Jeremy Bradley-  Nicky from the Wailin' Jennys, thanks for joining me today.  And it's a great day outside and a great day to have a new album released!  What coincidence that your album comes out today! 

Nicky Mehta-  Yeah.

JB- Let's start out with the name - The Wailin' Jennys.  It's a play on words, you know, I get that.  But when I hear the word "wailin'" I kind of get the idea that it's not necessarily a pretty sound.  And that couldn't be further from the truth with your music.  So where did the name come from?

NM- Well it's actually a name that was given to us when we did our first show in Winnipeg in 2002 with the original lineup.  It wasn't supposed to be anything that would go beyond the two nights that we were playing at this little guitar shop.  We had just advertised the show as the three solo entities playing together for one night.  But the guitar shop owner thought that it actually had a future and sort of a feeling that it would go somewhere so he was really intent on finding us a name and he came up with these awful names.  That was the one he came up with that all three of us liked.  We work as an equal collective so we have to agree on everything.

JB-  Is that a difficult task sometimes?

NM-  Well that's not actually true.  We don't have to agree on everything.  Usually it's majority rules but, generally speaking, we want everybody to feel comfortable with it.  So even if a few people feel comfortable with it they're not going to force the third to agree.  We usually try and find a common ground.  And yes, that can sort of slow down decision making.  And our management would have lots to say about that!  (laughing)  Sometimes it takes us a while to come to a conclusion about things.  It can be tricky but in the long run it's better to have people that are onboard with something than secretly thinking, "OK, I didn't want to do that."  Everybody has the opportunity to speak their mind.

JB-  So what's the story of the group?  How did you all get together from that first night at the guitar shop?  And from what I understand it wasn't always the three of you it is now.

NM-  It originally started because Ruth just wanted to get together with other female musicians and play together just for fun.  She'd heard of Cara (Luft, the original group member) and me through the music scene.  As you know, the scene in Winnipeg is pretty close knit.  If you don't know somebody personally you'll at least know of them.  And she liked what we were doing and thought our voices would blend pretty nicely and she approached us at the Winnipeg Folk Festival in 2001 and get together to sing.  We didn't really take it that seriously at first… well, I didn't anyway.  Because musicians talk about getting together all the time and it often doesn't happen.  But that's when the guy from the guitar shop sort of stepped in and said, "You know, you guys should really do this," once he heard us talking about it.  Just the response to the shows was really… there was a lot of excitement about it.  People just really seemed to like the combination of the three of us.  But still we had no intention of really pursuing it beyond that until we started getting festival offers based on people hearing about these shows and people started talking to us about putting on more shows.  It was when we went down to Jacksonville, Florida and that's when the offers started pouring in.  We thought, "This is really interesting."  You know, we were all doing pretty well before that but there was just an interest in what we were doing because it was pretty unique.  And it still, to a degree, is pretty unique.  There's not a lot of people doing what we do.  The appeal seems to be still there for people.  It's something about the three-part harmony.

RUTH MOODY (soprano)

NICKY MEHTA (mezzo)

ANNABELLE CHVOSTEK (alto)

JB-  It is strange - this little group from Winnipeg to be getting offers from Jacksonville and other big American cities.  And you're going to Europe too!

NM-  Yeah, we've toured the U.K. a couple of times.  We're going back in July and again in January, February and then we're moving into Spain at that point, I think.  We're going to be doing more broader Europe stuff in the future hopefully.  And we've been to Australia as well.  But probably the bulk of our work is the U.S. now, and of course, Canada.  Canada we toured for a good two and a half or three years before we really started moving into other areas.  It is a real testament to three-part harmony - to three-part female harmony - it just really seems to resonate with people.  I think also the fact that it's not just three singers coming together, it's three songwriters as well coming together.  My sense from feedback we get is that people are interested in even just the fact that the dynamic exists that these three people who were functioning on their own and could function on their own were choosing to make this the primary thing.  I think people are kind of interested in how others make something work when there are different personalities involved and everybody has a different view of writing and music and stuff like that.  It's like how do you bring those things together?

JB- Like you said, three different personalities, three different people - when it comes to writing or even just connecting with each other, did that happen instantly or does it take a bit of time after you've worked a bit together?

NM-  We've never written together.  We arrange everything together and that's always been… we've all enjoyed that.  We enjoy that process.  It's a really creative process and everybody gets a lot out of it.  That's really positive and that was there from the beginning.  I think everything happened so fast and has continued to stay at this really rapid pace that it's hard to keep up with.  So you don't really get much of a chance to actually sit back and think too much about what's going on.  So we know it has worked well enough to allow it to exist for as long as it has in a way that people feel like they're doing something they enjoy.  It's a lot of hard work but it is obviously paying off for us - allowing us to play music for a living and travel and stuff like that.  But in the beginning, because there were no great intentions, we just enjoyed the fact that we were singing on each other's stuff.  Everybody loved singing harmony so much and Cara did decide to go back to her solo career, and that was a choice that made sense for her and made sense for everybody in the end.  And then Annabelle came onboard after a search for a new member and it was like lightning striking twice in terms of blend because getting a really tight blend is not always the easiest thing in the world.  We got lucky.