by Shawn Colvin
Larry’s alter ego was “Señor de la Noche,” which loosely translated means “Lord of the Night.” In a former life, while working with some Latin jazz players in the eighties, he was so christened during all-night cocaine binges. Señor de la Noche would appear to us from time to time, to say in a thick Spanish accent, “I know exactly what you mean, my man.” Or, when particularly nostalgic, he might sigh wistfully, “Ahhh, la cocaína—the laaady …” Señor was a bit of a prankster as well, often daring us, for a reward of “two hundred pesos,” to confront total strangers about their clothing or hair or sexual habits, usually in airports when we were forced to abandon our beloved bus and fly. When that was the case, Steuart, who loathed flying, would ingest a concoction he called his “atta-boy cocktail”: a tranquilizer, Ativan, washed down with a martini. Or two. After a long flight from L.A. to Melbourne, Steuart emerged from the plane completely disheveled and asked in all seriousness, with just a hint of panic, “Does anyone else feel upside down?” Señor de la Noche wearily replied, of course, “I know exactly what you mean, my man.”
One of the great friends I made in California was David Mirkin, who loves music more than anyone else I know, except maybe Steuart. Dave can tell you not only who sings lead on any Beatles song, he can tell you who breathed where. Dave is divinely funny, ridiculously so, and is responsible for launching my cool factor into the stratosphere by getting me to voice a character on The Simpsons, which he executive-produces. I was Rachel Jordan, a Christian rock singer. It was also Dave who got Garry Shandling to come down to my gig one night. Garry asked if I would appear on his series, and that’s how I got on The Larry Sanders Show.
Meanwhile, despite the fun things I was doing and the good friends I was making, I had to wonder what had possessed me to relocate to California. Yes, of course I loved the flea markets, a shopaholic’s true nirvana, but if you’re from the Midwest, you just can’t feel at home without a good thunderstorm now and then, and they didn’t exist in L.A. And, of course, there was the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Our friend, Danny Ferrington, an ace guitar maker who hails originally from Louisiana and has a voice registering somewhere between those of Minnie Mouse and James Carville, took this opportunity to defend his gas-guzzling SUV, saying, “When the shit hits the fan like this, I can get home!” Meaning he could off-road down Lincoln Drive to his apartment in the Palisades. I did everything wrong during that earthquake. As soon as the house started pitching like a washing machine at 4:00 A.M., I ran directly to the back door and panicked. Not recommended. Then I ran to the front door screaming while every car alarm for miles went off. That seismic party, along with the lack of weather in L.A., put me over the edge.
I had a gig in Austin and decided to look for a house there. Simon was on board for the move. Austin was a music town and had great food, no earthquakes, and no shortage of thunderstorms. In no time flat, I found my dream home, really just a Leave It to Beaver house but right across the street from Lake Austin, with a boat dock to boot. I threw my down payment at it, and we loaded up the truck and moved to Scenic Drive—yes, that was the name of my street. Scenic bloody Drive. Oh, Lord, oh, Lord, why in the name of God did I ever sell that house? You don’t sell a house on Scenic Drive; you hold on to it for dear life so you can retire in ten years. Simon went on tour with Richard Thompson, and there I was, sitting in a four-bedroom mortgage. The house on Scenic Drive turned out to be a house of cards.
15
Sunny Came Home
Julie Speed’s Setting the World on Fire oil painting
(Photograph courtesy of Julie Speed)
Line ’em up in a row.
Gunshot—ready, set, go.
During our first few months in Austin, I sat with a bunch of guitars and notebooks in my “writing room,” which was actually just a bedroom upstairs overlooking the water. I’d gaze out at the lake, trying to take in my good luck. I’d never had a writing room before. Shouldn’t I be prolific and brilliant now that I did? It was no use. When I write, I like to empty my mind and focus in on a feeling or a rhythm or a melody. But my head was spinning. Why, oh, why had I moved away from New York, a hotbed of edge and sophistication and artiness where a weird South Dakota girl like me seemed downright normal? What was I doing in a neighborhood living among doctors and lawyers with no Korean delis, no Two Boots Pizza, no MoMA? Where I had to drive to get anywhere? How could I have left my crazy friends, Stokes and Kim? Oh, I stared at that lake and came up empty. I was neck-deep in the biggest commitment I’d ever undertaken, becoming a homeowner. Wedding vows were cake compared to this. There was nothing to do but write about it: “Go jump in the lake, / Go ride up the hill, / Get out of this house.” Yes, the starting point for my next album was inspired by buyer’s remorse, and it would take down my marriage.
