Shawn Colvin

Some words from Shawn Colvin

On learning the guitar....

My father bought my brother a guitar that had a full body but a very thin neck and only four strings, which would be the high four strings of a regular six-string guitar. It was made by Harmony and he bought that for my brother and taught him to play 'Sweet Georgia Brown' on it, and some other things, and my brother dutifuly learned what my father taught him, but he went on to play the violin, classical stuff, that's what he was .. he's still interested in that, my big brother, and the bagpipes - he eventually played those, so he's kindof a strange one, and I took over the guitar. Probably nine years old, somewhere around there, and it was a great guitar for me to learn on because that neck was so thin. So my dad taught me some pretty basic stuff - 'This Land is Your Land' and things like that. So at nine or ten I started to play the guitar. Singing I did before that, we had a ... my best friends father was the organist at the church and .. so they were a very musical family and there was a junior choir so there were ten or so of us kids that had choir practice a couple of times a week and went an sang ... and when the Beatles hit we were crazy about the Beatles, and you listened to that stuff constantly and sang it.

You know it was all a big fantasy I guess I probably had a little inherent talent, you know. We were a musical family - my parents can sing and I could carry a tune. I understood music pretty well. Once I'd learned some basics of the guitar I could change keys pretty easily because I understood the relativity of the one chord and the four chord and the five chord and I could pick things out by ear. So, I was good at it and I think when you cross over into thinking you could actually ... I don't think I made an adult decision until I was in my thirties about the fact that I was actually making a career out of music. It was just something I really enjoyed and then of course it coincided in the late sixties/early seventies when I was reaching puberty and it was important to be cool. There was this huge folk/rock boom with Crosby, Stills and Nash and Neil Young and Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell and James Taylor and here I was I could play the acoustic guitar. So I was cool, in my own way I had a niche for coolness. and I dutifully tried to write songs that were very bad. I wasn't a person at fourteen or fifteen that wrote anything significant. By the time I was maybe twenty or twenty one I wrote some things that I eventually went back to and actually found something worthy in them, but I wrote really bad songs when I was a teenager. It was all a big fantasy. I drew my first record cover when I was that age. I thought I was going to do it but I didn't really know.

I sort of quit doing it as a child and came back to it as an adult and that made a lot of things more possible. I was very serious about the writing and I was very serious about understanding the what business aspect was. I wasn't rebelling against that any more I was ready to play that game, if you will, which involved going and doing opening, support slots for people for no money, for zero money, it cost me money. But that was the road to getting a following and I just hadn't been willing to do that before - I just said give me my money and I don't care where I am or what I have to sing. And I had written these songs, I had a little, tiny arsenal of songs that I thought were really mine and were good. So that was sort of the beginning of what I think my career is now.

I knew something was wrong. I think everybody who has a story of addiction and recovery - their stories are very much the same on some level and their stories can be very different. I never thought the drinking was AOK, ever. I knew there was something wrong with feeling sick constantly. Waking up feeling sick. I knew that was not the way one had to live. I didn't start drinking until I was in my twenties, so I'd had a number of years where I had enjoyed myself as a semi-adult and not been sick all the time, or inebriated. I knew there was something wrong. I felt guilty about it from day one. But the drinking in effect was an escape - it was all tied up with depression and anxiety - it was just this big mess which I've come to think really had more to do with being a person having a depressive/anxiety disorder who was trying to make myself feel better - and the drinking did it. So I knew somewhere deep inside that it was going to have to go. It was either going to kill me or I was going to have to deal with it. It reached a point when I was miserable enough about it that nothing else mattered and I began to deal with it seriously, with every ounce of my being and with no other goal in mind than to sober up. So for me, I know there are plenty of people who make careers for themselves and still wrestle with addiction, in and out of addiction and can still manage careers. I don't know why it worked out the way it did for me. I just couldn't make that step 'til I sobered up. I guess the chance always existed that I wouldn't sober up and nothing would ever have happened, but I had enough pride and that made me mad so I think that helped.

You gotta go through turmoil and discomfort to learn to go through the passages I think that you have to go through. This doesn't go for everybody. It doesn't meant that everybody necessarily has to suffer from an addiction but there's no easy way around the changes we have to go through to grow up. So that was just my path and I think a lot of artists write about similar things and I just happened to go through mine the way I did. So it was what I had, it was my knowledge, and when I started writing songs it was very clear to me that nothing to offer except what I personally knew. I did't really want to tell another story or make up stories, I wasn't good at that. I felt I had something to offer and that I had something to express, something that was valuable and I had a way to say it that was valuable. Which was important because then I was kinda past the point of caring what other people thought. So I think it's important.

That was something, that was really something. The Grammys felt like someone was patting us on the back and saying 'we know you've been around and we're glad', and that was great. And then the day before that we'd found out... we'd gotten this amniosintesis you because I'm 42 years old and pregnant and we'd found out that the baby was OK and it was a girl which is what we were hoping to have. So this whole week period of the Grammy awards and that was just an incredible time.

I knew that on some level I was kind of bored, which is a terrible reason for having a kid and I don't mean to put it that way, but the growth in me was kind of stifled and I didn't really know what to do to kick start it again. I felt that something was lacking and I was ready to do more or be challenged more, and there's a number of ways to do that, I'm not insinuating that you need to have a baby. But for me that was the thing to do and I knew it. It shatters you. It shatters your comfortable little world and I think this happens to all of us in big or small ways through your whole life.., and this is a big one, this is a rip-you-open one, and I don't mean that literally - my birth wasn't that bad. I don't see how that will come through in the mix, the stuff that I write, I'm a bit shaken up, there's no question.

It's real interesting when you realise you've crossed the line from being though of being an MTV possibility to only VH1. This recording career of mine has gone on ten years now and at the beginning I guess I was an MTV possibility, but after ten years that doesn't seem like it's the case any more. And that's frustrating - all I did was just sit here and make music, I can't help it that I got older - it's the same me and the same music.I mean like 'Sunny Came Home' they wouldn't play that v ideo on MTV. That's frustrating - how do you have a top five hit on top forty radio and MTV will play a song that's similar - the Jewel song and any number of things that are soft rock. The age thing is a reality and doors close.