Diamond in the Rough (13 page)

That decision brought about a turning point eventually. I had been taking stock in this year that I took off. What am I good at? What do I like? How do I want to spend my life? What do I want? I was at an AA meeting at the Church of the Ascension, an Episcopal church on Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, when I heard a song that I recognized and liked, and I had the distinct revelation that I missed performing. I didn’t want to go back to the potpourri, scattershot career I had, but I also knew that I didn’t want to move on in my life without having ever tried to find out what kind of artist I really was.

It came to me pretty quickly. I was a solo performer, and part of the epiphany was that I was good by myself; it was the truest form of my talent. That was clear to me, but it was a challenge, because what I was gearing myself up to do was write, and write confessionally, because that’s what I loved and had cut my teeth on. It was time to get personal. I could feel it. I knew what the direction had to be.

I had grown up on solo singer-songwriters who played acoustic guitars. I could entertain a roomful of people by myself, and my guitar playing was unique. I was comfortable this way, much more comfortable than fronting a band no matter how much I loved pop and rock and soul. It was that pesky songwriter part that still had me tripped up. But wait. There was one thing. A song I wrote in my head when I’d first moved to New York. I’d written it on the D train to the Bronx one day on my way to a Buddy Miller rehearsal at Lincoln’s. I’d been lonely and bereft, and I’d imagined myself singing to a baby—of course the baby was me. I wrote four verses, chords, and a melody, all in my head, and never much thought about it afterward. Because I was not a writer, not then. Now, though, I considered playing it. It was called “I Don’t Know Why.”

The next challenge was taking this new identity and making it work with John. I don’t believe he was aware of what I was trying to do—at any rate, he gave me a new piece of music, fully produced, that had a rhythm-and-blues feel to it, kind of like “Gimme Some Lovin’.” It had a simple bluesy chord progression, and I had the idea of trying to morph it into a Richard Thompson song by lowering the E strings down to D to make it drone. Richard had become my reason for living. I changed the beat and turned it into a march instead of a swagger. So I had successfully transposed a Leventhal production piece into a solo acoustic piece, a first. Now lyrics.

The first words that came out of my mouth were, “As a little girl, I came down to the water with a little stone in my hand....” Oh, God! What is THAT? A little girl and a little stone, how twee! Donald Fagen would never sing that line. I called John immediately and played it for him, expecting the worst. He said, “You’ve got something, keep going.” That was a crucial moment, because if he’d said he didn’t get it, I probably wouldn’t have finished the song.

I realized I was writing about getting sober, about coming alive, about claiming myself and uncovering these gifts that had been obscured by both external and internal forces, about this veil of confusion and dysfunction and addiction being peeled away, bit by bit. Before that I didn’t have a message. The song was “Diamond in the Rough,” and Shawn Colvin, the singer-songwriter, had found her voice. It was a very pointed incident, this transformation into becoming a songwriter. There was a lot of water under the bridge leading up to it, but it was certainly a very specific point in time, an epiphany for sure, when a line was crossed, and I got it.

I got it!

Lyrics from my notebook for “Diamond in the Rough”

11

A Mission

Various gigs, various years

Truth to tell and time to burn, I hit the wall at every turn.

The ceiling cracked in half and I just flew.

Poetry was what I heard, I was hanging on to every word.

I was a lover for the world to woo.

I had a formula for writing songs, and it was nothing profound. It was so simple, even though the actual writing often is not. It really came down to trust. I remember writing affirmations back then:
“I, Shawn Colvin, know everything I need to know to write. I, Shawn Colvin, am a songwriter. I, Shawn Colvin, have something worthwhile to say.”
We were all into affirmations at the time. My friend Kate Markowitz, who sings with James Taylor, was instructed by her therapist to make a list of ten things she liked about herself. Kate went to Starbucks, stared at the paper, wrote down three things, began to daydream, got a latte, and left without remembering to take the list with her. I dated a guy for a minute, an actor, who called me one afternoon and said, “I was late to rehearsal! I was doing affirmations in the mirror, and I started to like myself so much I lost track of time!” He wanted to be a songwriter, too, and had given me a tape of something he’d written that I thought was not good. I called Stokes and asked, “What am I going to do?” He suggested that I simply pick out the parts that were okay and say something about those bits, ignore the rest. When I told Stokes that this fellow had rhymed “apocalypse” with “Picasso lips,” there was a brief pause. Then: “What are you going to do?”

