Jen Lane

Jen Lane was sixteen when she made her first record. Family and friends pushed her toward it, and Sleepless came out on her own Jen Lane Music imprint in 1999. It opened with ‘Poison Ivy’, still her favourite song from the album. She paid for the whole thing herself and made the artwork with her parents. The following year Sleepless was nominated for Outstanding Independent Album at the Prairie Music Awards. “It was a fun project and not bad for my first try,” she said of it years later.

Her second album, Injection, arrived in 2002. One of its songs, ‘Ed’s Blanket’, stayed in circulation after Saskatoon community station CFCR put it on the 2005 compilation 100 Years Old And Still Rockin’. That recording had Lane on vocals and guitar, Jeremy Lane on bass and Peter Pizurny on drums.

Around the same period Lane played a songwriter showcase at Louis’ Pub on the University of Saskatchewan campus. John Antoniuk, another Saskatoon singer-songwriter, followed her onto the stage and told the room he had a crush on her. Both had opened shows for Tegan and Sara by then without hearing much of each other’s work. They married in 2007 on the same stage at Louis’ where they had met.

Antoniuk, who also recorded as Smokekiller, became Lane’s regular lead guitarist, backing vocalist, collaborator and manager. In a 2014 interview she traced the progression. She sang with his band occasionally, he started playing lead for her, and the two careers folded into one another.

Her third album, the self-titled Jen Lane, was released on July 8, 2006 through Jen Lane Music. Lane sang and played guitar, Antoniuk added guitar and vocals, Andrew Dickson played bass and Joe Dickson drums, with Rod Salloum, Megan Lane and Efren Pereira Jr. filling out the arrangements. Pereira produced, Lane and Neil Meckelborg co-produced, and Meckelborg engineered the sessions at Audio Art Recording in Saskatoon.

A west-coast solo acoustic tour followed, she showcased at the Western Canadian Music Awards that fall, and she was invited to play JunoFest in 2007. Serviced to college radio in January 2007, the album reached Top 30 charts in Ottawa and Toronto and earned a nomination for Outstanding Independent Album at the 2007 Western Canadian Music Awards.

Reviewers repeatedly singled out Lane’s voice, comparing her to Sarah Harmer, Lucinda Williams, Edie Brickell and Sheryl Crow. Her singing carried a natural country inflection, while the strength and intimacy of her delivery remained consistent across folk, roots and pop-oriented material.

Her touring widened through the second half of the decade. She opened for Tegan and Sara in Regina and Saskatoon, and by 2009 she had reached South by Southwest in Austin, where ‘Grey Skies’ appeared in the official showcasing-artist material. Travel, homesickness and the distance between being away and being home started turning up in the songs.

For The Night was released September 14, 2010 and recorded in Vancouver with producer Steven Drake. Lane cited Paul Simon and The Mamas & the Papas when describing the sound she wanted, particularly the warmth and natural bleed of older recordings. Three acoustic instruments and drums were recorded together in the room, with the microphones picking up the other instruments around them.

She disliked what happened to music when it became files on a phone, and she still wanted to hold a record, open it and follow the lyrics. “I believe in vinyl!” she told the Saskatchewan Arts Board.

Drake produced, engineered and mixed For The Night at Stone Canyon Studios in Vancouver, and played bass, guitar, piano, autoharp and tambourine on it as well as singing. The other musicians were Antoniuk, Sam Cartwright, Megan Lane, John Ellis, Kevin Kane and Simon Kendall. Greg Calbi mastered the album at Sterling Sound in New York. Lane wrote and arranged all twelve songs, supported by the Saskatchewan Arts Board through its Independent Artists and ArtVenture programs, funding she said allowed her to step out of ordinary life and concentrate completely on songwriting.

For The Night brought a Western Canadian Music Awards nomination for Roots Solo Recording of the Year in 2011. That same year Lane and Antoniuk represented the Saskatchewan roots scene at Prairie Scene in Ottawa, playing the National Arts Centre alongside JP Hoe, Alexis Normand and Del Barber. The program singled out her smooth vocals and the maturity of a catalogue built by someone still young.

Beginning in 2013 the couple took recurring residencies at Toronto’s Cameron House. Instead of trading sets, they played everything together. The banter between them and the friction between his indie-rock instincts and her folk and country ones worked well enough on stage that they went and made a record out of it.

Jen & John came out in 2014. Seven songs, with the writing divided between Antoniuk and Lane and room left for two covers. Lane pointed out that the division was thinner than it looked, since the two of them were forever suggesting changes to each other’s material.

A serious foot and ankle problem led to several invasive procedures, and after the last of them Lane spent roughly eighteen months mostly confined to her house. Watching Orange Is the New Black through the casts and crutches gave her the title ‘Shoe’, a joke on the show’s solitary housing unit and on being locked inside her own home.

