by Shawn Colvin
The nominations represented to me a measure of success that was very special. There was never any question about wanting my mother and father to be part of it, and I flew them to New York for the show. They’d witnessed enough scenes with me that hadn’t gone so well. This was different, to say the least. Mom and I got our makeup and hair done in the hotel. And then we all drove to the ceremony in a white limo. The mood was upbeat and giddy. It was enough just to be going, win or lose. It really was. Nothing could have dampened our spirits.
At the Grammys, Radio City Music Hall, January 1998, John and I were backstage, having just performed “Sunny Came Home.” And then we heard our names being called: we’d won Song of the Year. We only made it a few steps onstage, though, when our moment of glory was hijacked. Ol’ Dirty Bastard from Wu-Tang Clan chose this particular moment to storm the stage and rant about not having won an award earlier that night. He was shaking his fists and yelling—about what, we had no idea, because we couldn’t understand a word, being behind him. The only thing I could decipher was, “Wu-Tang is for the children!” John’s and my disparate reactions to this event perfectly describe the difference in our general attitudes. I thought, Oh, God, what did I do wrong? whereas John was thinking, Boy, this guy really loves our stuff!
The next day I received the biggest bouquet of flowers from Ol’ Dirty Bastard with a note that read, “Sorry for messing up your night, Love, Ol’ Dirty Bastard.” That’s something not just anyone can lay claim to.
Other crazy things happened during the ceremony: A fellow with the words SOY BOMB written on his torso managed to get onstage while Bob Dylan was performing. We all thought he was promoting alternative energy until someone pointed out that perhaps he was trying to say, “I am the bomb,” in Spanish. And then a hydraulically lifted stage set piece began to rise from the floor as Vanessa Williams was walking out, nearly cutting her in half.
Later that evening there were all sorts of festivities, naturally, but what stands out in my mind is meeting Bob Dylan. I was led to a VIP room—I had come by it honestly that night—and there he was, sitting at a table between Cyndi Lauper and Diana Ross. We were introduced, and he took my hand, bent over, and meant to kiss it, I guess, but it really was more like he wiped his nose on it. I’ll never care, though. Put any kind of Dylan DNA on me, I’m good.
What I’ve always said about winning a Grammy Award is that there isn’t one bad thing about it. It looks great on the résumé and is super helpful in convincing your parents and your past teachers, especially fifth-grade English ones who once deemed your poetry “trite and sugary,” that you aren’t a lost cause after all. Did I think we would win? Given the competition—which included Hanson, R. Kelly, Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Diane Warren, and Gwen Stefani—I sure didn’t think we were a shoo-in. “Sunny Came Home” had done well but I was hardly a superstar. Still, ever since Bonnie Raitt swept the awards in 1990 for Nick of Time at age forty-one, it seemed as if anything was possible.
John and I won two Grammy Awards that night. One for Record of the Year. And Song of the Year—that’s for songwriting. Bonnie, it just got better. And I was carrying around a little something extra that night. Guess who’s coming to dinner? And breakfast and lunch? For the next eighteen years?
The big night, 1998
(Photograph courtesy of Lisa Arzt)
16
Hold on Tight
Me and Mario Erwin, baby daddy, 1996
(Photograph courtesy of Alex Erwin)
I believe I have pulled a major coup.
I believe I have boarded up the zoo.
I believe I have dropped the other shoe.
And there’s nothing like you.
In 1996, just as I finished A Few Small Repairs, I met Mario Erwin, a freelance photographer–turned–graphics salesman for a local Austin outfit. A mutual friend and her fiancé introduced us at the lake. Mario was going to take us all waterskiing. Although he hailed from Arkansas, he was of Italian descent and had lovely olive skin and big, bright, blue eyes. He was compact and sinewy, like my father, and his style was no-bullshit, wry, sarcastic. I hadn’t dated in about a year, and when I met Mario, I thought, Well, I could sleep with this guy. He called the next day and asked if we could go to dinner and did I want to go tomorrow or the following weekend? “The sooner the better,” I said. “We might as well find out if we like each other.”