Once I’d written “Diamond in the Rough,” I had parameters: Don’t think, sing. Be personal, tell the truth. Remember that guitar parts are as important as the words and melody. The next song John gave me didn’t need any tweaking or transposing. It was a minor-key, finger-picked folk song with a wonderful melody already written by John. Again I tuned the low E string down to D, so when the verses and choruses hit the major fifth, a D chord, the bass would ring out. I needed a way in lyrically. I’d wanted to use the word “avalanche” in a song, I thought it was a good word. Again, like with “Diamond,” I kind of cleared my head, played the guitar, and let something come out of my mouth. This time it was “I’m riding shotgun down the avalanche.” It felt good, and the meaning seemed pretty obvious to me: My romance with John was going
down.
It was a song of heartbreak, that much was clear. If I were falling down an avalanche, then there would have to be mountains and snow and a great area of empty space, a void. But the singer is a passenger, and the person at the wheel has sealed her fate, left her nowhere else to go but into the abyss. So I had something close to my heart, I had an interesting metaphor to anchor me, and I had a visual. From there I tinkered with it and filled in the blanks. It might seem strange to have co-written a song with someone about breaking up with that someone, but for some reason it didn’t bother me. It was cathartic, and anyway, John knew how I felt. The intent of the song wasn’t reconciliation; it was simply a statement, one that felt right.

I’m of the belief that a song isn’t really a song until you’ve tried it out on an audience, any kind of audience, not so much because you want approval—although that’s definitely a plus—but because, for me at least, the act of performing a new song in front of people is the ultimate bullshit detector. If there’s a lyric I’m uneasy about, I can sense pretty quickly if it’s something that’s going to work. Or not. I don’t mind being uncomfortable, but lines that are just filler or, worse, dishonest, have to be dealt with harshly. Now I was writing, but who was listening?

Along with redefining myself artistically, I had to rethink my venues. It’d been fine to cut my teeth for years at the Other End and Kenny’s Castaways on Bleecker Street and the Cottonwood Café on Bank Street, where I could make a few bucks, get some dinner, and see friends. They were all great hangs. There might be an audience present, and there might not be—if I did have a crowd, they might listen, but they might not. I used the times when they weren’t there or weren’t paying attention to mess around with strange covers or even little pieces of songs I tried to write, and this phase of my career shaped me as much as anything, but it was time to move on.

There was another place called the Speakeasy over on MacDougal. It was still a joint, but with a higher calling—the Speakeasy wanted to hire songwriters, and its patrons, for the most part, wanted to hear them. In fact, the club was spawned by a group called the Songwriters Exchange that met weekly at an apartment belonging to Jack Hardy. I wasn’t part of the group, but I knew of some of its members: David Massengill, Cliff Eberhardt, Richard Meyer, Christine Lavin, Rod MacDonald, John Gorka, Tom Intondi, Frank Christian, and, probably most notably, Suzanne Vega. I’d also met Lucy Kaplansky, who, like me, didn’t write much at that time but was keen to interpret the songs of some of those other writers and did so without peer. We were individual performers, but some of my fondest memories are singing “Ring of Fire” or “The Return of the Grievous Angel” with Lucy at the Cottonwood, or of huddling with her and John Gorka in a back room at the Speakeasy, working on harmony parts to his songs.

This community of writers also put together an organization called Fast Folk, a monthly “musical magazine,” which was actually a vinyl recording, showcasing the fruits of their labors. In addition, somebody somewhere, I don’t know who, had the idea of putting on a Fast Folk concert, a revue consisting of several different performers who’d been featured on the albums. Remember that song, the one I wrote in my head on the subway? Fast Folk chose that song, “I Don’t Know Why,” to be recorded for their magazine and invited me to sing it at their concert. This was huge, I can’t tell you how much so, as the show was to be at the famous Bottom Line, a true listening room, a concert venue. And I was getting to sing a song I wrote. The show also played in Boston, and the visit there turned out to be enormously important for me. At the after-show party, I was introduced to Bob Donlin.

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.