It’s rather glib of me to blame the failure of my relationship with Simon on a house, but the bottom line is that I wasn’t ready for either of them, the husband or the house, and it certainly wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that I ran from commitment.
We’d had our troubles even in California. Simon liked his pot, and I wasn’t woman enough to just let him. It irritated me when he became stoned and got dry mouth and talked slowly and acted spacey and giggled over nothing. One night at a party in L.A., he wandered off for a while, and I knew it was demon pot that got him. Sure enough, he returned to where I was sitting in the garden, and I was grossed out. Seeing my boyfriends in altered states threatened me; I wanted to be able to relate to them at all times. Of course I could have attempted a little sense memory from back in my druggie days, but I didn’t. I was annoyed, and Simon agreed to leave the party and call it a night. As I drove us home, I felt a little sheepish for coming down on him and suggested we rent a movie. He agreed apprehensively, not sure if he liked me, but then slowly his whole face lit up. Still foggy and silly from the reefer, he exclaimed, “Oh! Could we get a comedy?” We got Monty Python, a stoned Englishman’s nirvana.
But we’d had lovely times, too. In the L.A. days, Simon rewrote the words to the Crowded House song “Weather with You”:
Walkin’ round the room in my favorite sweater
At 209 Rennie Avenue.
It’s the same gear, but everything’s different.
We got a garden and a bar-b-que.
Kay is cookin’ in our kitchen,
Jane’s Addiction on the radio,
Caesar salad at the Souplantation,
Simon and Larry say, “Oh, nooo.”
My sister, Kay, had lived not far down the road from us in Venice. She worked as a sound tech on films. We became addicted to the Souplantation, an all-you-can-eat cornucopia of salads and soups. We would stuff ourselves there and went so often that Simon began to dread dinnertime. Twice we went to Australia to visit Simon’s son, Tom. Fond, fond memories. Simon was a love. He still is. Just last summer Callie and I took him and Tom out on Lake Austin for the day.
But back then I felt trapped and completely out of my depth at the prospect of committing to forever and building true intimacy. I found that living with someone wasn’t something I could put my best self into. I felt suffocated. I didn’t like sharing or compromising. Simply put, I was childish. The thrill of the chase and getting married had worn off, and, of course, some real issues came to light, both his and mine. I found myself unwilling and unable to work them out, and so between the husband and the house, I kept the house and fled the man by asking Simon to move out. We had been married two years.
It was back to the writing room, or the drawing room, or even the rubber room perhaps. At any rate, I hadn’t made a record of original material in almost four years. The folks at Passim would surely not approve. It was time.
I had written a few fragments of music and lyrics and had finished two whole songs, “If I Were Brave” and “New Thing Now.” But I needed help to write more material, and it occurred to me that maybe enough water had gone under the bridge for John and me to take a stab at writing again. We
hadn’t worked together in five years and probably hadn’t spoken in three, which allowed me to get some distance and move on both personally and musically. I called him one day in 1994, and the next thing I knew, he had flown down to Austin to meet with me.
The tension between us was gone. We could actually be friends. I was less self-conscious around him, having realized I could work without him and having finally moved on past the wreckage of our romance. John and I no longer felt obligated to consider Top 40 radio in our efforts. I’d compromised before, remixing and re-producing songs like “I Don’t Know Why” on Fat City and “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” on Cover Girl against my better judgment for the sole purpose of getting radio play. It had never worked. In fact, when John and I reunited, all we were hoping for was a little inspiration and spark musically, like in the good old days. I remember both of us feeling as though we had nothing to prove. To anybody, not even each other, or perhaps least of all each other. As near as I can tell, that made all the difference.
