As any fan of the cinema knows, music plays a powerful role in setting the tone of a scene or an entire film. It can evoke emotion like no other medium, and combined with the visual drama on the screen, creates a uniquely powerful experience for the audience.
Canadian filmmaker Catherine Legge understands this concept well. And when she was seeking a way to imbue her already evocative and compelling documentary about women who fall in love with men who are in jail for serious crimes, entitled Met While Incarcerated, she knew she needed both a songwriter and a voice who could convey the complexity, subtlety and sometimes moral ambiguity of the subject matter. Already a fan of her work, Legge sought out talented Canadian singer/songwriter Jadea Kelly to add her exceptional skills as a songwriter and otherworldly aura as performer to see if she would be interested.
Kelly was, and eventually contributed two all-new original pieces to the film, as well as two previously released songs and an incredibly moving rendition of the classic song Amazing Grace. On May 17, those five pieces will be released as a special EP MWI (Soundtrack) and Kelly will tour Ontario in support of the release throughout May.
“Up until working on Met While Incarcerated I had only known Jadea through a Spotify playlist. I ended up going to her music and listening to it while I was working on another project and played one song over and over again, because it was just the right mood and the right tone and was so inspiring and spooky. I was attracted for this amazing combination of light and dark that she has,” said Legge.
“I was about two full years into making the film and I was really struggling. I was wondering how I could authentically bring this story to a viewer in an hour and 20 minutes. How can they make the leap from starting where they’re starting, with skepticism and stigma and stereotypes and all of these things that we have head about these women that are often hated for no crime other than who they love? How am I going to get the audience to make that leap, because just words aren’t always enough? And then I thought of Jadea. I had been listening to her music on and off making this film, asked our mutual friend for an introduction and met for coffee in Toronto.
“I brought up this very dark subject and plunked it at her door and kind of left it there. But it seemed to have landed at the perfect moment for what she needed for inspiration. And her work really helped me transport viewers into this very unique love story. To me she is just incredible. I am in awe of her. I am a friend and a fan and when she does things, I just think she should be heard so much more because her writing blows my mind. And then when she performs there’s her voice and what she brings to it, you are right on the edge between sadness and happiness. That’s what she brings to all her music, and especially to the music for this film.”
And it is indeed a subject matter that needed to be handled with a deft touch by the filmmaker and everyone involved in the production, because of the controversial and misunderstood nature of the subject matter. Although the premise is simple – according to the film’s official website Met While Incarcerated “is the provocative and touching love story of three successful, strong, intelligent women who’ve shocked themselves and their loved ones by falling for a man who is in prison for a violent crime. It challenges the stereotypes – both around society’s monsters and the imagined divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ when it comes to crime and punishment, good and evil, forgiveness and redemption.”
Legge is the film’s producer, writer and director, and brings a breadth of film and television production experience to her work. She has helped create television series such as Canadian Pickers, Python Hunters, and CBC’s Still Standing, and has also created award-winning journalistic documentaries for the CBC, including Inside the Interrogation Room for CBC Disclosure, The Enemy Within for The National and Billion Dollar Caribou for The Nature of Things, among other lauded work.
Kelly, of course, is a well-respected, award winning and beloved singer/songwriter who has created four masterful full-length albums: 2008’s Second Spring, Eastbound Platform (2010), Clover in 2013 and Love & Lust in 2016. She is presently working on her next album.
The documentary had its world premiere at the La Femme International Film Festival in Los Angeles on Oct. 14, 2018, followed by its Canadian premiere at the Hamilton Film Festival on Nov. 9. Kelly also performed a showcase, including music from the MWI soundtrack in Waterford on Nov. 10 and then again on Nov. 19 at Addiction Sound Studio in Nashville, where there was a screening of the mini-documentary Sounds Like Grace, which saw Legge’s crew film sessions of Kelly recording different versions of the classic hymn Amazing Grace, produced by Canadian ex-pat David Kalmusky.
The film itself was commissioned by The Documentary Channel, which is a subsidiary of the CBC. The broadcast premiere for Met While Incarcerated will be on Sunday, March 31, at 9 p.m., on the Documentary Channel. It has already earned some prestigious accolades, including for Best Score/Composer (Jadea Kelly) and for best Feature at from the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards. Kelly will be accepting the awards on behalf of Legge and her team at an awards ceremony on March 23, in Los Angeles, where she now lives full time. The songs were mixed for the documentary by Tim Abraham of Soleil Sound.
Kelly didn’t realize she had a huge fan in Legge until the filmmaker reached out through a mutual friend to see if she would be interesting in participating in the production.
“I guess Catherine heard me and my music on the CBC for years and always had been a fan of my music. My friend posted something about me online on Facebook and Catherine said ‘wow you know Jadea Kelly. I would love to talk to her.’ So, over a year ago now we had a long phone conversation about the project before it was even completed. And that’s how it started. She had picked a number of songs that already existed that she wanted to include in the film. But at the time, I was taking a lot of trips to Nashville and L.A. and I had just written Make Peace With It and I showed it to her and she loved it and thought it and some of my other new songs fit in with the tone of the film,” Kelly explained, adding that eventually two songs, Beauty and Mercy from her 2016 Love & Lust were also used in the documentary.
