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one of my downfalls actually, because I don’t have the ambition to be a huge,
huge artist. There’s an ambivalence there that can’t help me.”
Shawn Colvin is in the musical middle class. While her sales figures hover
around levels worthy of ordinary adjectives like “respectable” and “promising,”
she doesn’t make money from selling albums. It’s from touring, playing an
estimated 200 dates a year, that she stays solvent. “I buy opportunities with
records,” says Colvin. “I get satisfaction out of making more music and
recording it. I think I satisfy fans by doing that, but the nuts and bolts of
how I pay the rent is by going out on the road.”
In that situation, the pressures come from both above and below. With the
entertainment-consuming public becoming increasingly fickle and even more
forgetful as popular music proliferates at alarmingly exponential rates, an
artist is never completely safe from sliding into oblivion, and — without
financial coffers filled by a multi-platinum seller — a rather poor oblivion
at that. Even more pertinent, though, can be the unsolicited and perhaps
unrealistic expectations of others –those on the business end of the music who
stand to profit as much as if not more than an artist by having a hit
record.
“There’s a sense of limbo, and that you’re going to have to go one direction
or the other,” Colvin concedes. “The nature of the business is for people to
talk as though you’re going to go up to the next level every time you put
something out. So there’s an essence of disappointment or failure if you don’t.
And every record I have put out has done better than the last. But the nature
of the rhetoric in the music business is that you’re gonna go for something
much, much, much bigger than that. So, there’s always the feeling of waiting to
do that, and if you don’t then something has gone terribly wrong.”
Traces of the unwanted pressure may be manifest in Colvin’s fidgety gestures;
sitting in her living room, she regularly moves from floor to couch and back,
ad infinitum, continually running her fingers through her hair, manipulating it
back and looping the short sides around her ears. These are more likely the
habits that reflect a plain childlike restlessness, but Colvin does have some
immediate concerns. Chief among them is a tour, which kicks off here, in what
is now her hometown.
Colvin’s taking up residence in Austin may seem like a random talent windfall
for the city, but her move here in 1994 was actually a return to the area.
Around 1976, in an effort to evade the responsibility of having to book her own
shows and be her own manager, and to get out of Carbondale, Illinois, where she
had been living at the time, Colvin joined a band called the Dixie Diesels,
which was relocating to Austin. The band gigged locally and around the rest of
the Southwest for a couple of years before splitting up. Colvin left Austin
and, via San Francisco, eventually ended up in New York.
In New York there were two major events that affected Colvin’s success as a
musician, one of which was her eventual, albeit temporary, failure as a
songwriter. Colvin’s progression from imitating her folk and pop idols (Joni
Mitchell’s name comes up a couple of times) to arriving at something that she
could identify as her own had stopped. The things she was coming up with at the
time were just “senseless pop dealies that were musically sophisticated but
lyrically terrible.” It wasn’t just the inability to move past emulating others
that stymied Colvin; it was her loss of faith that it would ever happen. “It
was fulfilling to try and write songs, but it wasn’t really working for me. The
irony is that what it took for me was that I had to quit.
“In 1986, or something like that, I had this epiphany where I said, `You’re
really kind of demanding more of this than it can give you. And isn’t that kind
of tragic because music is so sacred? You don’t know what you’re doing here.
You don’t really believe in what you’re singing and you don’t really care. And
you don’t really know what it is you’d like to do, so you can’t say, “Get up
off of your butt and go do that.” So, isn’t this kind of disrespectful to your
whole love of the deal? You know, if you’re not meant to be in it to this
extent, then maybe you’re just going to have to leave it.’
“And it was the thing to do. My identity had been wrapped up in it to such an
extent that this could be a good adventure. I stood to learn something, and I
certainly didn’t stand to lose anything because I could go back. So there was
kind of a calm and a peace that came with that because I was just doing a
regular job and going out with my regular friends. It was a relief. And within
about a year, I began to miss it and I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do,
but the feeling of having nothing to lose was very helpful to me.
“Then, some songs started to get written and that was the breakthrough for
some stuff. Before I was trying to be smarter, clever, whatever. It was one of
the most frustrating things. It’s terrible when you just don’t have an
intuitive sense if you’re going to the right place or not.”
The other component to come out of her years in New York was Colvin’s meeting
and working with John Leventhal. The two co-wrote material and, with Leventhal
also functioning as producer, created Colvin’s debut, Steady On, an
album that won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1990. Their
partnership extended beyond the professional sphere, though, as the two had a
personal relationship as well. Out of a desire to succeed that approached
necessity, Colvin recognizes that she and Leventhal succeeded musically in
spite of spill-over tensions rather than because of them.
“We had a romantic relationship and there was so much tension in it for the
early years of my knowing him that I think the thing that probably kept us
together was what we could achieve musically. Hand-in-hand with that was
the need for what we had to achieve musically. I don’t think we’d be as
motivated now, because we both have a lot of other options. But back then we
had something to prove and I think we both felt it. We needed one another for
what we wanted to do.”