It was as though the stars had aligned. Anything went, we weren’t precious about it. We pushed each other without trying—I went after melodies and lyrics in unusual ways, and John was coming up with amazing pieces and fleshing out wonderful production ideas. I didn’t care about singing perfectly, and he didn’t care about pristine production. On Steady On, you’d have thought we were curing cancer. I guess we had both grown up a little—after all, it wasn’t rocket science. It was fun.
The writing was magically easy. He had a piece that I called “Get Out of This House,” a rocker, and I basically just threw words at it. I adopted a pissed-off attitude and improvised on tape, filling in lines on paper as I went. I wanted to sound like I didn’t care about the singing, only the attitude. This was new.
John suggested we try to write something similar to a Crowded House song that I played live, called “Private Universe.” When in doubt, steal, we always say, and steal from the best. As we messed around with chord changes, I was looking through my notebook and had the idea to take lyrics I’d written in 1993 with Tom Littlefield (who wrote “Window to the World” on Cover Girl) and insert them into the song. I tried them with this new melody, new chord changes, and a different time signature. After a few weeks, it all came together, and we had “Trouble.” That’s what I call our mash-up method.
I used my speaking-in-tongues technique on “You and the Mona Lisa.” I took John’s music and sang nonsense syllables, and the phrase “you and the Mona Lisa” came out of my mouth. I had no idea what it meant at that point, but I just decided to follow the words. At the beginning of the song, I sang “Hoist a pint, to the lads” for a good long time before I finally found the right words—“nothing in particular.” In fact, I sang the whole song as a drunk British sailor for a bit, but in the end it wasn’t what we were after. Thankfully. Words can let you know what the song is about before you even consciously realize it.
The lyrics turned out to be based on my little niece Grace. These days when I play the song, I’ll give the audience an update on Grace, who at this writing is fifteen and recently shaved her head.
“Wichita Skyline” was a total combo of stealing, speaking in tongues, mashing, and cheating. The music John wrote had a low, twangy guitar break, an obvious ode to “Wichita Lineman,” one of the best songs in the whole world. And I knew I wanted the lyrical imagery to evoke the Great Plains of South Dakota, where I grew up. I thought, what would Bob Dylan do? And suddenly I thought of Nashville Skyline. So I had my title, “Wichita Skyline,” although I meant to change it to be more specific to South Dakota. The word “Wichita” sings so nicely, though, and honestly, the only other town name I could come up with that scanned as well as “Wichita” was “Tokyo,” and that obviously wouldn’t do. I cheated by getting out a map and borrowing the towns of Independence, Missouri, and Salina, Kansas, which I pronounce incorrectly in the song, but there was a good reason! A storm blows in on the last verse, and the singer looks up at the sky to find “a patch of blue.” There was a movie called A Patch of Blue with Sydney Poitier and Shelley Winters—a wretchedly heartbreaking movie; I loved it—with a character named Selina, played by Elizabeth Hartman, an abused blind girl in the South who falls in love with Sydney Poitier. I stupidly borrowed her name to represent the town of Salina, which is actually pronounced “sal-EYE-na,” only I say “sa-LEE-na.”
I’d written the lyrics to “The Facts About Jimmy.” John just threw a guitar piece at me later. It was a mash-up. “I Want It Back” was something I started on a National steel guitar in G tuning. It was a slight steal from “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire” guitarwise and took its inspiration lyrically from how lost I felt, alone in that Scenic Drive house, trying to write but reading People magazine instead and balking at celebrity worship.
“If I Were Brave” started on an airplane ride to New Orleans for a gig at Tipitina’s. It was one of those great instances where I kind of heard the chord progression and the melody in my head before I even had a chance to put it down, and I knew as well that it would be on piano. Very simple piano, which is all I’m capable of. It was one of those gifts where the essence of the song, at least musically, was apparent to me. “If I Were Brave” was about my failed marriage to Simon and all the questions I was asking myself about what I could have done to make it work, including having a child. I wrote most of it on that plane ride.
