had an Email from him that he had left tickets and backstage passes for me back in Seattle for the Mary Chapin-Carpenter show. So I got on a flight and think I must have paid $1000 for that flight - it was insane, but I got back in time and drove straight from the airport to the show, saw the show, went backstage and met him for the first time and we just hit it off."

"He is everybody's perfect producer. He is wonderfully talented and
extraordinarily giving. He's like that as a person and he's like that as a
producer. So from there it was just finding time to do it. And it was still
another six or seven months after that before we could find time where we
were both free. A lot of it is a matter of deciding what you want and then
you have to decide what you're willing to give to get it. And I was willing
to give everything. I was willing to wait as long as I had to and if I
hadn't been willing to do that, I wouldn't have Skies Burning Red, so it's
always worth the wait."

MICHIGAN ROOTS

Cass was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Feb. 9, 1972 and got both her roots
and drive from her family's love of music and diverse album collection.

"I started out in Michigan," said Cass. "I was in and around Ann Arbor all

of my life and then in '97 I moved out to Washington because I needed a
change of pace and I was always drawn to the Pacific Northwest, so I went
out there for four and a half years and then came back home."

"My parents were very into music and they played so many different kinds of
music when I was growing up. My mother would put on Joan Baez and then we'd
listen to that whole album and then my dad would take Joan Baez off and
play Kris Kristofferson or whatever. Everyone from Woody Guthrie and The
Weavers and the real old folk, to Hank Williams and the old country and
then some of the new country, like The Carter Family.  I certainly have all
the influences of the old styles of folk and country. And as I grew up, I
got into everything from rap to R&B to reggae to pop and rock. I have the
strangest, most eclectic album collection. It's just bizarre."

Cass played her first shows in her early 20s at all of Ann Arbor's hot
spots. "I got my start at the open mics in Ann Arbor around 1994-95. I'd
bought myself a guitar from waitressing tips when I was probably like
22-23. There was a music store that was a block up from the place that I
waitressed. I would walk by the music store on the way home and think, 'I'm
going to go in there someday and get a guitar."

"My dad had a guitar and would play us songs growing up. I thought I'd like
to be able to play a Tom Paxton song sitting around a campfire someday. So
I saved up my tips and bought myself a $250 Sigma," she laughs.  "The
machine made  Martin! And I just started playing and it came pretty
naturally - the progression from, 'wow I own a guitar and have no idea how
to play it' to 'I am now going to play my own song at open mic. Probably
like seven months. It just came pretty easily for me to sing and to write
and play."

It was only a couple of years before Cass recorded her debut album.

"I did that when I was in Ann Arbor and released it when I got out to
Seattle," she said. "The big push for Brave Enough was done from the West
coast. I cut it in L.A. and did some supplemental recording in Ann Arbor.
The band that I worked with out in L.A. was the Red Elvis which is a very
strange, campy Russian surf-rock band. They really are from Russia."
"They're great guys. They happen to be the 'go-to guys' at the studio that
I worked with, so they all got called and were my studio players.  They're
my session boys," she says laughing.
Not knowing what to expect from the overwhelming industry, Cass released
her debut CD at the wrong time of year.

"I released it the minute it was done, which meant I released it Nov. 23,
1996 and you just don't release albums in November of any year. Anybody who
releases albums knows this. I did not because I was just a person who wrote
some songs.  But that's what's known in the business as the 'dead zone'. No
one will play it because they don't want to play last year's CD and you've
had it on the market for four weeks before it becomes obsolete. It was a
hard lesson, let me tell you."

Coincidentally, Cass was following two different muses while getting ready
to graduate. One was working on different political campaigns during the
time she recorded Brave Enough and eventually moving out to Seattle.

"I was very involved with political campaigns when I was like 21 or 22. I
got involved with a bunch of different campaigns and that took me to
Indiana, Wisconsin and D.C.  I love politics! It's my other love. I've
lived all over the place.  Michigan, Indiana, California, Washington, D.C.
and Washington state. I've chased politics all over the country. I worked
with three different campaigns and now I'm working with Howard Dean's
campaign."
Having mixed both politics and a music career, Cass put some of her college
to work and became a lawyer, which brought her back home to Michigan.

"I try not to think about that too much," she adds. "I really don't mix the
two.  People don't even know about the lawyer side.  I think in many ways
it's kind of the same thing, because being a trial lawyer what you do is
tell stories. And being a musician, you tell stories. In lawyering, he or
she who tells the best story wins and in music, the better your stories
are, the better your following gets to be."

"I think it's a weird combination and whenever anybody does find out that I
do both those things, they always want to know how it is I can do that."

INFLUENCES

Cass lives for her musical career which she has gathered strength off of
three different influences. Her music is mainly a mix of strong
singer/songwriter folk with rock.

"I think my greatest influences that have always carried through that I
continue to go back to that are my touchstones are probably Phil Ochs, The
Indigo Girls and Elvis Costello. Strangely, those are probably my big
three."

While the Indigos are a bit more apparent in her work, Costello sets a
blueprint that she hopes to follow.

"If you look at the things that he's done, when he burst on the scene he
was pretty much considered kind of an outside punk type of influence," she
laughed. "And three/four albums later he put out a straight country album
of country covers, Almost Blue. And he's done The Juliet Letters with the
Brodsky Quartet. He's done such a wide range of things and I would
definitely like to be able to do that."

