Ask delightful blonde bombshell Janina what she ‘does’, and you might get a moment’s hesitation. She’s just released her debut solo album The Original Ending, but she also works as a producer for Radio NZ Concert, a freelance writer for various publications and recently did a stint as stand-in editor for Capital Times.
JANINA’S decade-long juggling act between music and writing, started at University.
Having completed a Bachelor of Music at Victoria University, Janina then went on to graduate from journalism school.
“I didn’t have it in my heart to reject one of them,” she admits.
Classically trained in clarinet, Janina’s love of classical music wasn’t enough to pull her down that career path.
“It wasn’t in my nature to practice for seven hours a day alone. I like to be around people and to write my own songs… I felt my personality type was more sorted to sway from music to writing and back again... when one gets too much I go back to the other,” she says.
In that vein, Janina was working at Classic FM in London when she decided to pack it in, head home, and make an album.
“I loved my job but instead of writing about music and musicians as a profession, I thought, ‘well I should just do it myself’. Now, I think every reviewer needs to write an album before they are qualified to critique it. It’s like travelling. No one knows what Afghanistan is like from listening to the news about it.... it needs to be felt, emotionally, and the process needs to be understood.”
Some of the songs were written recently, some years ago. A few were started in 2009, during a hitchhiking trip with her brother, musician Stevie Starr, around the South Island.
“We decided to hit the road and write some songs... The guitar was really all we needed and it came in handy when we got attacked by massive killer bees in the hot sun out of Wanaka. We took turns whacking them to stop them flying into our face… We joke sometimes that we are like the Gallagher brothers, we fight but mostly because we want the best for the song or music.”
In an unintentional tribute to the album title, Janina and Stevie are now travelling a similar route to that first one, for the album tour. They play Wellington this week, with a full band in tow.
“All the additional lines I could hear in my head I have finally got out live. It’s good to finally perform them live. Before, they didn’t feel like they really existed.”
Composer John Psathas is one person who’s glad they do exist, saying in a review, “Janina’s voice is beautiful, moving, and wonderfully rich in color. She has a voice that the ear loves, and she can do that very rare thing, sing something and make you feel it in a special way…”
Janina’s happy to take a compliment from her most inspiring New Zealand composer.
“Any musician who is really interested in bettering their craft has to be selective about what reviews they believe in and what ones they pay not the slightest bit of attention to. Otherwise you would start to hate what you love, and that’s the beginning of the death of creativity.”
The Original Ending album release, The Garden Club, June 23.