The album closer, “Nothin’ on Me,” was the one song that survived out of all the things John and I had written back in the horn-rimmed-pop days. It ended up on the record partially because of the record company’s hope that it could become a hit. I was glad to do the song; it was fun, it had swagger, I enjoyed the lyrics, but it did not become a hit. It did, however, become the opening theme song for the TV sitcom Suddenly Susan, starring Brooke Shields, that ran in the late nineties.
“Sunny Came Home” didn’t start as the story of a tortured housewife’s revenge. John had given me a fully produced piece of music to write melody and lyrics to. Originally I called it “40 Red Men,” a clever way, I thought, to talk about my loathsome daily habit of smoking two packs of red-box Marlboro cigarettes. Needless to say, the words “forty red men” didn’t sing very well, and, as my A&R man said, “I don’t think anyone is going to care about forty red men. Besides, it sounds like you’re referring to Native Americans, and then you’ll be in a world of shit.”
So at the last minute I had to back up and rewrite the song to complete the record. I had already chosen the cover art, a painting by my friend Julie Speed. Her subjects were often women on the verge. I could relate. For example, there was a portrait of a rather sweet, peaceful woman with little flames on top of her head, like a crown, and the title was Please Help Me, My Brain Is Burning. I chose for the cover a classic Julie-scape with a woman in the foreground of a vast, flat prairie, holding a lit match. Wasn’t that me, really, a girl setting the prairie on fire? Far, far in the distance, on the horizon, there was a very large fire. Although the title, A Few Small Repairs, belonged to an entirely different piece, a collage of a woman sewn and safety-pinned together, Julie was all for mixing and matching titles, and when we applied A Few Small Repairs to the fiery landscape painting, the effect was, to us, a riot. Whatever repairs that woman was making were neither few nor small.
In an actual moment of marketing wisdom, of which I generally possess very little, I decided to finish that last song by making it about the woman in the painting. I called her Sunny, wove in the line “it’s time for a few small repairs,” and the record was done. I called it—what else?—A Few Small Repairs.
The timing couldn’t have been better. It was 1996, and Lilith Fair was about to take off. Columbia decided it was time to really pull the trigger on me and threw all their weight into the marketing of A Few Small Repairs. First they released “Get Out of This House” as a single, and it achieved modest success. Then they released “Sunny.” I don’t remember what radio station played it first, or even how far up the charts
it went. I’d already made and promoted three records without any singles catching on, and I really wasn’t paying attention. I do remember the head of radio at Columbia, Charlie Walk, calling once as the song gained more and more airplay and crowing, “Sunny’s comin’ home, baby!” I just laughed. But then things started to happen that made me aware that something exciting was going on with “Sunny Came Home.”
Larry and Steuart and I were touring with Lilith during the summer of 1997 when “Sunny” was released. Our slot was in the late afternoon, and while we were certainly featuring songs from A Few Small Repairs, we weren’t being dogged about it. We’d play “Sunny” somewhere in the middle of the set. But after a few weeks, we noticed that whenever we played that particular song, we were seeing the quintessence of a true rock-and-roll audience in top form, with lighters ablaze and arms waving. And right at the end of the song, during the instrumental outro, the roar would start. I’d seen enough concerts to know I had to make the song the last one in the set and milk that response for all it was worth. As we took our bow one evening, Steuart, a purist who eschewed any form of idolatry, turned to me while we were upside down and said, “I like this.” Yes. I’d made a video for “Sunny Came Home” as well, and in the food court of a mall in Indianapolis, a high-school basketball player looked at me and said to his friends, “Hey, there’s Sunny!” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call fame. I think the song made it to number one, but I knew it was big when the audiences at Lilith Fair waved their lighters, and because of that kid in Indy.
Receiving my gold record, 1996
And I did my own tour with a band including Steuart, Doug Petty on keyboards, Alison Prestwood on bass, Kate Markowitz on vocals, and Chris Searles on drums. Then the Grammy nominations were announced. Yes, “Sunny” had been a hit, but I was floored—John and I were up for two of the biggest awards, Record of the Year and Song of the Year.