We liked each other. In fact, Mario announced to me that same week that he liked everything about me—shouldn’t we be an item? It sounded good to me. I was lonesome. This might have been the right time for me to have played the field, but I’ll tell you, that concept eludes me. I don’t get it. Does that make me a serial monogamist? Or just a one-man woman? I even tried to suggest we not be exclusive right at first, sensing that my habit of diving headfirst into romances within minutes might be a problem. But Mario wouldn’t have it. I was flattered, I liked being wanted, and I was only too happy to be tied down. Mario had a boat. I had a dock. After a couple of dates, he put his boat in my dock—and yes, I get the symbolism.
My niece Grace was about a year old by then. I was in love with that child; I even felt partial ownership. And part of me felt lacking. I was the older sister, and Kay had taken the leap into motherhood first. Well, damn it, if she could do it, so could I.
I’d always had a difficult time picturing myself as a mother. I spent a great deal of my life resenting my folks for all their failings as I saw them. Part of me thought I could best them in the parent department, and part of me knew I had set impossibly high standards. I didn’t have pets because I traveled too much. I couldn’t keep a plant alive. I liked that I could spend an entire day if I wanted to just hiding from the world. Before I got sober at age twenty-seven, I was basically surviving. Afterward I began to be comfortable in my own skin. I could viscerally feel myself making up for lost time. I loved choosing what I would eat, loved that I had my own coffeepot, my own bed, my own apartment. I took myself to movies, things like that. Simple pleasures, more peace, fewer voices.
Fast-forward several years down the road. I’d had my fill of what eventually felt like a selfish lifestyle, and I remember thinking that if I were to have balance I was either going to have to have a child or devote myself to a cause. Something in me yearned to give. And meeting Mario and Grace almost simultaneously sent my biological clock into Oh. Ver. Drive. I’d made records, I’d traveled the world, I’d already been married once, and I was forty. It was now or never. When I got off tour at the end of the summer in 1996, Mario presented me with a back porch he had built himself onto the house on Scenic Drive, along with a diamond ring. We got married October 19, 1997, and by Thanksgiving I was pregnant.
Pregnant at Lilith Fair, June 1998
(Photograph courtesy of Lisa Arzt)
On the heels of A Few Small Repairs, the record company asked me to do a Christmas record. I couldn’t see my way clear to making sense of the idea until I remembered a book I’d been given when I was eight years old. It was called Lullabies and Night Songs. And while they weren’t Christmas songs, I thought I could probably blend those lullabies with lullaby-like Christmas songs, given that Christmas is about a baby being born and all. There was something in the way Alec Wilder voiced these songs for the piano. They reminded me of Aaron Copland. Beautiful and odd. It was summer, and I was eight and a half months pregnant when I recorded Holiday Songs and Lullabies. We made it in Austin with my keyboard player, Doug Petty, producing. Doug had owned the same book as a kid. The morning of July 24, 1998, I went into labor, and our daughter was born ten hours later, at 6:00 P.M., with “A Whiter Shade of Pale” playing in the background.
We took her home after only one night in the hospital—I was anxious to be a “real” mother. On A Few Small Repairs, I had a song called “If I Were Brave” where I asked, “Would I be saved, if I were brave and had a baby?” Well, yes and no. There is no rescue as I once imagined it, no secret answer, no one safe place. I think it’s the being brave that sa
ves us, maybe. Is it brave to have a baby? Oh, without a doubt.
When did I know that postpartum depression had set in? I was overwhelmed, teary, completely thrown by this stranger in my house who required my constant attention, up to and including latching itself onto part of my body for nourishment. Does anyone talk about this, really? It isn’t that I didn’t love her or couldn’t bond with her. I felt deep empathy and responsibility for her and cared with all my heart. But I was awfully scared and unfamiliar with everything that was asked of me as the mother of a newborn. Life as I knew it was over—it was that simple. There were no off hours or holidays with which to be completely selfish. As one of my sister’s friends said, “You’ll never sleep the same way again.” Nothing would ever be the same again. My body and even my face looked different. The sky, the trees, the very air I breathed seemed to change.
