From This Moment On (47 page)

While I acknowledge this is all something to be proud of, breaking records is not why I got into music. This is an art form, not a sport like hockey, where someone’s always gunning, say, for Wayne Gretzky’s record for most goals in a single season. As much as I love performing and singing to large audiences, the biggest thrill for me is as a songwriter. Those outrageous numbers containing all those zeros sprang from a simple song composed on an acoustic guitar. It didn’t even have words or a title at first.

To this day, how a song is written remains a mysterious, elusive process, which is part of what makes it so rewarding. Every writer has individual approaches, reasons, inspirations behind each one. Songs are like fingerprints, they are one-of-a-kind creations. What the songs mean to the listener is also extremely unique to each one. One mother told me that her favorite song was “From This Moment On” because it was the song she played while giving birth to her son. Another mother wrote to tell me that my music will live forever for her, as it was the music requested by her child to play during his funeral,
so it would bring cheer to those around him rather than sorrow. Although not my thinking when I wrote the song, I believe like any song, it belongs to whoever claims it, and its purpose becomes whatever it means to that individual.

Okay. Now you finish the song, polish it, and record it to the best of your ability. Eventually you have a whole litter of songs, and you send them out into the world, never really knowing what effect they will have. They excite
you
and are fraught with meaning for
you,
but will anybody else hear it? When you receive validation that the feelings you put into words connected in some way with other human beings around the world … whoa! It doesn’t always have to be that profound, either. For every couple who has adopted “From This Moment On” as “their” song, there’s someone who likes “Rock This Country” just because it’s fun and catchy. Other listeners couldn’t even tell you why they like a particular song. They just know it moves them when it comes on the radio. That’s enough.

At the end of the Come On Over tour, Bo Derek invited me to go along on a weeklong horse trip to Spain and Portugal with her and a few of her girlfriends: actresses Daryl Hannah and Tatjana Patitz; Diandra Douglas, Michael Douglas’s wife at the time; and Shekar, a Turkish princess. It was quite a crowd, and although I didn’t feel I fit in with the likes of all these regal beauties, I went along to admire my favorites of all God’s creatures as a present to myself after a good three years of dedicated work on
Come On Over
. All the radio and television promotions of every single; video productions; endless hours of editing; photo shoots; interviews; songwriting; recording; and right to the end of the tour, I felt I deserved it. Spain and Portugal pride themselves on their magnificent horses, and we’d be visiting the most noted breeders in the region. Maybe, I thought, I would find a new Andalusian.

Despite all the stunning horses I saw and rode on the trip, my heart wasn’t in it. To me, no other horse could live up to my Dancer. I just wasn’t ready for a new one yet.

While in Portugal, we watched a game of horseball, which is like
a cross between polo, rugby, and basketball. It’s played on horseback, naturally, by two teams of four. The object is to score a goal by hurling a ball into the opposing team’s hoop-shaped net. Sounds tame enough, except that we have not gotten to the rugby element yet.

As a team gallops across the field toward the goal, its players must pass the ball back and forth. The ball, about the size of a soccer ball, has a leather, ropelike netting around it for handling easily with the fingers. It was explained to me that originally, this game was played with a human head, and the hair was what one grabbed on to with the fingers. The defending team tries to prevent their opponents from scoring, either by blocking the shot, or wresting the ball out of another player’s hands, or using their horses to push rival players’ horses off course. There is more to it than that, but you get the basic idea. It’s fast, furious, and physical. The sport is said to have originated in Argentina during the eighteenth century and at one point had to be outlawed because too many participants died playing it.

Maybe it’s the hockey fan in me, but I found horseball thrilling to watch. At the end of the trip, when Bo and the other girls went back to their lives, I had an open week for a change and decided to stay on to learn how to play. It was the first time in a year and a half that I didn’t have a manager, an assistant, or security with me. To be in a foreign country, not speaking any Spanish, with total strangers, was really stepping out for me. And it turned out to be exactly what I needed in order to get back in touch with myself: do something spontaneous and completely unrelated to my professional life. I always enjoyed athletic challenges, and horseball was physically demanding enough to qualify for that.

Let me tell you, I had the time of my life. My body ached from the physical strain inflicted upon it; every morning, I woke up so stiff that I was ready to limp to the telephone and cancel going to practice. But once I coaxed my legs into the shower, my determination flickered to life, and I was ready to rumble. By the end of the week, I was hooked. My fingers were taped for support, as they were strained and bruised, and my thumb was actually sprained, but
once I was warmed up the excitement and adrenaline of the game masked the pains. After the hardest working period of my career, beyond a success I could ever have imagined, and the loss of my beloved Dancer, I was going to enjoy spoiling myself by basking in the pleasure of doing something self-indulgent and rejuvenating. Even if it hurt a little.

And what a place. I’ll start with the house, the elegant Swiss, French-style château I started telling you about earlier. It was perched atop an imposing hill overlooking Lake Geneva and the French and Swiss Alps. A designated historical landmark, it had been an art school in recent years, and although the mansion and grounds were in decent shape, they required extensive work to convert this magnificent building back into a home. Practically every room had something that needed fixing, such as repairs to walls, doors, rewiring, and plumbing. All the sinks, showers, and toilets had to be replaced, too.

Plus, it needed a new kitchen. Make that
a
kitchen, period. It didn’t have one; it must have been removed instead of refurbished, as art schools needed classes, not kitchens, after all. I never knew where the original kitchen would have been, but I believe it was probably in the basement, as most noble families did not cook for themselves but rather had staff cook, who worked in a discreet area in the building. I decided that the kitchen needed to be at the heart of the house,
a central location where everyone could congregate together easily from anywhere in the home.

