by Shawn Colvin
Bob Donlin was a crotchety marshmallow of an ex–Beat poet, who, along with his wife, Rae Ann, devoted himself to a tiny coffeehouse near Harvard Square in Cambridge called Passim, where listening was serious business. There was no liquor there—you were coming in to have some cider and cake and to listen to a troubadour, a folksinger, a singer-songwriter, whatever you want to call it. Its audiences were more than respectful; they were by turns reverential and adoring. They wanted to hear original music. Bob had been impressed enough with my performance at the Fast Folk show to offer me a weekend as an opening act for Greg Brown, a hunky and marvelous baritone from Iowa who wrote great songs. I was to play Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday afternoon, which was a live radio broadcast, and Sunday night. He offered me three hundred fifty dollars, and I was over the moon.
I had exactly three original songs—“I Don’t Know Why,” “Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” and “Diamond in the Rough”—not enough, but I’d have to figure something out. I figured something out. I pulled out every obscure cover song I could think of that I’d done in the bars. I’ve been a huge John Hiatt fan since discovering Ry Cooder’s version of “The Way We Make a Broken Heart,” and I played “It Hasn’t Happened Yet” and “Your Crazy Eyes” by Hiatt. I played “American Jerusalem” by Rod MacDonald and a song or two written by my old boyfriend Jim. I’d been doing an acoustic version of the old Foundations hit, “Baby, Now That I Found You,” forever. Down the line Alison Krauss would hear me do it at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and record my arrangement. There were songs that I later recorded on an album of covers, like “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” by Dylan, “Satin Sheets” by Willis Alan Ramsey, “There’s a Rugged Road” and “The Vigilante” by the brilliant Judee Sill, and one of my favorites from the Buddy Miller Band days, “Killin’ the Blues” by Roly Salley, also covered by Alison and Robert Plant as well as John Prine and who knows who else. It’s a perfect tune without a single rhyme in it, and it doesn’t make a bit of difference. That’s poetic songwriting. There was one Colvin/Leventhal song called “Knowing What I Know Now”—kind of a mouthful anyway—and I’d do that one. I ended with “Diamond in the Rough.” They bought it. No one called the songwriter police.
I had no idea how to talk to an audience when I started playing Passim. So I did the same thing I did when I started playing the guitar. I went to school, this time by watching performers like Greg Brown and Claudia Schmidt in listening situations, trying to pick up tricks and clues and methods of how to build a relationship with the audience. I can’t overstate the impression Greg Brown left on me after that first weekend at Passim in the spring of 1987. I watched every one of his shows as if they were master classes. Greg knew who he was onstage—that was the main thing—and he knew his audience. There’s an art to handling your crowd, especially when it’s only you and you can hear a pin drop. I was quaking. Greg had his stories, his one-liners; he had his timing and dynamics down. He was accessible. Instinctively, I knew that’s what I had to go for. Some artists can reel you in by being remote, but I’m like a dog—I just want you to like me.
When you’re out there onstage all by yourself, the audience is all you’ve got. If you want them to truly get what you’re doing up there, you need to know how to reach out to them. Nowadays it can be hard sometimes to shut me up onstage, and I like to say that the saving grace is that I’ve been in therapy so long that I just naturally wind down forty-five minutes into the set. Back then, though, I had to plan what to say. The whole thing was nerve-racking and thrilling.
Now, here’s the bottom line: Donlin wanted me back in about eight weeks’ time. And if there’s one thing I was sure of, it was that I had to have at least one new original song by then; my pride depended on it. I felt like I owed it to the Passim audience to grow, to have a larger catalog, to become a surer and more authentic songwriter. Of course I wanted that anyway, but, ever the procrastinator, I needed a deadline, and whenever my next gig at Passim was, that was my deadline. Pretty soon I had five songs, then seven. Bob Donlin and the audiences at Passim were invaluable to me because of that. Their expectations were higher than mine.
Bob and Rae Ann Donlin at Passim, Cambridge, MA, 1987
I started developing a fan base there, until I got a headlining gig and people were opening for me. All of this was before I made a record. Pretty soon I’d be playing theaters in Cambridge, not coffeehouses, and the first time I did was in September 1988, at Paine Hall on the Harvard campus, capacity 435. I put a white carnation on every seat.
