Formerly the riveting and engaging frontwoman/songwriter for indie-rock darlings, The Balconies, Jacquie Neville has recent embarked upon a life-affirming, emotionally rewarding and spiritually gratifying journey back to the music industry with the understated release of some new original music. It comes nearly four years since the dissolution of her beloved band after a decade of heavy touring, critical and popular acclaim, as well as some other significant – and wonderfully enriching – changes in her personal life.
Hers is the story of how paths can change, of the fickle nature of success in the Canadian music business, and how the creative spark never really leaves – it just sometimes sits dormant, waiting to blaze to life again when needed and when most appropriate. The muse was always present in Neville’s soul and spirit leaving little doubt that someone with such an evocative genius as a songwriter, vocalist and stage performer eventually would find her way back to her gift and her calling.
With the soft-launch release of her first solo single and video for Lead the Way last year, as well as the more recent issuance of the sweetly melodic Magic Man, and with a number of local solo performances under her belt, Jacquie Neville is set to make her bold, confident and genuinely joyful return to the music scene. The endgame is her first ever solo album, set for release later this year, as well as a hopeful return to the concert stage, once the Covid-19 crisis abates.
“For me, when I came out with Lead the Way, it’s like my own personal statement of saying that I am doing this on my own terms and I am doing this for myself, and I really like that. This is what this whole project is all about, really sticking to my guns and staying true to who I am and what music means to me, and not letting outside influences play a part in what I am doing,” she said from her home in Ottawa, adding that there was no fanfare or promo outside of some Facebook posts, announcing the release of both singles.
“It was deliberately a soft launch because I wasn’t sure I was ready to fully commit to a solo project, so I didn’t want to go crazy. I just wanted to plop it onto Spotify and onto YouTube and just do it for me and not for any kind of industry push. I wasn’t looking for that at the time. And now I am ready. I am ready to get out there and start playing again and touring again and all that. But it took time to get there and I think that’s a good thing.”
To the outside world, it seemed as though The Balconies were there one minute and gone the next, with the logical prognostication that the eminently talented, sublimely compelling and incredibly hard-working Neville would make the transition to solo artistry.
It’s never as easy as that. The ending for The Balconies was gradual, and painful for the two remaining co-founders, Neville and Liam Jaeger. The move to creating solo music has been even more gradual, as Neville has instead focused on a new family, and new career outside of music, only returning to the stage and to songwriting over the past year or so.
“I guess when you see someone for several years and they’re not really in the spotlight anymore and then come out with a completely new life, it’s shocking to a lot of people. For me, the biggest turning point with The Balconies was when my brother Steve left the band [in 2015] and that was pretty heartbreaking for me, because he and I had always played music together since we were in high school. I think for him it was just too much as far as touring goes, as far as the blood, sweat and tears that just went into that band. And he really wanted to challenge himself more academically. So, he ended up going back to school and quitting the band,” she explained.
“I think at the time I didn’t understand. I was like, why, we have all this freedom with the band, and I was quite stubborn and didn’t understand what he was needing and where he was coming from. I think that loss was very impactful on the band and the dynamic. It wasn’t necessarily that Liam and I couldn’t do music without him, it just suddenly changed the energy in a big way. And Liam and I release [the band’s second full length album in 2016] Rhonda, which I was super proud of, and really excited to try this new chapter together. But, after a while, we realized the band just couldn’t sustain itself financially anymore. Touring got even harder, especially across Canada, and I feel like towards the end of 2016 the band kind of plateaued. Liam and I kind of looked at each other after our cross-Canada Rhonda tour and said, ‘holy crap, how do we keep sustaining this? It’s impossible.’ It felt like we were hitting brick walls everywhere we turned. As much as we loved this band, as much as we loved working and creating together, it just wasn’t feasible anymore.
“And we are also getting older right? I was approaching 30 at the time, and I feel when you’re getting to that age you start re-evaluating what you want your life to look like and where you see yourself. I guess at that point I didn’t see myself at 30 still touring in vans. I was hoping at 20, that by the time I was 30 I’d be touring in buses, for example, and having a more comfortable professional music lifestyle. So, it was a wake up call for me. I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to spend my life grinding it out in a van for the next 10 years. And it went in waves. It’s not like Liam and I sat down and said, ‘okay, the band is breaking up.’ It was an ongoing, downward spiral over the last couple of years. We kept coming to these forks in the road where it was like, okay do we go here, or do we go there? So, it was a gradual, progressive thing, which I don’t even see as a breakup because Liam is one of my all time favourite people on this planet, and in fact we are working together on this new music.”
Losing something that had been the focus of your life, especially something that involves so much of one’s heart, energy, spirit and time, is like the loss of any significant relationship – it’s sad, painful and leaves one with a sense of emptiness. Neville needed time to grieve, to reassess and re-energize, which thankfully she has done with her move back to Ottawa, her recent marriage, stepsons, career as an interior designer, and now her exciting and confident re-emergence as a songwriter and recording artist.
“I think for me, at the time, I went through this major grieving process. With any kind of grief, you go through these different waves and everyone experiences grief differently. I really do see the loss of The Balconies as a big life-altering, grieving moment in my life, where I am happy and excited for the future, but I am also super, super depressed and really sad and also in denial. I am experiencing all these different stages and feels. So, I would go through these moments of elation where I would be like, ‘yes, I am going to do this awesome solo project and be able to do everything I want to do.’ When we played our last Balconies show in Ottawa in 2017, I was on a high from that because I just felt so much love from the fans and everyone who had supported the band from the beginning. It was so beautiful and such a wonderful bookend to that chapter in my life,” Neville said.