Having never had a permanent home of my own before, I enjoyed the novelty of building the nest where Mutt and I would live and love happily ever after. It was like a fairy tale. During the last several months of the tour, you would find me studying blueprints and floor plans, surrounded by decorating books and piles of fabric swatches. Thankfully, much of the structure’s original materials had been preserved, such as the detailed parquet flooring throughout, and the various stone and marble staircases, pillars, and fireplaces. Handsome French oak panels made from trees no longer in existence lined the high-ceilinged living room, and the whole house still had its original door and window frames, also made of oak with the original brass handles.

After visiting Versailles and learning to appreciate the different periods of architecture and design during my international travel, just out of interest’s sake I started to take more detailed note of the materials, lighting fixtures, fabrics, colors, and shapes. I was especially drawn to the Renaissance period when Versailles was built. I wanted to put our own imprint on the centuries-old château—make it cozy and homey—yet keep the decor in its original period style. My feeling was, you just don’t tamper with an architectural jewel such as this. We chose mostly classic French fabrics in the style of the 1700s and 1800s, which went back to the days when Marie Antoinette still had her head. The carved wood frames evoked a palace tearoom setting, only with furniture in larger scale and more comfortable and lofty than the originals. I’d ordered brass fireplace screens custom designed from the original molds of Versailles, while the floors were graced with Renaissance-style Savonnerie and Aubusson rugs, some of which were antiques in their own right but from the period. Crystal chandeliers, antique alabaster and ceramic lamps, and several antique bronze sculptures completed the look. It was all very palatial, lush, and fit for a princess. I learned as I went, leafing through
Renaissance and Baroque design books and browsing European antiques markets to try to do justice to the already beautiful palate of the naked house. Given my humble beginnings, at times I did feel a bit like Cinderella at the ball. Am I really going to live here?

My favorite rooms were the kitchen and the bedroom that would become my son’s room. The stove, a radiant-heat Aga made of cast iron, was a stunning piece of art in itself, finished in French vanilla enamel, with brass and black fittings. Without my having to go on tour anytime soon, it would receive quite a workout.

Mutt, meanwhile, being the passionate landscape designer that he was, completely transformed the garden. We had several hundred different varieties of roses everywhere; they poured out of the flower beds to cling to the trellised walls and the balconies that offered a panoramic view over the lake and mountains. You’ve never seen a more dramatic landscape: steep, snowcapped mountains plunging down to meet the lake, which is fed by the alpine glaciers, making it crystal clear.

Throughout the plateaus and valleys in the region lay farm country. Swiss farms are like no other farms. They are neat and tidy, like the farms depicted in children’s books: wood chalet-style barns and houses with roofs made from cedar shake or stone-tiled roofs. The windows have colorful, blooming window boxes, bursting with buds that cascade over the edges like floral fountains. Every windowpane has delicate and intricate hand-crocheted curtains gracing it and water troughs overflowing with gushing glacier-fed streams. All buildings are perfect, compact, and so well maintained. Smurfville comes to mind for me. It’s like a million Smurfs must live in these handsome hamlets to keep everything so perfect and pristine. It’s as though your eyes are looking through high-definition lenses exaggerating this already splendid view. Or like someone pushed the “enhance” option key on the Photoshop program of the computer. I want to eat these sweet little farm clusters up every time I see one, each of them posing like a model for its postcard opportunity.

The first time I took in this pastoral view, I thought happily,
I’m in love with this. I want to live here, love here, snuggle sheep here, and eat chocolate.
(And I don’t even
love
chocolate, but Swiss chocolate is exceptionally good.) Tim, Mutt, and I took to hiking the hills. One time, as Tim bent down to drink from one of the mountain water troughs that zigzag the terrain, his tail grazed an electric fence belonging to a livestock farm.
Zap!
Suddenly I heard my poor dog yelping in pain. Those fences are pumped with enough voltage to discourage thousand-pound cattle from escaping, so Tim was pretty lucky that he didn’t get seriously hurt.

Other than that, the lake region was the perfect place to be after leaving the road and the craziness of the entertainment world. For one thing, almost no one even knew who I was. I mean, they may have been familiar with the music of
Come On Over—
as it sold something like seven million copies in Europe
—
but I, the artist, wasn’t considered a big deal in Switzerland. That by itself brought a kind of freedom I hadn’t experienced in years. It’s not that I mind being recognized in public; I mean, if you’ve sold millions and millions of records and suddenly nobody stops you on the street, you might want to call your manager to inquire about the health of your career, but it’s heartening to be reminded that sometimes when strangers approach you, it’s not because you’re famous, but rather that they just want to be friendly. (In some cases, they just wanted directions and figured that I must be a local!) Let’s face it, celebrity or not, sincerity can be frustratingly hard to find and is something to be valued.

Living away from the magnifying glass of fame had a healthy effect on me. I slowly began to shed the protective shell that I’d built up over the last few years and even began making eye contact with strangers again. To be able to wander the streets just like everybody else was a revelation to me. Every once in a while someone, usually a tourist, would recognize me and ask for an autograph or a picture. It had become so unexpected that it actually caught me off guard. And you know what? Now it came as a pleasant surprise, like a child finding a piece of candy that she’d left in her pocket and forgot about.

At first, I felt very much out of my element in my new country, where I didn’t yet speak the language. The only friend I had at first was an Italian-French woman, five years younger than me, named Marie-Anne, who’d been serving as Mutt’s secretary and interpreter while we were renovating, because none of the workers spoke English. She’d spent most of her life in the area, and so I had to rely on her to an uncomfortable degree, including when it came to learning how to operate the parking meters.