Another reason the Boston area was such fertile ground for someone like me was the presence of college radio, like stations WERS from Emerson College and WUMB from UMass Boston. I had a little cassette demo with four songs on it, and these guys played it, along with the Fast Folk recording of “I Don’t Know Why.” (Incidentally, Alison Krauss and Union Station did a cool bluegrass version of that song in 1992 on their album Every Time You Say Goodbye.) Those radio stations were the best marketing tool I could have had and helped immeasurably in building a following for me.
Philadelphia Folk Festival, 1988
(Photograph courtesy of John Leventhal)
Then I got a call in October 1987. Suzanne Vega had hit it big with “Luka,” and we were all atwitter. I’d actually sung on the record. I remember going into a coffee shop and hearing “Luka” playing on the radio, I could hear my little “ah” part. It lit fires under all of us; it was inspiring. It also made us jealous, which is never a bad thing. I remember going to see Jane Siberry in concert at the Bottom Line during that same period of time and walking out devastated, because I just felt like I couldn’t begin to be that cool—but those are good things, they make you try. I got a call from Suzanne’s manager saying that she was on tour, didn’t have a backup singer, and that she’d kind of like to add one. The next leg of her tour was to be all over Europe for November and December. Now, I was bound and determined not to commit to another job that would take me away from the matter at hand, which was finally doing my very own thing. But Good Lord. I’d been to Canada. That was the extent of my foreign travel. Two months in Europe, on a proper tour? I couldn’t pass it up.
I met the king of Sweden and members of Twisted Sister. I saw more cathedrals and museums than you can shake a stick at. I went running along the Seine and the Rhine, in the Alps, past Buckingham Palace, by Irish potato fields. I saw where each Beatle lived. I had an affair with a drummer who was a terrible scoundrel. We saw movies in Rome, made love to “Tunnel of Love” in Antwerp, fought in Brighton. I bought red gloves in Germany, black jeans in Switzerland, chocolate in Belgium. I listened to Nothing Like the Sun by Sting and A Walk Across the Rooftops by the Blue Nile. And I got to sing in some of the most beautiful old theaters you ever saw.
Suzanne Vega, 1987
If I had been hungry to become “someone” before Suzanne’s tour, I was starving now. I came home to New York two months later a little bruised from the road and the affair, but eons richer. Thank you, Suzanne. I felt even more under the gun to buckle down and get serious. Certainly that drive was aided by seeing what Suzanne had done. As my sister, Kay, would say, it gave me the wantin’. She says you’ve got to have the wantin’, but she also says you can’t have it too bad or it can ruin things. So I tried to stay focused and wrote another song with John, called “Steady On.”
12
She’s All Right
CBS says YES, 1988—John Leventhal, me, and Steve Addabbo
(Photograph courtesy of Ron Fierstein)
Gee, it’s good to see a dream come true.
It must’ve been about June 1988. The Polaroid is of John and me and one of my managers, Steve Addabbo. We’re outside John’s studio on Twelfth Street, holding a bottle of sparkling cider. I wrote a caption on it, and it reads “C*B*S says Y*E*S.”
As it turned out, the Suzanne Vega tour yielded a far bigger dividend than just goosing me to get on the horn with my own career. Her managers, Ron Fierstein an
d Steve Addabbo, took an interest in me and casually gave my four-song demo tape to Joe McEwen at Columbia Records. Joe was an A&R guy there, which meant he could sign acts, and he loved the tape. Columbia signed me, and Ron and Steve wanted to manage me. It all happened really fast.
The demo tape that got me signed
One of the first things I did was … move. At long last I left my rat- and roach-infested East Village apartment that had been home for eight years and relocated across town to a considerably nicer place in the West Village. I cried my eyes out while waiting in that empty Third Street hellhole for the cable man to come and shut down the service. I thanked that wretched place for allowing me to do the hardest growing up of my life. I’d been drunk and suicidal. I’d been sober and suicidal. I’d been through the deepest and most difficult relationship of my life, with John. I’d started therapy with Myra Friedman, whom I still talk to. I’d written the first significant song of my life, “Diamond in the Rough,” which defined everything I would write from then on. I forged friendships that would last forever. I’d had countless odd jobs and eventually landed a recording contract. I learned to be myself. So why could I not see that I would simply be bringing that self to increased square footage, a bathtub in an actual bathroom, an actual living room with a view, and no rodents? But there you have it.
