is set to open Pandora's Box stateside
Ticket, Montgomery Newspapers - May 7/8, 1997
Ticket Editor
Virtually unknown in her own country (at least for the moment), the popular singer-songwriter is thrilled to see her second CD, "Pandora's Box", making serious waves in her adopted land, and is currently negotiating for its stateside release.
Known to her many friends as Joan Cara Stein, the sometimes resident of Elkins Park, her family home, is a musical gift to the world and uses the world (literally) as her sounding board.
Jones spent the first month of recording "Pandora's Box" in Tokyo, accompanied by Masanori Narikawa and the Caraband, then flew to Ireland, another of her adopted countries, for a month to lay down the remaining tracks. The album features two songs back by Ireland's popular Mary Black band, and was produced by world-class producer Jimmy Smyth (Van Morrison, Toni Childs).
By now your head must be spinning. You must be wondering, what's a nice American girl from Elkins Park doing in Japan, and why did she bother recording in Dublin when Tokyo was already far enough away from the mainstream.
In a recent interview at Caffe Marco Polo, Jones revealed that serendipity, along with a healthy mix of hard work and judicious choices, led her to Japan.
She said, "I had decided on a career as a singer at the age of five, but didn't tell anyone until I was 25." By then she had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in East Asian Language and Civilization (with a concentration in Japanese), continuing on to her M.A. in Regional Studies: East Asia, also from Harvard.
Jones, who plays guitar and piano, grew up under the musical influence of the singer-songwriters of the 70s (James Taylor, Janis Ian, Karla Bonoff) and has been writing songs for years. But as befits any good honors student from Cheltenham High, she put her avocation on hold until she completed here formal education.
At Harvard, she excelled at languages, mastering Spanish and French before moving on to the infinitely more challenging Japanese. It was at Harvard that serendipity struck big-time, when the head of her department recommended that she apply for a fellowship to polish her Japanese at Tsukuba University in Japan.
She won the fellowship, immersing herself in Japanese language and culture for a whole year before her senior year. Back in Boston, she worked as a disc jockey at Harvard station WHRB and became a band manager and concert promoter.
Undecided about a career direction, Jones returned to Japan where she hoped to work her way into Japanese radio, where English and American music are extremely popular. She said, "The Japanese language is so culturally derived that most foreigners live on the periphery of the culture. Despite my fluency with the language, it took me a whole year before it suddenly clicked."
That means everything. The language. The culture. The big break. One day, while she was being interviewed on a Tokyo radio station, someone in the record business heard her say she was also a songwriter. He gave her a shot at writing a song in English for a Japanese artist. It was a hit and served as her formal introduction into the world of Japanese radio and music.
Since then she has become a major radio personality in Tokyo, where over a million people listen to two of her pre-recorded programs every week. She continues to write songs for Japanese artists, does voice-overs and narrations for radio and television commercials and even sings her own compositions on commercials, which she says are nothing like those we hear stateside. She says, "I've never written a jingle."
Jones calls them "pop songs", one of which, "Supermodel", went on to sell more than 120,000 copies on the debut album of artist Hideki Kaji. Her best selling song, "Musicman", which she co-wrote and sings on the soundtrack to the Playstation game, "Arc the Lad II", has sold more than 850,000 copies, which would be a major hit in the U.S.
Her first solo album, "Different Skies", produced in May 1994 on an independent label, sold all 15,000 copies in three months, generating a lot of airplay and earning offers from several of Japan's major labels.
Which leads us to "Pandora's Box", a September 1996 release on Teichiku, one of Japan's top labels. Jones says, "It's like having a baby. It's about nine months from conception to delivery. Then all that you can do is give it your best and hope that it turns out well."
In this case, that's an understatement. The first single, Jones' searingly felt acoustic interpretation of Soul Asylum's "Runaway Train" hit #23 on the "Tokyo Hot 100" chart, where it stayed for nine weeks.
Jones had always loved Irish music and traditional Irish instruments, and was rewarded with a dynamic sojourn in Dublin, where "Runaway Train" and "I Need Love" were recorded with members of Mary Black's band.
About her globe-trotting, she had this to say with a laugh: "After commuting from Tokyo to New York to Dublin a few times a year, I don't want to hear any complaints about a sixty-minute commute to work."
Next stop for Cara Jones, who is now writing songs for her third album, is the stateside release of "Pandora's Box" and a recording contract here. As she writes in the title track of her current album, "Took more than thirty years to know the score/I didn't want to die before I'd really been born/And now my life is like a playground, high and free/Why don't you take a chance and come and join me."
For those who have forgotten the myth, after all the Evils contained in Pandora's Box escaped and scattered across the earth, what remained was one Good -- Hope. Although she'll always have a home in Japan, a country which has welcomed enthusiastically, Jones is ready to bring her sweet, upbeat and ethereal music back to her native land.