"I try very hard and if I'm writing something and it is coming out a
particular way and it is jazzy or folky or poppy or rocky or flat out
country, I try to let it be what it comes out as. And then I try to record
it the way that I heard it in my head and I think that my albums are very
eclectic because of that. They jump all over the map. But I definitely try
to stay true to what I heard in my head and I think Elvis Costello is a
great example of someone who just said, 'Yeah, I can write in this genre
and that genre."

Recognition

Accomplishing variety in music with Jennings on Skies ’put the music at the
head of the pack at many festivals and helped rake in much songwriting
praise along the way.
Just last week she was announced as a Runner-Up in the John Lennon
Songwriting Contest for 2003.

"I've had a good year. If you would have caught me in '98 you wouldn't have
thought I was nearly so cool," she laughed.

"My song Main Attraction was a finalist in the folk category. Now if I'd
won the whole thing I'd have a lot more money! But hey, I'll take the
praise any time."

While Cass has been offered Independent label contracts and has been picked
up by Sidestreet Distribution as well as the Internet shops, she has yet to
find a label that can help her grow and do more than she already is doing
for herself.

Independence

"At this point I do all of my booking myself and that's not by choice. It's
just the way that it kind of happened. When I came back to Michigan, I left
behind one of the very best booking agents I've ever worked with, but she
was really not willing to continue it if I wasn't in the area, which was
too bad. Stacy Emerson was just great and she was a booking promotional
guru. When I came here I pretty much took what I learned from her and tried
to incorporate it into the way that I do business."

"Honestly, I think you get to a level where you understand more about the
business. When I was starting out in '96 and pretty much all the way
through 2000, I wouldn't have had any idea how to do any of this. But you
read Donald Passman's book (All You Need To Know About The Music Business)
and pick up the Indy Bible and you read and read and talk to anyone who
will talk to you and eventually you figure out how it all works. I would
love to have a booking agent."

Living in Bay City with her husband, Cass has a permanent roadie for her tours.
My husband is John Barnes and he teaches at the Saginaw Public Schools.
"He's a science teacher at Arthur Hill. We had mutual friends that would
just not let us not get together. There was a big strong push to get the
two of us together. We both went to Michigan, but there was only one
semester where we overlapped. So we didn't meet each other in college, but
we had friends that knew both of us from college and insisted that we get
together."

While Barnes is the only current member on her touring team, Cass puts in
at least two hours each day herself for her music business, before most
people get up.

"All these things would be easier for me if I had a promotional person that
I could trust, but since I don't at the moment, I carry on. I get up
ridiculously early in the morning, no matter how late I've been out. I get
up at 5:30 and from 5:30 until about 7:30 I use those two hours to Email
and get press kits out and those are my two hours."
Cass predicts that this year will be her busiest yet.

"I do need to get another CD out, because it's definitely a publish or
perish type business. I've got some interesting stuff that I've been
writing. I think its going to be a really good CD. It's going to be called
Accidental Pilgrimage, which is from a new song that I wrote.

Road Stories Into The Future

The new album title came from a great road story about her other musical
hero, folkster Phil Ochs.

"I had a gig in New York City sometime at the end of the summer. I played
my gig at a place called Arlene Grocery and was leaving Arlene Grocery and
trying to get back to my hotel. I don't know my way around New York. So I
put my guitar on my back and I'm carrying an amp and 3,000 cables and
trucking' it through New York trying to get home. I found myself
accidentally in Phil Ochs neighborhood in Greenwich Village."

"I was kind of looking at things and New York is not one of the places that
I've been or spent any time in really, but I was looking around at things
going on and recognized this doorway and statue and it was strange. I
couldn't figure out how I knew these places when I had never been there."

"And it kind of popped into my head that they were all on Phil Ochs album
covers and in Phil Ochs promotional shots. I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm in

Phil Ochs' neighborhood. So of course I had to look for the Bitter End
(venue) which of course had to be in Phil Ochs' neighborhood."

"It was right up the street from where I was.  So I turned the corner and
there was the Bitter End and I had this moment of  'how cool is that to
have no idea where I was going and end up where Phil Ochs started his
career.' So I wrote a song about that experience and it's actually been one
of the coolest songs I've ever written."

Accidental Pilgrimage made its debut in front of many of Ochs' friends at a
festival soon after.

"I played it for a guy named Vic Heyman who is the Godfather of Folk," said
Cass. "He's just a wonderful guy and been on the scene for years. I had a
gig at his venue in Maryland and played it for the first time live there.
Everybody cried. The whole audience cried and it was the first audience
I've ever been in front of that knew Phil Ochs and knew his music."

"A bunch of people came up afterwards and they were saying, 'You just got
it right on. That's exactly right.' And Vic said, 'We've got to get this to
Sonny Ochs, which is Phil's sister. We've been talking to her and she is an
incredible person who has been involved with music for all the years of her
life and continues to put on a whole bunch of festivals."

At the end of February, Cass will finally get to perform the song for Sonny
Ochs and accomplish yet another one of her dreams.

"You can't ever give up," said Cass. "I had a year in there where I gave
up. I had a year from maybe the middle of '97 to '98 where I didn't play a
single gig. I just said, 'I guess I'm done with that part of my life.' And
that part of my life just came charging back and said, 'No, you're not done
with me."

While the guitarist had to cancel six shows due to a broken finger in a
non-alcohol related incident on New Years Eve while luging near Marquette
in the Upper Peninsula, she plans on being back in full-time action by Feb.
20, and is strumming rather than picking her guitar.
She will be at The Big House next Tuesday, Jan. 27, for a quick set to
prepare her for the big month ahead.

"It hurts. It's in a big old cast. Feb. 4 it comes off."

"I'm looking forward to 2004 and everything I get to do this year and
we'll see where we land."