Anyway, I had more important things to worry about. At thirty-two years old (Columbia suggested I list my age as thirty, and I did), I was finally going into the studio to make my own record, and even though I’d been in studios before to sing on other people’s records or demos, this just seemed ultimately like the real deal. The stakes couldn’t get any higher.
We decided to record “Diamond in the Rough” and “Shotgun Down the Avalanche” first, since, being the oldest songs, they had received the most thought and preproduction. After I’d nailed down the acoustic guitar tracks for both of them, the day came when it was time to do the vocals, and I was pretty apprehensive. We dimmed the studio lights and lit candles in the vocal booth. I probably said a prayer, or at least an affirmation: “I, Shawn Colvin, have all I need inside me not to fuck up this vocal....” We were doing “Avalanche” first. I put on headphones while John and the engineer picked a microphone for me and gave me a mix I felt good singing to. The rubber was about to meet the road. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath and laid down my first vocal take on “Shotgun” for the album we would call Steady On. When the song ended, I opened my eyes and waited for the verdict from the control room. I should mention that normally you sit down to do vocals and perform several attempts, then go through each take, making notes about which lines are sung best in each pass. From there you “comp” the vocal—pick out the best bits and marry them into one complete take. But I was too nervous to do a bunch of passes; I needed to know how that first one was. Was I in good form or was I self-conscious? When I walked into the control room to listen, I saw very long faces and was crestfallen. I was sure this meant I’d sucked—but no. Turns out the engineer did not press the Record button. There was nothing to listen to. I can laugh about it now, but we had to end the session for the day, and I never saw the engineer again—that’s how far it threw me. I guess somebody got rid of him. I’ve learned since to see the wisdom in not overthinking a performance, that sometimes vocally what may seem like a mistake can actually hold some emotional value, but back then I was beyond nitpicky. I would sometimes comp the vocal, not line by line, not even word by word, but syllable by syllable. Today I would rather chew tinfoil than go to that trouble. If you really can sing, there isn’t the need for that kind of microscopic attention, but back then, forget it. I was a total control freak about the singing.
John and I were no longer a couple. As musical partners this was our shot, but our breakup was complete by the time we were finishing Steady On. As you can imagine, that made for some tense studio sessions. Part of me viewed John as the enemy, because he was so bloody sure of himself and I didn’t have the maturity to experience that as anything but a power play. John knew it was “my” record, that I had to be happy, but he was also hired to be the overseer of the thing, and rightly so. These days, when we record or write together, if I think he’s acting arrogant I just threaten to slap him, but back then I threw pizza in his general direction or cried. And John? You know how men can compartmentalize and still tend to the job at hand in the midst of Armageddon? It drove me crazy.
In the end, we did at least some of the work in separate studios. I banished him from the vocal sessions, which I slugged out with an engineer for weeks and weeks. I produced one track on my own, “Another Long One,” and asked my friend Bob Riley to produce “Stranded,” both of which I’d written by myself.
One of the things I’d loved about all the records I grew up listening to was looking at the back cover credits for the guests who appeared on them, like when Joni Mitchell and James Taylor hooked up and sang for each other on “Blue” and “Mud Slide Slim,” respectively. In addition to the fine rhythm section we had, with the late T-Bone Wolk on bass and Jerry Marotta on drums, I got Suzanne and Lucy Kaplansky to sing on “Diamond in the Rough.” Soozie Tyrell played violin and sang on “Another Long One,” and Bruce Hornsby stopped by one day to play piano. Earlier that year Bruce had performed at a Grateful Dead tribute concert (oh, joy) at Madison Square Garden, one that Suzanne was performing at as well, so my managers, Ron and Steve, got me backstage. I was after Hornsby in particular, because I loved his record The Way It Is, and there he was. I handed him that same lucky, ratty tape that had gotten me signed to Columbia. I figured it was a long shot, but two days later I got a phone call from none other than Hornsby, telling me how much he liked the tape. He agreed to come in and play on “Something to Believe In,” and Leventhal and I behaved, for that day anyway.
