More than fifteen years ago, when Jillian Horton was a teenager studying at a small piano school in Vermont, she told her teacher, American pianist Alvin Chow, that she didn't know what she was going to do with her life.

"He told me if music was in my heart and I ran from it that I would spend my whole life running," she recalls.

It was the better part of a decade before Jillian Horton confronted that prophecy; her life, like her music, always seems to return to a handful of particular themes: fate, faith, compassion, home.

Jillian was born in Brandon, Manitoba. The youngest of four children, she spent the first seventeen years of her life in the small community about 50 miles north of the US border. Her relationship with the city remains emotionally complex.

"It's home," she says, of Brandon, "and it was a city that supported me in so many of my activities when I was young. But it's also a city that shunned my sister and failed to provide the most basic supports for my sister and my family, and we all suffered for it. All of those things are tied up in my thoughts and feelings for the place."

While Jillian was a talented musician and student, her sister, twelve years her senior, suffered a brain tumor at the age of six, and was left with devastating and profound diasbilities.

"This was thirty years ago, back when people just shoved the disabled into institutions and denied them any part in communal life. My family refused to do that with my sister, and back then there were no supports for that. My sister was treated like garbage. In general, so were my parents."

Music emerged early on as a way that Jillian would seek solace from this family tragedy. "Around the age of ten or eleven, the piano just kind of became this magnet, pulling me towards it. I started to practice two or three hours a day. It became something I could count on to provide refuge, mentally and physically. It was like there was a bubble around me and the piano whenever I played...nothing could get in."

It was clear to those around her that there was something special about her relationship to music. "One of my junior high music teachers overheard me playing something I had written myself on the guitar. She asked me if I had written it. Up until that point, for some reason, I had kept the fact that I wrote music to myself, so I was almost too embarrassed to admit it was my own writing. But she was so enthusiastic...she told me I had to keep writing music, that I had to promise her I would. She moved away at the end of that school year, but the fact that she had given me that bit of positive feedback kept me writing from then on."

It would have been easy for writing to fall by the wayside. By the time she was in her early teens, Jillian was an accomplished performing pianist, in love with classical music, and hoped to pursue classical performing as a career. This was how she found herself at the prestigious Adamant School in Adamant, Vermont, studying with Alvin Chow, somewhere around 1990.

But there were problems. "I had practiced so much over such a short period of time that I developed tendinitis," she remembers. "It came up very quickly, it was really painful if I played or practiced a lot, and at first, I couldn't accept the idea that maybe this wasn't going to be a career I could pursue. I was also a tall, awkward kid, and I had had a couple of falls with mild injuries to the soft tissue in my hands, which I never let heal because I was always practicing."

Hence, the heart-to-heart with Chow one night on the front porch, at Adamant.

"I never forgot his words," she says. "Even when my life took a completely different path, I think I hung on to them because I knew they were true for me, that he was right."

It was shortly after that that Jillian ended up travelling to the Clinic for the Performing Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, seeking treatment for her tendinitis.

"I couldn't accept that there wasn't an immediate fix for this, a pill, a surgery, something. I went to that clinic thinking there was an answer, and of course, I never found one. On that level, it was a waste of time."

On another level, that trip would lead to a series of events more than a decade later that would launch her recording career, but she couldn't have known that then.

Not long after, she recalls, "I basically gave up on music. I accepted a full scholarship to the University of Western Ontario, and I moved there with the idea that I was going to start over and leave music behind."

At Western, Jillian studied English and Drama. She turned to acting and then writing, churning out a number of manuscripts, short stories, poems and plays. She barely touched a piano for nearly two years.

Then, one night, she was out with a group of actor friends at a pub.

"There was a piano there, and someone asked me to play. I started and I couldn't stop. It was like a floodgate opening. I started to sing, and I was playing and singing all this music I had been writing myself, for years and years, that I had never really played for anyone before. And my friends loved it. I could tell they weren't just saying that, either, and witnessing their response to my music was a shock to me. I suddenly thought, maybe there's something here that has a life beyond my living room. I really started dreaming about music again that day."

Not long after that, one of those same friends put her in touch with a friend who was studying to be a recording engineer. Jillian seemed ready to mature into a singer-songwriter and to see herself that way. And yet, as she describes it, something held her back.

"I don't know what it was. Maybe I wasn't ready. I just couldn't bite the bullet and put myself out there musically. The university scene didn't fit me, either...it didn't suit the more practical side of me. It felt too theoretical. Even though I was in London, my mind was still at home,with my family and my sister, because they were suffering a lot. I can't put my finger on exactly when I felt I had to pursue medicine as a career, but somewhere in there, that's what happened."

And so, at 23, Jillian started medical school at McMaster University, the same place where she had gone as a teenager to cure her tendinitis. "It seemed fitting," she says. "I did feel a sense of fate about the whole thing."

The next three years were gruelling. "I saw things I thought I would never see. It seemed to me that I felt everybody's pain very acutely, because I knew that feeling, of when someone you love is sick. It was good to go from the helplessness I had felt on the other side (with my sister) to being able to provide people with the love and conern that had really been missing from my family's experience with the medical system. It was a huge comfort to me."

But there was a flipside. "I felt myself disappearing into the vortex of human misery. It started then, and continued for several years, and it only got harder with each passing year."

When Jillian graduated in 2000, she was her class valedictorian. Her path appeared set; she had secured a residency position in internal medicine in Toronto, where she would spend the next four years.