It was a bit of a challenge for Kelly to write original songs based on a thematic idea not of her own making, although as soon as she talked in depth with Legge and saw portions of Met While Incarcerated, she was able to create soundscapes that are not only breathtakingly power emotional compositions in their own right, but which adds such enigmatic tone to the film itself.
“I had never written for a movie before. But the way I wrote was really just based on everything Catherine had told me about the characters. I had seen clips of the different people who were being featured, but I didn’t see the finished product until the premiere I Los Angeles last November, so I was really just basing what I wrote off the letters from the women and clip,” she said.
“It was a great experience. It was something new, and it was writing for characters outside myself, so that was very refreshing. And one time when I was back in Nashville, I wrote Bad Like Me with Robby Hecht and we had the film completely in mind for that. I guess personally I have a history of chasing after people that often keep me at arm’s length and that’s sort of where the idea stems from. It’s being ready for love and being ready to open myself up to that possibility.
“The women in this movie are chasing after men who are behind bars for some very horrible crimes. And they are bad boys, they are people who have a very dark history. It’s clearly their decision and I do believe that the characters are genuinely in love, even though some of their partners are behind bars for murder. It’s just an interesting topic. It makes you question why a woman goes after a man who has this type of history, but then you also realize maybe there is forgiveness involved. Maybe they’re not that person any more. It’s a fascinating discussion and I don’t have a right or wrong answer for it. It makes you question the attractiveness of the bad bot, but to a lesser degree we have all done the same thing – fallen in love with people who are bad for us and treated is badly. But those experiences can teach you a lot about yourself and your self worth and confidence and learning to let someone good love you.”
The MWI soundtrack is a powerful collection of music that, as stated earlier is potent as a standalone listening experience, but the level of potency is elevated upon seeing how Legge utilized the songs throughout the documentary.
“Magical things happened making this and they weren’t even conscious. I know this sounds weird as someone who has always worked on the factual side of things, but this is really the peak of artistic expression for me in my entire career, because I just knew Jadea needed to bring something and she definitely brought it. Everything that came along, I just went with it and I didn’t try to control it or manage it or produce it. I was on the ride and just waiting to see where it was going,” said Legge.
“So, when I heard here little demo version of Amazing Grace and then she sent it to David and a couple of days later she put me on the phone with him because, and as soon as we started talking, I said ‘I am coming.’ I arranged for a crew in Nashville and I said, ‘I am coming. We are doing this.’ And we filmed the recording session of Jadea and those amazing musicians doing four very different versions of Amazing Grace. And I created the mini-doc Sounds Like Grace from that.”
It is actually quite stunning to realize that Make Peace With It was not written exclusively for Met While Incarcerated because on every level, melodically, tonally, pacing, vocal performance-wise, lyrically and from the emotion it generates, it is a perfect fit.
“Make Peace was written with Garrison Starr and it was during my first writing trip to L.A. and that title just popped into her head when she was out for a walk. It ended up being a song that we wrote for my sister. It’s a song about making peace with your past. I think it’s incredibly hard to live your life fully if you don’t make peace with your past and enjoy the future. It’s about forgiveness in a sense, which is kind of the them of the whole film. Forgiveness isn’t always for the other person; you have to forgive yourself for all your imperfections and realize that they are part of who you are, not truly imperfections. It’s about just making peace with your past and accepting who you are.,” Kelly explained.
It was while Kelly was working in Nashville with Hecht that Legge asked if she would consider recording a version of Amazing Grace. She partnered with Nashville-based Canadian producer Kalmusky and hunkered down in Addiction Sound Studios to work on four separate versions, as captured in Legge’s mini-documentary.
The song itself is a universal message of underserved grace, penned by a former slave trader in the 19th century. It is a deeply Christian message, although the notion of grace is a universally powerful concept, regardless of its religious overtones. The haunting versions crafted by Kelly and Kalmusky are remarkable in how well they fit in tonally with the film, as they are not infused with light and positivity, but also not weighed down by darkness.
“Amazing Grace really is the ultimate message and love is the fundamental core of that. Grace is at the heart of what it means to be Christians. God gave us all grace through the crucifixion, and it didn’t matter who you were, or what you did, because of that huge sacrifice, you were free. When I first met with Jadea and told her I want her to bring her angelic voice and her deep emotions to this really challenging subject, we talked about this version of Amazing Grace that Willie Nelson had done, and it’s in a minor key and is really dark. I said that I felt that’s how the song seemed to fit perfectly for this film.”
Kelly will return from her new home in Los Angeles for a string of dates in Ontario to mark the release of MWI. She is playing Capers in Belleville on May 2, The Oakville Performing Arts Centre May 3, Mills Hardware in Hamilton May 4, Silence in Guelph the following night, and at Ellena’s Café as part of the Starstop Concert Series in Napanee on May 6. Then there are two shows at The Burdock in Toronto on May 10, a private house concert the following evening in Barrie before wrapping up the short, but intense jaunt at the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield Quebec on May 11.
For more information on Jadea Kelly and MWI, visit https://www.darthjadea.com.
For more information on the film Met While Incarcerated, visit www.metwhileincarceratedthefilm.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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