It took nearly a year to make Steady On. We started the album in the fall of 1988 and finished the following spring, with Kevin Killen doing the mixes. Besides “Diamond” and “Shotgun,” these are the songs we recorded, along with how some of them came to be in the first place:
John gave me the music that was to be the title song. “Steady on” is an English phrase that means to steady oneself, and I heard it first as the title of a dance program I had a small part in by a New York troupe called XXY. John’s music seemed bouncy and purposeful, and I just knew that “Steady On” would fit as the chorus refrain.
I brought the song with me on a little beach trip to a friend’s house in North Carolina and got the first lines sitting by the ocean. I took it from there and just juxtaposed imagery of weaving and wandering that hopefully got pulled taut and straight at the chorus. At the time, I didn’t write many “fun” songs, but this one was light and had a smile. Even the doomed love affair in the second verse is left in the dust by the chorus. John’s production is superb here, from all the intricate percussive touches to the modal tribal yells he sings in the chorus. This song was debuted at the Newport Folk Festival in 1989.
The song “Stranded” started with the guitar part that opens it, which reminded me a little bit of “Waiting on a Friend” by the Rolling Stones. Often, if you can get one good line or verse right at the beginning, the song will be set up well for you. In this case, outer space came into play on the second line, so I had my little metaphor that gave me security. The song is another vehicle for my failing relationship with John, and I appreciate the tenderness and blameless quality about it. I wrote this one alone.
Another solo effort, and one I really feel I’ve underestimated over the years, is “Another Long One,” inspired by either John or the Doe-Eyed Dreamboat—I can’t remember which. This was an old song, something I started to write before “Diamond in the Rough” but didn’t finish until I got my songwriting legs under me. The first line makes no grammatical sense—“If losing sleep were any indication of the loving that I’ve missed …” I supposed it should be “If loss of sleep,” which sounds like it’s got a pole up its rear end. I let stuff like that slip by whenever possibl
e if it’s something that just flies out. Better to leave it. There’s a line like that in “Shotgun”: “This is the best thing and the very most hard.” Huh? But it felt right; it came out of my mouth correctly. “Another Long One” speaks to that basic hard truth about yourself when all is said and done. My boyfriends weren’t perfect, but it was becoming clear to me that I had some pretty significant issues in the intimacy department. I was massively insecure for one thing, prone to self-righteousness, victimization, and obsession—hence the “little boys in my head sleeping tight”—tending to look on the dark side of possibility when I didn’t understand men (which was often), ultimately creating a no-win train of thought: “If I think that you are with me / Then I know that you can always change your mind.” This makes for long nights indeed. Just me and my well-intentioned spite. Not so cozy. The girls like this one. John thinks I’ve outgrown it, but it feels as right today as it did twenty-three years ago. I perform it often. And for the album I produced it myself with the wonderful percussionist Michael Blair, who literally beats on pots and pans here, the clanging of my own warped mind.
I’d say the cornerstone of Steady On is “Diamond in the Rough” and this theme of healing and recovery. “Cry Like an Angel” is a chip off that block. John had written it and even had some chorus lyrics: “I hear you callin’, you don’t have to talk so loud, / I see you fallin’, and you don’t have to walk so proud, / You can run all night but I can take you where / You can cry like an angel …” That was all he had, but it got me. It started with mandolin, and I wanted it to sound like a Band song—I wanted to hear Rick Danko sing it. That’s what I reached for lyrically, using colloquialisms like “It’s not so’s you’d notice” and “There were hard pills to swallow / But we drank ’em all down,” bringing in a mystery train and the wheels of ambition, the Friday night, dances, and even a band. The theme is self-discovery and the beginnings of self-reliance and a certain maturity gained as a result of having gone through the fire. So this song was about grief and the necessity of grieving. We can cry like angels when there are no words.