Diamond in the Rough

by Shawn Colvin

  I had to admit there had been instances of blatant flirtation by John that had made my heart skip a beat, like the time at a Chinese restaurant where he flatly fixed his gaze on me, reached out with his hand, scooped up some of my chow mein, and wordlessly stuffed his face with it. At the movies once, he took a piece of popcorn and stuck it up his nose, again turning to me with the driest, most sober look. Not to be outdone this time, I stuck a piece of popcorn in my nose, at which point he swiftly leaned over, plucked it out with his mouth, and ate it. Touché. Clearly there were sparks between us; anyone could see that. But the Roving Dreamboat was due back from Europe the very day John offered me a bed. I had to hold out for Mr. Doe Eyes.

  Well, the Casanova Shakespeare arrived at my apartment basically to crash. It didn’t feel like much of a reunion, and I began to sense I’d been had, so as he slept, I went through his bag, where I found lots of letters to and from lots and lots of women. I called John and told him. He said, “Well, you were a fool.” Hanging my head in shame, I presented myself to John on a platter, and we hooked up. It was the summer of 1982. I was twenty-six years old.

  Me and John, 1982

  Poor John. He fell for me at a time when I just did not know myself. I was still drinking and had no concept of being the slightest bit of an adult in a relationship. I was surviving. John had focus and confidence, enough to carry me along for a while before all my insecurity started to wear us down, but that was pretty much immediately. He took me to the movie Brazil the first week we were together, and I found it so disorienting that I cried through it. Much worse than that, though, was that I blamed him for it! It reminds me of something I think Roger Vadim said about being married to Brigitte Bardot—that she got mad at him in the morning for being rude to her in her dreams the night before. Perhaps I could’ve pulled this off had I been Brigitte Bardot. John was smart and funny and brilliantly creative, and he loved me and didn’t know what to do with me. Almost everything we did together was fraught with some angst from me, from the way he said good-bye on the phone to the way he held my hand to the simple fact that maybe the sky was gray one day. Things were never right; I was not right. Fairly early on in our relationship, I quit drinking, so I was on the proper path, but I had so far to go. We were together off and on for about six years and eventually fizzled out.

  Regardless of whatever personal drama was unfolding between us in those days, one thing John and I could always count on was sparking each other creatively, and certainly this is part of how and why we stayed together. We got together regularly and worked on songs. I loved the music John wrote. I would hear words and melodies immediately. It was his confidence and talent and passion that kept me going. I could be furious at him for being insensitive and arrogant, and he would sit down and play “God Only Knows” and I was a goner. I should’ve seen the writing on the wall when he moved to East Twelfth Street and wouldn’t let me have anything to do with picking out his sheets. I broke up with him, and he broke up with me, and so it went until finally, at his behest, it stuck. But months after that, after making our first record and after I moved to the West Village, he came over to my new place for the first time, looked around, and began to cry. I knew why. “I grew up, didn’t I?” I said. We knew that our time had passed.

  We worked literally for years on the type of pop music I mentioned before, but I knew something was missing. I was still doing gigs in folk rooms and rock clubs and country dives, and if I listed every musical genre I dabbled in for the next couple of years, we’d be here all day. Suffice it to say that the notion of becoming a rockabilly chick with a ponytail and poodle skirts thankfully blew over.

  Me and Maria Muldaur as Dinettes,

  Pump Boys and Dinettes, Detroit, 1982

  I even made a quick sojourn to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1996 and joined a band called the Red Clay Ramblers. I first became aware of them in 1985 when I saw A Lie of the Mind, a play by Sam Shepard, in New York. The Ramblers performed live during the play—it wasn’t a musical; this was a live sound track—and it was stunning. There was Jack Herrick, Tommy Thompson, Clay Buckner, Bland Simpson, and me. I loved being in the Ramblers. They could do anything. Our sets consisted of all manner of styles, from original stuff to Irish jigs to bluegrass to old gospel songs, complete with five singing parts. We frequented the Carolinas and played the folk festivals along the eastern seaboard and in Canada. We all starred in a musical in Cleveland called Diamond Studs, based on the life of Jesse James, in which I played Zee James, Jesse’s wife. Jim Lauderdale, a singer-songwriter I’d met in New York, was Jesse, and the Ramblers were his band of outlaws. (Yes, I was trying musical theater, too.) Being in the Ramblers was terrific, but it still wasn’t what I was after.

  The Red Clay Ramblers, 1986

  Diamond Studs, with the Red Clay Ramblers, 1986

  So there came a point in my sobriety where I just threw up my hands. I was tired of trying to figure it all out, and thanks to the sober friends I’d made, I didn’t see my identity solely as a musician anymore. You go through changes when you quit using, when you quit engaging in the insanity of addiction. Eventually everything kind of comes into question. I mean, you’re making this huge choice every day not to do this thing that you were addicted to doing, and that’s a powerful experience. I was able to ask myself, Well, what else am I able to make choices about? I was stalling with music—I didn’t really have any other skills and didn’t know how else to make a living, but I wasn’t happy showing up to my gigs and playing anymore. I hadn’t come to any great revelation about who I was as an artist; I was still a very good copycat and not much else. It seemed pointless and empty to me, and I realized, for the first time in my life, that this doesn’t have to be it. I didn’t have to sing.

  The friend who helped me the most was a beautiful, raven-haired, ivory-skinned, blue-blooded New Englander by the name of Kim. Kim was sober, too, had been for three years, which seemed like an eternity to me. I was extremely impressed; I wanted what she had. Kim was probably the first person, besides Stokes, who I let in after I quit drinking. Once I’d stopped, all sorts of problems cropped up, mostly to do with my phobias and panic. Much harder to manage without alcohol. When that stuff hit, I was terrified to be alone and was driven to confide in someone. In fact, I remember the very night that I decided to call Kim and talk to her. I was desperate. And I realized she knew something about me that no one else did—she understood the nature of my anxieties and how they tortured me and ruled my life, because she had the same problems. She called them her “voices.” That was such a comfort, that someone else actually had a name for what I was trying to explain. The fact that Kim called our fears “voices” makes us sound a bit schizo, but that wasn’t the nature of them. The nature of phobia and panic disorder is to intrude constantly and especially during times of pleasure, like the proverbial devil on the shoulder, but instead of enticing us to behave badly our devils told us we couldn’t have fun or be happy, that something could or would go horribly wrong if we tried. These demons lived in our heads every minute; they were our dirty secrets. With Kim not only did I unburden myself of this dark shameful secret, I reveled in knowing I was not alone, which in my opinion is the most healing thing of all. I was not alone. Maybe I wasn’t crazy. Kim presented me with this possibility, and it changed my life.

  I got a job through Teddy Wainwright, Loudon’s sister, as an administrative assistant in a real-estate developer’s office and lived the life of a nine-to-fiver. I cut myself loose from all expectations. I still wrote with John and still did one solo gig a week at the Cottonwood Café, but that was all. I felt like I was family in that place. I was comfortable there. I think I got paid forty dollars a night. Oddly, it was the location of my last drink. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it was a homey place for me to go.

  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 wa
nt? 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, w
ho, 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.