Lee Aaron: Rural life rocks!

By Tom Zillich

On the street where Lee Aaron lives, hellbent motorists hustle by the otherwise pastoral setting of her South Surrey abode. Outside the rancher, a newer-model minivan is parked in the circular driveway, not far from the horses and sheep and llamas out lounging on the neighbouring property. Inside the house, a baby is heard making baby noises.

Wait a second, here. Something's not right with this picture. The one-time queen of Canadian hard rock is living in the sticks? The words "Lee Aaron" and "minivan" used in the same sentence?

Believe it.

But when she opens the door, the petite singer is all big-city glam in a tight black sweater, her long, reddish-brown hair framing a freshly powdered face and those pouty, ruby-red lips. There's a photographer on the way, after all. Or maybe that's just the way she dresses on a soggy midweek afternoon.

Aaron's husband John is home, too, holding the couple's baby girl, Angella (emphasis on second syllable). Within seconds of entering the home, it's apparent that a real family lives here.

"I wouldn't say this is country life," insists Aaron. "It's rural. The beauty is that I can get up in the morning and have breakfast on the porch surrounded by forest - but I can drive five minutes and I'm at the boardwalk at Marine Drive. It's great!"

It's a long way from the out-and-about distractions of Kitsilano, from which Aaron moved three years ago to live with the drummer in her jazz band - John Cody, the father of her baby and man of her dreams.

It's mutual, for sure, but it almost wasn't meant to be.

"I didn't even respond to her first call when she was looking for a drummer," admits Cody while the missus is in another room with photographer Sharon Doucette, "because I hated what she represented back in the early days. I heard she was doing jazz and couldn't even imagine that - I didn't think she had any talent for it. I had no interest because I thought, 'That's going to suck.' Eventually we met, and it worked out. I realized that I got everything wrong about Lee Aaron. She's actually a great musician."

It's not news that Lee Aaron is singing jazz these days, because that story's made headlines since her mid-1990s move from TO to the West Coast. The tale needs updating, though, because based on her latest album, the White Rock-recorded and Aaron-produced Beautiful Things, her new music isn't so much jazz as a pop-jazz blend, a bubbly but entirely adult concoction so far removed from her Metal Queen and Some Girls Do days that it's hard to believe this is the same person.

And it's not, really.

"Quite honestly," she says, "I'm not at all comfortable with that rock chick of the past. I was a kid in my teens when I started out in the music industry. I did a lot of growing up in public - and some of it was embarrassing - I carried around quitea bit of shame about some of that for a few years, because had I been more knowledgeable, I wouldn't have made those decisions."

Gone are the tarty tops and teased-hair horrors of the '80s-era Aaron, who at the time made a noise so loud that she's still working to silence the hard-rock beast within and without - some seven years after making the hard-left turn to lounge-y jazz music.

"Some people still don't realize I'm doing jazz," she says with a sigh.

"It's funny," Aaron continues, "but having a lot of success like that, early on, can be both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it's what every artist hopes for in an industry where only one per cent of all (musicians) even make a dent. I got lucky in that respect. But when you have a couple of big records, that's the image people get to know and define you by. So Lee Aaron is synonymous with 'rock chick, poster girl, metal queen.'

"Some people love me and," she laughs, "some people hate me. It's a constant fight for credibility."

An irony here is that '80s hard rock is back in vogue, giving the Solid Gold record label reason to reissue some long-out-of-print Aaron albums.

But at the moment it's all about Beautiful Things for Aaron and Cody, whose stunningly complete collection of records is a source of inspiration for the lady of the house. When an idea strikes, she doesn't have to mosey far.

"We recorded the bed tracks at Turtle (studio), which is on the beach in White Rock," she explains, "We did it all in analogue and then brought them here for overdubbing. It was great doing that work here because we weren't looking at the clock all the time - and I could get up and do a vocal track in my pyjamas."

At the moment, Angella is the only one in PJs as she sucks on a bottle of breast milk while cradled in daddy's arms on the couch. The post-New Year's plan for the musical couple is to tour with a nanny - which works well in this case, because both parents would travel with babe.

Just four months old, the girl is reportedly already holding a drum stick.

And then it dawns on me. I do the math in my head and realize that Lee Aaron is 40-ish, a woman whose best childbearing years are behind her.

And so the question is asked: Was she worried about being an older mom?

"I'll be cautiously candid and say no, I wasn't worried about that because I knew I was healthy and fit and in good shape. However, Angella is kind of a miracle baby, because we tried for quite some time and had some unsuccessful pregnancies. It wasn't as easy having a child as I'd originally anticipated - not at all. And that's why she's so precious."

And motherhood?

"Compared to getting a platinum-album award and being nominated for a Juno and being in a studio and pulling the very best take, compared to traveling overseas and playing some amazing concert in Europe - all of those things are dwarfed by bringing a little human into the world. Nothing compares, nothing at all."