While she and Antoniuk were touring Jen & John, a friend put them up at Bottega, a thirteen-acre property near Kelowna with an alpaca farm, wildlife and a working studio. Lane went home, made some calls and arranged to return and record. Writing about the sessions afterward she remembered the alpacas, the owls and woodpeckers, the ponds and the crickets, and thanked John MacArthur Ellis for helping turn all of it into an album.

Then her grandfather died, days before recording was to start. He had been a sculptor, painter and poet, and one of the strongest supporters of her music. Her first instinct was to cancel. She decided he would have wanted the record made. ‘Movin’ On’ and ‘Fools’ came out of that stretch, both of them about pain and the decision to keep it from setting the terms for everything after.

This Life Of Mine was released in 2016. Ellis produced and mixed the album and supplied pedal steel, guitars, banjo, mandolin, Hammond and Briscoe organs, Wurlitzer, piano, synthesizer, bass and percussion. Antoniuk and Nick Stecz formed the rest of the core, with Dana-Marie Battaglia, Jesse Padgett, Jamie Prentice and Gunner & Smith also contributing. Calbi again mastered at Sterling Sound. Lane wrote ten of the eleven songs. The exception was ‘Thirteen’, written by Alex Chilton and Chris Bell for Big Star’s 1972 debut, #1 Record.

Lane has since singled out her version of ‘Thirteen’ as one of her personal favourites. She also has a particular affection for Big Star, a Memphis band whose first album was widely praised but badly hindered by distribution problems and sold only a few thousand copies when originally released. The group later became one of the most influential cult bands of its era. Lane remarked on the irony of a young band called Big Star making an album called #1 Record and then failing to receive the audience the record deserved.

Saskatchewan is all over the album. ‘1st Day Of Spring (In Saskatchewan)’ turns a prairie blizzard into a private holiday of records, food, wine and guitar. Around it Lane writes about hotel rooms, recovery, absence and letting go. SaskMusic heard the record moving between country, roots, folk and Americana, and voters placed it at No. 6 among the Best Saskatchewan Albums of 2016. The title song reached the semifinal round of the International Songwriting Competition in the folk and singer-songwriter category. The album brought another Western Canadian Music Award nomination, this time for Roots Solo Artist of the Year, and in 2018 Lane was among the Saskatchewan Country Music Association nominees for Roots Artist or Group of the Year.

In 2015 Saskatchewan singer-songwriter Sarah Farthing recorded When Your Answer Comes with Lane producing, Josh Palmer engineering at The Recording House in Saskatoon and John Ellis among the musicians. Farthing later described Lane as an intuitive producer who helped her keep hold of a project that had started to feel bigger than she was.

Lane and Antoniuk returned to the duo project with Jen & John II. Most of it grew out of their 2016 summer tour. Afterward they stopped in Kelowna to see friends at Bottega Studio, where Lane had made This Life Of Mine. The studio was available and the couple had several free days, so they recorded songs they had developed during the tour.

Released March 15, 2019, Jen & John II was self-produced, with Jamie Prentice engineering and mixing at Bottega. Its seven tracks pulled their folk, country, roots and indie-rock backgrounds closer together, around acoustic guitars, harmonica, close harmonies and the call-and-response singing that had become central to the duo. Six songs were originals. The seventh was Boudleaux and Felice Bryant’s ‘Love Hurts’, taken from the Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris reading of it rather than the harder-rocking Nazareth version.

The opening song, ‘I Don’t Need The Sunshine’, was written by Antoniuk at the Salt Spring Island cabin where he and Lane had honeymooned. He described it as a song about stripping away everything unnecessary and finding that being with Lane was enough. ‘Big Beautiful Butterfly’, at the other end of the record, grew out of a night the two of them spent babysitting his niece and nephew, Connor and Emily Fleming, who share the writing credit.

While touring This Life Of Mine, Lane and Antoniuk had learned they were expecting a child. Shane Connery Volk, lead singer of Saskatoon band One Bad Son and a friend of the couple, made the album cover, which the two of them described as reflecting the maturing of their songwriting and of their relationship.

By then the duo had played BreakOut West, Canadian Music Week, North by Northeast and Prairie Scene, with dates farther afield at Folk Alliance in Kansas City, South by Southwest in Austin and a SaskMusic export showcase in Los Angeles.

In 2020 Lane sent ‘Today I Lost My Mind’, from For The Night, back to radio, a song about isolation that landed differently that year. Her website mentioned new music intended for 2021. Nothing under that description was released.

She stepped away from live performance for nine years and raised her children full time. In August 2026 she announced that she was coming back, with new work shaped by the time away and by a changed view of identity, love and ordinary life, and her website filled again with Saskatoon dates.

In September 2026 she told CitizenFreak.com that the return had sent her mind back to the start of the catalogue. She found it funny that Sleepless had begun resurfacing and said she was thinking about another solo acoustic record as a follow-up to it, twenty-seven years on. She named This Life Of Mine as her favourite of her albums and remembered making it as one of the happiest stretches of her working life. “I am finally playing again.”

-Robert Williston