The perfect world of Jillian Horton

Manitoba singer-songwriter hopes to leave her mark in the world of music and medicine

By Graham Rockingham
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The Hamilton Spectator

Remember back in high school, there was always this one kid who was just too perfect. You know the type. They dressed well, had all the looks, probably starred on all the teams, ended up getting straight As and a scholarship to Harvard. You wanted to hate them, but couldn't because they were just so nice.

Jillian Horton is that kind of person. Seven years ago she turned down a full scholarship to study English literature at Oxford so she could study medicine at McMaster. Horton figured she could do more good in the world as a healer than as a scholar. Three years later she was the medical school valedictorian.

After graduation, Horton moved to Toronto for four years of intensive training at some of the best teaching hospitals in the country. While doing her residency, Horton would end her gruelling 90-hour work weeks by coming home to her apartment, sitting at a keyboard and composing music. It turned out, of course, that her songs were so good that a record company with a big-label distribution deal decided to sign her to a multi-disc contract. All this and she's not even 30.

Oh, by the way, you probably figured out from her picture that Horton's got some looks, too. Yeah, you want to hate her, but she's just so nice.

Horton's on the phone from her parent's home in Brandon, Man. She's there to wish her dad a happy 69th birthday. We're talking about her self-titled debut album which has just been released by Marquis Records with the help of Capitol/EMI. She plays piano and sings in the tradition of Carole King and Laura Nyro, although Jann Arden and Joni Mitchell are her favourites. She has a strong lyrical sensibility, befitting a woman with a masters degree in English, and sings of bad love, good love, self-doubts and missing home.

"I'd come home after working long hours and go to the piano," she says. "In a very strange way, music emerged as the thing during my residency that kept me from going nuts."

It was tough enough writing the songs and recording the album while training to be a doctor. Now she's got to figure out some way of balancing the demands of the record company with her new job as a doctor with the Winnipeg Health Authority. It makes touring difficult. She hopes her speciality in internal medicine will loosen some time up. It's a field characterized by three or four weeks of intensive hospital work, followed by as much as two weeks off. Most doctors need the time to recover. She needs it to perform.

Although Horton is a Manitoba girl, her big break in the music world started with a chance meeting in Hamilton. In her early teens, Horton studied to be a classical concert pianist, a career cut short by chronic tendonitis. At one point, when she was 16, she visited a clinic in Hamilton for therapy. During one of her sessions, she met a Toronto cellist named Eitan Cornfield who worked frequently for CBC Radio. Years later, during her medical residency, she heard a CD on the radio by Canadian singer Patricia O'Callaghan.

"I had never heard of her before and they played some selections off her CD. I was spellbound. I thought this is the kind of record I wanted to make my whole life. I didn't know they still made this kind of stuff.

"I bought the CD and I was flipping through the notes and saw that Cornfield had produced several of the cuts. So I said 'what the hell, I'm going to write him.' I'd never forgotten that meeting in Hamilton. I said 'I'm a doctor now, but in my heart I'm also a musician and I've always dreamed of doing something with all the music that I write. And I know that if I don't do something really soon that dream is just going to fade away. Would you be interested in listening to some of the stuff that I've written?' He did remember me and he wrote back right away."

Cornfield loved the songs, booked her into a professional studio, recorded a demo and brought it to O'Callaghan's label, Marquis. They loved them. From then, on every bit of her time away from the hospital was consumed by the recording project.

"After finishing a shift when I'd been up for 30 hours, I'd stumble downtown and do something like visit the person working on the layout for the album cover," she said.

Almost as an afterthought, Horton mentions that something else was indeed going on in her life. Apparently she found some time to meet a man, fall in love and get married. His name is Eric, a Juilliard-trained concert pianist from London, Ont. He's embarking on a second career, having enrolled in the University of Manitoba law school.

"We're a mess, basically," Horton laughs. "He was a musician and now he's got to be a lawyer. I was the doctor and now I've got to be a musician. We don't make any sense."

grockingham@thespec.com