And yet, by that point, "I knew something was definitely missing. I loved my job, but I wasn't happy. I had really wanted to go back to Manitoba to be near my family, but I ended up making the decision to stay in Toronto for some very ill-advised personal reasons. It was one of the first really big mistakes I felt I had made. I just wasn't myself anymore."

Her gruelling residency in internal medicine only confirmed her suspicions; there was something wrong. An unfamiliar city, combined with a job full of unique stressors and a high quotient of human misery, began to take a toll on her. The person her classmates had described as perpetually exuberant could barely drag herself to the hospital for morning rounds. Something felt off. "My spark was gone," she says.

Right around this time, fate stepped in.

Coming home from a gruelling 24 hour shift one day, Jillian crawled into bed. She flicked the radio on as she adjusted her covers, and suddenly, she heard something that made her freeze.

"It was a CBC interview with Patricia O'Callaghan, a Canadian singer. They were playing cuts from her new album (Real Emotional Girl). I stopped cold. I actually got tears in my eyes, and I thought, 'That's exactly the kind of album I always thought I was going to make', back in those days in London. I felt sick, and before I fell asleep I remember thinking of what Alvin Chow had said to me, 'If music is in your heart and you run from, it you will spend your whole life running.' I think that day I realized that I was running from something, and I was miserable."

The experience stayed with her for days. "I couldn't stop thinking about it, about this music. It felt like a sign."

It wasn't long until she saw the album in the store and bought a copy., and when she finally got the CD home, she listened to it for hours. But what happened next seemed like more than coincidence.

"I read the liner notes, something I really never used to do. And buried in there I read, 'Produced by Eitan Cornfield', and my heart stopped."

Why? Because more than a decade earlier, when Jillian flew to the McMaster clinic seeking treatment for her tendinitis, she had met Eitan Cornfield, and she knew he was a producer at the CBC.

"We had talked a fair bit," she recalls. "We had talked about the classical music world and industry as a whole and how competitive it was. I had told him about my hand problems, and he said something to the effect of, 'These things all work out in the end.' I remember it because it was kind, not patronizing, as many adults were towards me at the time. I never forgot him, ever."

Over the next few days, Jillian mulled theses events over and over in her mind. The conincidence was too great to ignore. So she decided to write Cornfield.

"I emailed him, in the end," she says, grinning. "I felt stupid, but so what if he thought it was nuts. It was going out on a limb."

He didn't think she was "nuts". Incredibly, he remembered her from their brief encounter years earlier, and they arranged to meet for coffee on a Saturday morning at St. Lawrence Market in downtown Toronto. With her, she took a demo of songs a friend had recorded for her years ago in London, as well as a notebook full of compositions she had been writing over the last several months and years. There was an instant connection. Cornfield heard something in her music immediately...something Jillian herself had continued to believe was there all along.

Over the next few months, they hatched a plan for a demo recording, which Jillian would schedule on post-call days or weekends. John "Beetle" Bailey was hired as the project's recording engineer. Over a year later, they had a finished product in their hands, which they were on the verge of distributing independently, when Cornfield happened to give a copy of the disc to Patricia O'Callaghan's label, Marquis classics. Marquis loved the early recording, offered a five-record contract immediately, and in October 2004 they released "Jillian Horton", produced by Eitan Cornfield.

The music itself is heartfelt collection of songs written during those wrenching years in Toronto when Jillian struggled to find the balance in her life between medicine and everything else, and also, when she faltered under the weight of intense homesickness.

Among her favorites: "Winnipeg", a richly orchestrated, evocative narrative, "Less of Me", which she refers to as a sparse "apology to myself, for everything", and "Dinosaur Park", a dark, complex ballad about her family's life. Other highlights are the hymn-like "All The Pretty Horses", featuring the saxophone playing of Canadian legend Phil Dwyer, the simple, lyrical "Beautiful Ride", and the almost theatrical final track, "Song for an Evening in June".

What influences does Jillian hear in her own music?

"I regard myself as a total Joni-phile," she says, referring to Canadian great Joni Mitchell. "For me, there is no one like her. I've listened to her since I was a child and I am still discovering new songs and new layers. Her writing, her lyrics, everything...it's sacred music to me." She lists other Canadians, including Jann Arden, Rufus Wainright, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen and Ron Sexsmith as musical heroes and musicians who continue to "pop up here and there in my writing. There's no way around it, and provided you are not consciously trying to imitate people, I think that interaction is a normal, healthy part of the writing process".

Since the release of her first commercial album, Jillian has been working to find the balance between her two, sometimes vastly different occupations. At the same time, she sees similarities between them both.

"I find it strange if people don't see how music and medicine are related," she says. "Sometimes musicians say things to me like, 'Music is all that matters', and I kind of tune them out at that point, because that's junk to me. Music is about what matters...you write about the things that touch you in life. If there are people out there who think I should have been 'putting in time', you know, playing in bars and doing gigs like that, then my question for them is, how would anyone have been better served by that than by what I did instead? I just subsidized my dream differently. I paid a different set of dues, but I paid them."

Having relocated to Winnipeg in order to be closer to her family, Jillian has found peace in her life in the last year. She practices and teaches medicine part-time, and devotes the remainder of the year to supporting her music career, writing, and spending time with her husband, also a musician, and her family and friends.

"I can't say what the balance will look like three or five years from now, but at the moment, it's working."

Was her teacher, Alvin Chow, right all those years ago?

"Oh, absolutely," she says, with a trademark grin. "I made peace with music a few years ago. No more running. I'm home."

© 2005 jillianhorton.com

Jillian Horton photos: Ivan Otis