Good Medicine

Brandon-born singer-songwriter Dr. Jillian Horton has a decent career to fall back on...

By Morley Walker
The Winnipeg Free Press

SAY one thing for Brandon-born singer-songwriter Dr. Jillian Horton. If her new CD tanks, she has a decent career to fall back on.

In June, the vivacious 29-year-old completed a four-year residency in internal medicine at the University of Toronto. In August, she and her new husband moved to Winnipeg, where he is enrolled in law school and she is suiting up as a doctor.

Last week, however, Horton was back in the Big Smoke, where she launched her self-titled album on the Marquis Classics label.

"You could say I've gone overboard in terms of job security," says Horton, who seems to have the ambition and energy of three people. "I'm very much caught between the two poles of music and medicine."

The baby of a family of four children in the Wheat City, Horton started organ lessons at age six, before switching to piano at 10. She seriously pursued her classical studies until her mid-teens, when she developed tendonitis.

At age 17, she left home to take a B.A. in English at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. Did we mention she was also an aspiring poet and playwright?

During her master's degree, also in English at Western, she wrote a play about the life of our wartime prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King. It was staged at the Undergrand, the second stage of the Grand Theatre, London's equivalent of Manitoba Theatre Centre. She was 22.

Horton won a full Commonwealth Scholarship to do her PhD in English at Oxford University in England. But she had an early-life crisis. So she switched gears entirely. She got accepted into the medical program at McMaster University in Hamilton, where she spent three years learning about organs of a non-musical sort.

Yet she couldn't flush the music out of her system. In her undergrad years, she had begun composing songs and lyrics at the piano, moody Joni Mitchellesque numbers about exile and longing, which she warbles in a rich soprano.

Almost four years ago, she was listening to CBC Radio when she heard a song by Toronto-based torch singer Patricia O'Callaghan. "I had a small epiphany," Horton recalls. "I wished I could make a song that perfect."

It turned out that the man at the controls of several cuts on O'Callaghan's CD was veteran CBC producer Eitan Cornfield, whom she had met at a tendonitis clinic in Hamilton.

Horton called him up and told him about the songs she had been writing and singing. They began working together and, before long, they had recorded several of her songs. She issued them on an independent CD in 2002.

Execs at Marquis Classics, whose stable includes O'Callaghan and jazz singer Molly Johnson, liked what they heard. They got her to flesh out the album with four new songs.

The Marquis CD, aimed at the adult-pop market, hits stores this week. But Horton is not touring to promote it. Instead, she's coming back to Winnipeg to get a job in internal medicine.

"I'm going to take it as it comes," says Horton, who has done little in the way of live performing. "There's no question that it's going to come up, and I will make time in my schedule to do it."

Early into her medical residency, Horton decided that she and Toronto were not a fit. When she finished, she promised herself, she was coming home to Manitoba to be near her family. Her parents and two of her siblings still live in Brandon. Another sister lives here.

She didn't give her future husband, Eric Hachinski, much of a choice. He's a classical pianist who has lived in Toronto, London and New York. On their first date, she told him her plans, perhaps hoping that was something that would interest him. "Lucky for me it was."

Her previous boyfriend, she says, was a "snob from the big city who considered moving to Winnipeg a fate worse than death." Horton immortalized his failings in a song called Winnipeg, which appears on the CD.

Hachinski, 29, obviously made the right choice. "I think of Winnipeg as my spiritual home," Horton says. "Our plan is to love it."