“But, once all the noise went away and I was back in the quiet of my own head, that’s when I think you’re really grieving. I think for me when I was really in the thick of that grieving, I never saw myself doing music again. I was pretty devastated. And Liam and I would call each other every two weeks and ask how each of us was doing. And I told him I felt like shit, I felt awful. I missed him because I was back in Ottawa and he was in Toronto and I felt really disconnected from the scene and from music in general. I literally, at the time, did not see myself continuing down a path of music. I ended up going back to school for interior design and that was just great, because it allowed me to channel a lot of that creative energy and some of my sadness and just refocus it into something different that was mine and that I had a bit more control over.”
By this time, she had also met her soon-to-be husband David, who brought 11 and eight year old sons into the relationship. Now comfortable, happy and fulfilled in her home life, music found its way back into Neville’s landscape through quite innocuous circumstances.
“One day I ended up going to this bar in Ottawa called the Elmdale Tavern, which is an oyster house. I was having a couple of drinks with a girlfriend and one of the servers came up to me and said, ‘hey, you’re Jacquie from the Balconies, I am a huge fan.’ And she asked if I wanted to do a monthly at the Elmdale. And at first I was like, ‘yeah sure,’ because the booze had kind of kicked in. Then I realized the next day, oh shit, she was being serious. She wanted me to play a monthly set and I committed to it I remember having a full on meltdown before the first show because I said to myself, I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I am not ready to play music yet, because I had gone a solid eight or nine months without even having touched a guitar,” Neville said.
“Once I started doing these monthly shows, I realized I was okay and that I really liked it. I was up there playing some cover tunes, some old Balconies tunes, and I realized how much I missed music and how important music was to me. And that dominoed into me writing songs again, which dominoed into me recording again. So, again, it’s all a progression. It’s not like the was one specific moment that altered everything. It’s been a slow build.”
As will her first solo single, Magic Man was released in a very quiet manner and is a song that represents the mindset of where Neville finds herself as she now re-opens that creative wellspring to write, record, release and perform new music.
“I think that only when the album is ready to come out will I do something more, in your words, aggressive as far as a publicity push. Again, this project is what I want to do and what feels right at the time. I think with everything going on in the world with Covid, I just really wanted to release a song that felt appropriate for the time. To me, Magic Man is all about finding things you really need when you don’t expect it, and that you didn’t even known you needed,” said Neville.
“I think that could be a silver lining with Covid-19 and having to self isolate or social distance; you realize that you start longing for a hug or longing for certain people in your life and you really start to focus on the things that are most important and what really matters. For me, the release of Magic Man was just me putting that positive energy out there and trying to just give people a fun summer jam. The album is kind of split down the middle in terms of the types of songs, and I think that’s maybe why its taking a little bit longer. After the band broke up, I didn’t write for months and months. Then all of a sudden, I started writing very intensely again, and I feel like there is a common thread throughout all the songs, and it definitely tells a story. Which is also why it’s important that I wrote a whole album because I am super old school that way, and I really believe in the art of the album.
“And I really want to tell my story. I am not ashamed of it; I really want to share my story and share my struggles. I definitely love the fact that there are these two major bits to the album; half of it is my struggle of leaving Toronto and not being able to make rent in dead end jobs and breaking up with my band and then on the other side, coming back to Ottawa and finding this whole new life and these people that I love and finding new meaning just in life in general, through music. To me, that’s a very exciting counterpoint.”
The life, the energy, and the authenticity of the sentiments, of the emotions displayed and from Neville’s performances is as palpable as she has ever been on record with both Magic Man and Lead the Way, which makes sense considered she is completely creatively unshackled for the first time.
“Lead the Way is definitely different from The Balconies. For me the song represented a real defining statement of where I am now. But once the full record comes out, you will see there are these little segues between all the songs, and different chapters and what those feelings were like. I feel that all the songs on their own are very unique and different in their own way. But there is a cohesion between them all when taken together as a whole,” she explained.
“I really wanted to play with different atmospheric approaches and I really didn’t want to hold back on what I wanted to do as far as instrumentation. I really wanted to do a little genre bending, just because I love everything. I have grown up loving everything: I love pop music; I love jazz music and folk and rock. So, it’s kind of a hodge podge of everything I love and am now filtering all of that through my songs. And it’s because I don’t want to hold back in any way. With The Balconies, we had established ourselves as a rock band and we couldn’t really break away from that. Whereas now as a solo artist, I feel that I have more freedom to explore different sonic tapestries. I think that’s what’s most exciting about it, because people are more forgiving when you’re a solo artist.
“The thing I love most about music now is that I am doing it on my terms. I am doing it because I want to, not because I have to do it, because I have to meet a deadline or because I have to write a radio hit. I am not restricted in any way and I am not being pressured to do anything. Now I come home to music and its my sanctuary. It’s now my escape. I think for me right now, at this point in time, I have the perfect balance. And it’s been a big deal for me to find that balance. I really struggled with that in The Balconies because there was no balance. It was an all or nothing situation. You’re playing 300 shows a year and not eating well, and never sleeping in your own bed and that was my life. And I loved it at the time, but as I got older, and is it became harder, I just realized that it wasn’t the life I foresaw myself leading. Not to sound jaded, but if you keep doing the same things over and over again and don’t get a different result, you need to change your approach. I think that’s how I felt. It was insane doing what I was doing and working so hard on this music thing and still ending up with the same result. I needed to change something. I wanted to shake things up and I did, and I feel it really worked out for me. I feel there is this huge weight off my shoulders. And I am thankful that my husband has been so supportive. He is actually the one who pushed me over the hump, because had I not had that confident support around me, I don’t think I would have started this solo project at all. I do think I would be doing myself a disservice as well if I didn’t stay true to myself.”
For more information, visit Jacquie at https://www.facebook.com/jacquienevillemusic.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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