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of songwriting and production credits on Steady On‘s follow-up, Fat
City, the two had effectively ended their relationship before most of the
work on the second album was done. For A Few Small Repairs, her third
studio recording of new material (it’s actually her fourth album for Columbia,
since 1994’s Cover Girl is just what its title implies, all covers),
Colvin and Leventhal — who went on to work wonders for Mary Chapin Carpenter
and is now married to Rosanne Cash — began writing together again. But it was
just that — writing — as Colvin had someone else in mind for producing.
“My idea was that it was great that we could write together again,” says
Colvin, “but I just wasn’t going to go there. I just wasn’t going to pursue the
producer thing. I just thought, `Let well enough alone.'” She made some demos
with a different producer, but the record company didn’t much care for what was
turned in. She and Leventhal had also recorded some demos of songs they had
written, and both of them were fairly enamored with how they turned out. You
can see where this is going. “John is very hands-on. You write a song with
John, and the ideas start creeping in. He’s a producer.” So, comfortable with
the notions that they didn’t hate each other and that if he didn’t want to
produce again, that would be fine, Colvin asked Leventhal to do just that.
The result: an impeccably produced record, but, in contrast to the pair’s
first offering, one that came together with relative ease. “It was really the
easiest, the most enjoyable time I’ve ever had making a record. And I guess I
kept thinking, `Is this all there is to it?’ But, on the other hand, I didn’t
do a lot of second-guessing. It did surprise me, but when it sounded good, and
he thought it sounded good and I thought it sounded good, my attitude was,
`We’re home.’ If he had a problem with it that meant something to me, and vice
versa; but it was a pretty easy formula. We were both pleased.”
Columbia was pleased as well. The reality of the music business is that to
work an album, to promote it and generate publicity and ultimately sales,
especially as the label envisions an artist going for something “much, much,
much bigger,” an album needs singles. In the past, Colvin and Columbia had spat
over singles. For Fat City the label wanted to push “I Don’t Know Why,”
with the idea of making Colvin, as she describes it, into “a folk-esque Mariah
Carey.” She eventually capitulated — save for nixing a flugelhorn solo — and
let the label have its way with the song, although ultimately it never took
off. (Colvin: “In a sick way I was glad.”) There was a similar clash with
Cover Girl, the result of which was taking one of her live staples,
“Every Little Thing (He) Does Is Magic,” and glossing it up with orchestration
for the album.
For Repairs, Colvin and Leventhal just sidestepped the whole issue of
singles by making a record that was radio-compatible. “We weren’t out to make
an avant-garde record. We weren’t out to break the rules anywhere. We weren’t
out to protest anything. If anything, we wanted to fit in. And we felt that
there was a way to do that that did not compromise what we do. And I think it
worked. I mean I think it’s as hit-oriented a record as any I’ve ever made and
I love every one of the songs.”
As do at least a few folks over at the National Academy of Recording Arts and
Sciences (NARAS), the people who hand out Grammys. A Few Small Repairs garnered Colvin two more nominations this year, Best Female Vocal Performance
for “Get Out of This House” (“I don’t get it. That to me isn’t a big pop
performance, not even that good a pop performance.”), and Best Pop Album
(without even a hint of it’s-a-thrill-just-to-be-nominated pseudo-humility,
Colvin admits she wants to win that latter category).
Her neighbors may not get Grammy nominations like she does, but just like
anybody else in the middle class, Colvin works. Only instead of getting up and
going to a job at 8am everyday, she hits the road; and touring isn’t structured
Monday through Friday, week after week. It’s a difference that Colvin doesn’t
gloss over anymore as she notes that “for my own sanity, after this record,
regardless what happens with it, the shift and focus is going to have to
change. I’m going to have to create a situation that’s less unsettling so that
I can actually feel like I have some choice, besides reacting to a record’s
release and then having to make money.”
If you can’t stand the clich�s, get out of the kitsch-en, or out of
sports broadcasting, or out of whatever. Right? There are certain duties
inherent in navigating any career path. That’s obvious. At some level you’re an
employee of the record company. You make an album for them so that they can
sell them and make money. Touring to promote the product is part of the deal.
But there’s another element to it that has nothing to do with uninteresting
complaints; talking about the desire just to have a schedule that’s fixed
enough to know when she can plan to take a “white-water rafting trip” or other
“stuff that you’d think you’d like to do in your life” indicates that Colvin
very obviously longs for the structured everydayness of her neighbors.
“I think everybody envies someone else’s life. I’m in touch with the things
that I get out of my life that suit me. I think too much routine would be bad
for me. I like the adventure of leaving and having a new project to work on
every couple of three years. It suits me; and the price you pay is things are
not consistent. I don’t want to change jobs. I think it’s just a matter of
taking control and making the job work for you… but at this point I think I
should be getting more back for what’s taking place.”
That may depend on the landed elite of the record company and whether or not
they’ll allow contentment as a luxury for the ever-shrinking musical middle
class. Says Colvin, “You know it’s not a bad place to be if you can hang on to
it, and if they’ll let you hang on to it.”
This article appears in January 31 • 1997 and January 31 • 1997 (Cover).