Molly Johnson has sat atop the rock charts, performed for British royalty and the late Nelson Mandela, and most recently hosted CBC'sRadio 2 Weekend Morning. Now Canada's multi-genre chanteuse is back with an album of Billie Holiday songs called Because of Billie.
This new record pays homage to Holiday's troubled youth by raising funds for the Boys and Girls Club of Canada. We spoke with Johnsonabout the new record, the state of jazz in Canada and her next big challenge.
I'm sure many have asked you why Billie, but what I'd like to know is why now?
That took decades to have the kind of relationship I now have with Universal where they understood the significance of the actual copyrights for the songs that Billie wrote. And I could have made a gratuitous Billie Holiday record but it was really important for me to dig in, find out who owned these copyrights and try to get some of that money into a charitable situation. Back in the day she probably gave her songs away for a bag of dope or a car, or some crazy thing. You know, the publishing business was in its infancy and artists were regularly being screwed. That was the time. Women really weren't writing a lot of songs — Ella never wrote anything — so for Billie to step into that arena was really something. 
She had no family so there's nobody collecting that money. It's just going into record companies and it annoyed me to no end. So I refused to record those songs until I could figure that out.
How did you wrestle the copyright back from whichever record label had been holding on to it all of these years? Did they just give it up?
They did. A portion of it. I think that they realized that this was the right thing to do. When we found them, when we got to them and they realized what I was doing and that it was for children ... they can't say no.
So it was a matter of asking the right question?
Yes. And to the right people. With the right support from Universal to say, "Her record's going to sell at this, and this much of it from our end is going to it so what can you do?"
And how did you come about selecting the Boys and Girls Club of Canada?
I chose the charity based on the fact that Billie did not have a childhood. When you're in jail for prostitution at 14 — with your mother — it's pretty clear you didn't have much of a childhood. So my idea was to find a children's charity that worked in North America, and I chose the Boys and Girls Club for two reasons: they have no religious affiliation and they're strictly after-school programs. As any working parent knows, it's not nighttime when you're worried about your kids; it's between 4 to 7 p.m. when they're out of school and you're not home from work yet. That's where we lose kids. That's where we lose teenagers in a big way, right in those hours. And I wanted to address that, talk about that and fund that. That's what the Boys and Girls clubs do.
So, the idea is that a percentage of the merchandise and a percentage of the CD will go to the Boys and Girls Club. Every city I play in, the Boys and Girls Club represented will come to the show and the money will stay in that city so I can fundraise city by city.
A lot of these songs have been part of your repertoire awhile, but not all of them. What was your approach to getting into the songs you had never sung before?
I'm often somewhere in the middle of staying completely true to the original versus making it my own because I just sing the song, and how it is is how it is. I don't do a lot of research, I don't do a lot of studying. In fact, quite a few of those songs I was learning on the day of [recording them]. 
And got a good number of them down in one take, right?
We did. These are jazz musicians who come to the recording session knowing the chart. So we're all starting from the same spot. And that bar is pretty high or you're not in the room. I surround myself with excellence. And we've got that in this country.
And yet, dedicated jazz venues in this country are dwindling. Your music is very popular in Europe and Japan. What's your take on the state of jazz in Canada?
Here's my thing about culture in general in Canada: I truly believe that Canadians love culture. There's just not very many of us. We're under 40 million. There are 48 million people in France, and France fits into Ontario twice. So let's talk geography and let's talk population. Canadians love culture, they're very loyal to Canadian musicians, they show up at shows, pay ticket prices, they're there. But it's a massive country with very few people.
This is a place to learn your craft, raise your children, have a happy life, sell some records. But sell records elsewhere. There's nothing wrong with that. People in the sock business have to sell their socks elsewhere, people in the lettuce business have to sell elsewhere. We're not alone in this. It's not bad to live in a country with a lot of space and a lot of room for people. 
Records aren't put together overnight. You've been living with these songs for a long time and, even though the public is only now getting a taste of it today, you're probably in the process of moving on. What's next for Molly Johnson?
I'll tell you what I have bubbling in the back of my mind. I've got one more record with Universal and everyone is asking for original material again. The last record was a songbook of songs I'd already recorded, and the record before that was basically a standards record with one original song. That was the last song I wrote. And that was back in 2008. It's very hard in my world to find writing time and space. Days uninterrupted with other people's laundry and concerns. As a mother, this is going to be my challenge. To write the next record.