Having come up making music in Montreal, Jordan was playing in bands by her early teens and fronted the popular local band, The Pinups. She credits The Band’s 1969 classic “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as something that encouraged her to pursue a career in music.

Known for 90s radio hits like “High Road Easy” and “Make You a Believer”, the rocker rose to fame in 1988 with her debut album, Tell Sombody, and generated enough buzz to make the jump to Los Angeles, where she recorded her best known projects, Racine (1992) and Rats (1994).

She recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of Rats with a limited edition run of vinyl. In a phone interview with The Equity on Aug. 13, Jordan said that the record was created during a difficult time for her, just prior to her departure from L.A. for good.

“I was just in the middle of a lot of [unpleasant things] and that was a really, really cathartic record to make,” she said. “It was a great way to get out a lot of demons and stuff. Music is like that, I really use it for mood enhancement.”

She said that part of the difficultly was that the label executives had their own ideas about what the album should sound like.

“The record company, because that’s what existed in those days, had asked for a certain type of record which… it wasn’t in my interest,” she said, explaining that she and her bandmates went ahead with songs they wanted to produce, and eventually the suits relented. “It was a great thing. It turned out to be a really cool piece of work.”

One of the artists who featured on the album is the infamously outlandish, indomitably out-of-the-box musician George Clinton of Parliament and Funkadelic. Though already in his fifties by that time, Jordan said he was a wild addition to the studio.

“Oh my god, I love that guy,” she said. “He … is a seriously intense character.”

She said the decision to re-release the album on vinyl only was a nod to her fans, who she said would appreciate the medium as much as the message.

“Real music lovers, who are the kind of fans that I mostly appeal to … the people that like that are definitely audiophiles and definitely love vinyl,” she said. “Vinyl’s having a huge resurgence. People are buying record players and stuff, it’s just like another thing to have, I think, and if you’re into music everything sounds better on vinyl, that’s a fact.”

“I like to call us Pterodactyl Sasses, because that’s me, a dinosaur,” she added with a laugh. “You’ve got to think about the fact that a lot of my fans are a little up in that age bracket, more mature, older. They remember having vinyl so they’re a little more into it. It’s more interesting than a CD, which is going the way of the dodo as well.”

Despite this attachment to the good old ways of doing things, (her first album was released on cassette and vinyl after all), Jordan was adamant that there is still good music being released through online mediums like Spotify.

“I don’t agree when people say ‘Oh, there’s nothing but [crap] out there,’” she said. “There’s a lot of great stuff out there now, you’ve just got to look for it. It’s just like anything, people don’t have the time and energy to start looking. You’re not going to like it from the first song, you’ve got to listen to it more than once. That’s where you get tripped up.”

Jordan said that she enjoys all kinds of genres, listing off artists like Khalid, 6lack and Rival Sons. She also had praise for female vocalists Lynne Jackaman and Sari Schorr.

In addition to creating music, Jordan has also recently expanded into creating the “Kick Ass Sass” line of wines, along with her friend and Niagara-area winemaker Brian Schmidt.

“The first cases, they’re all sold out so now I’m making a new batch,” she said. “The wine maker and the winery do all the hard work. The only thing that I’m involved with is the blending of the different wines into the bottle.”

She told fans to be on the lookout for her new album of covers, set to be released early next year, as well s the possibility of a limited run of whisky to accompany her wine.

“It’s wicked,” she said, of the album. “Listen to me, talking about my own stuff, but I can’t stop listening to it, it’s really good … It’s all blues covers like the Allman Brothers and Little Walter, it sounds amazing.”

Catch Sass’s show on the main stage at 9 p.m. on Friday Aug. 30.

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