Canada to Oxford via Papua New Guinea and Nashville: Miriam Jones puts down roots for hometown gig

Miriam Jones has been on quite a journey. It’s a trip which has taken her from the mountains of western Canada to the American South, the jungle of Papua New Guinea and now to suburban Oxford.

Now safely settled in Marston, the singer-songwriter is about to launch her latest album at a hometown show.

That country-roots flavoured record is the latest document of a travelling life lived to the full.

So who exactly is Miriam Jones . . . and why did she end up here?

“I'm a Canadian musician with American roots and a British passport,” she says, by way of explanation.

“Oxford has been a good host to my love of walking — an important aspect of nurturing my creative bent — but most of my stories have their roots in other places.”

Born in Vancouver, she spent her childhood transfixed by musical theatre — particularly the soundtrack of the 1968 film Oliver! “It fed and still feeds my joy of music and singing and maybe my sense of the dramatic,” she says.

She was also immersed in country courtesy of her Nashville-born mum, and through frequent trips to Tennessee to visit her grandparents. She came up with her first song aged eight, and, when the family moved to the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where her dad had a job teaching at a theological college, she filled her days climbing trees and writing tunes.

“Where we lived was rural and us kids did a lot of self-entertaining. I figure having ‘space’ — both literally and in terms of a lack of mindless distractions — probably aided that process,” she says. Moving back to a small mountain town in British Columbia, her love of music flourished. She learned to play the drums and won a regional songwriting contest, using the prize money to buy her first guitar, with which she joined a local jazz band.

She recorded her first album, 2008’s Being Here, back in Nashville, with Grammy-winning producer Charlie Peacock.

“My small town in the Rockies that we moved to after PNG has a special place in my soul, but a thriving musical culture it has not!” she says. “Nashville was my only real connection to a ‘scene’. I was never on the inside of it, mostly I was too young for it, but I knew the city from staying with my grandparents for long stints, and when the time came there were connections I could draw on and it felt appropriate for me to go.”

It was followed, two years later, by the rootsy Fire-Lives, recorded at home in Oxford, where she lives with British musician husband Jez, a trainee vicar.

So where does this wandering troubadour feel most at home?

“I have done most of my ‘adult’ things in Oxford — like file taxes and pay bills,” she says. “I feel an affection for the place and think I understand it pretty well now, but it’s hard not to think of where my brother, sisters and folks are in the British Columbia interior as my home-home.

“Papua New Guinea was both weird and wonderful, though moving to Britain has also involved a lot of cultural stretch! I met my hubby out in British Columbia, and we headed back here together. It seemed like a reasonable adventure to embark on, and I was curious about England. On reflection it was a pretty big thing to do, but most days I’m glad I did it.”

And has Oxford shaped her music? “While I’ve been influenced by the British scene, both before and since I’ve arrived here, it’s not my main frame of reference,” she answers.

“Oxford has always seemed to me to have more of a band scene. I have tended to end up involving a band at the record-making stage, but I’m primarily a song-driven and solitary music maker and I think I may have an unusually objective approach to writing some heartfelt music.”

Her mesmerising new album Between Green and Gone (engineered by Billy Bragg producer Simon Edwards, who also plays in her band) is a warm, sassy collection of tales populated by the kind of extraordinary characters you’d would expect someone as well-travelled as Jones to conjure up. She launches it at The Wheatsheaf next Wednesday and promises a night of “heart, soul, and some very pleasing grooves”.

Transplanted: Miriam Jones

“A recent reviewer called it ‘the metaphysics of ordinary life’, which I thought was a nice phrase that rang true. I’ve increasingly enjoyed collecting narrative data from different sources to create one story, and then writing in first-person even when it’s not really about me.”

She will be joined by her band, with Edwards on bass, drummer Martyn Barker and guitarist Calum MacColl.

“I’m used to writing alone, but I really value working with other musicians,” she says. “They’re a bunch of lovely, experienced dudes, and I appreciate their musical instincts.”

It certainly feels more Nashville than Oxford. So does this adopted Oxfordian still hanker for the wider world — such as those treetops in Papua New Guinea?

“Some pretty sinister things go on there and I experienced some fairly fearful times amid the absolute wonder and delight of the place and the people,” she says. “But then, some sinister things happen here too, they just often go unspoken or unnoticed, which is scary in its own way.”

She goes on: “I love that I’ve let another culture get under my skin though, and I know for sure that I wouldn’t be where I am as an artist now if I hadn’t made the leap.

“England has some great things going for it, no matter what the locals say!”

Miriam Jones
The Wheatsheaf, Oxford
Wednesday
Tickets: £7 from miriamjones.bandcamp.com