A month after the baby was born, which seemed like an eternity, I got to go out with my sister. It was my first outing since the birth. Neil Finn of Crowded House was in town. We tracked down Neil and his wife, Sharon, at a restaurant. I must’ve looked like a deer in the headlights, because Sharon took my hand and told me that Neil’s brother, Tim, had just become a father. “Oh, wonderful, how are they doing?” I asked with false gaiety. “They’re shattered,” she said, and I felt the utmost gratitude and relief. Someone told the truth. A newborn baby is a terrifying thing to own. It seems to me only those with the most superior emotional upbringings or those who are just blessed with the gift of nurturing can make the transition into parenthood easily.
Callie at two days old, July 26, 1998
(Photograph courtesy of Mario Erwin)
And the colic—oh, the colic. My sister came over one day early on and gave me the official diagnosis. The baby cried a lot. I could soothe her, but only if I balled her up in the sling, put my little finger in her mouth to suck on, and walked. And I don’t mean around the house. I had to go outside. It was August in Austin. I might as well still have been pregnant, given her proximity to my body. The sweat would pour down my face and mix with the tears as I racked up the miles in our neighborhood. She would stop crying, and I would trudge along like a soldier. She would have no part of a baby carriage or a stationary swing or a vibrating seat or a cradle. She wanted back in, basically, and I didn’t blame her. I wanted her back in, too. We weren’t ready for this. She didn’t nap for long stretches, and she ate like a horse. At least that’s one thing I knew I was doing right—she was getting fat. I was just staying fat. Deep down I wondered if I had made a mistake. I had buyer’s remorse again. I like loopholes and return clauses and escape hatches. She didn’t come with any of those. I had wanted her more than anything, but when she really became mine, I freaked out. I didn’t know how to live in service to anyone else. I had lived for myself up until then. I did what I wanted, got what I wanted. And I knew there was something fundamentally empty about the way I was living. When push came to shove, though, now that the deed was done, I was dubious. Mario had had kids before. He told me that he used to look at me before she was born, all glowing with pregnancy and promise, and think, She hasn’t got a clue. He was right.
I adjusted. What could I do? I became her mother. I named her Caledonia, because I wanted to call her Cal—after Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbird, after Cal in East of Eden, after the song “Caldonia.” She became Callie. I barely worked for her first year, and we got to know each other. She was mine, and I was not going to fuck it up. She breast-fed until she was two and a half, and the only thing that finally put an end to it was the day she held my nipple like a cigar between her back teeth à la Groucho Marx, looked up at me, grinned, and said, “There’s a hair on it.” I weaned her that day. Her first word was “Dada.” Mario took it upon himself to peer into her face and repeat, “Dadadadadadada,” ad nauseam, and it worked, by God.
Her daddy taught me how to burp her—I patted her gently while she fussed after a feeding, and he, having had two other children, grabbed her, threw her over his shoulder, and gave her back a few good whacks. She belched immediately and was happy as a clam. Her daddy fed her, changed her, bathed her, read to her, took her to the park, put her to bed. He gave her language she still uses: “I’m confuzzled,” she’ll say, or, when not quite up to snuff, “I’ve got dibucus of the blowhorn today.” When I ask her to pick up her stuff, she says, “Make me, punk.” That’s her dad.
He shops with her and tells her what colors he thinks suit her, and this means the world to her, coming as it does from “a boy.” “I’m in love with that little girl,” Mario told me when she was days old. She is my first and only, but Mario has been around that block. Callie can’t throw him like she can throw me. He’s quick to see the drama and laugh her through it. She calls him “Sir Talksalot.”
Mario just called me—I’m out of town working on this book. He wouldn’t have bothered me, he said, but something has come up. I’m stricken. Is she all right? Yes, but she now has a boyfriend. (She is twelve.) It’s the second day of their relationship, and there’s a problem. Some of the other girls have told her he’s a jerk, and she told him what they said. Now he won’t return her texts. “It’s the worst day of her life,” Mario says. “I thought you should know.” He says they sat and talked about it for a long time, that he told her it didn’t matter what other people said, that it was between the two of them. “But,” he told her, “I may not be the best person to talk to about this, because, after all, I am a boy. You should call your mother.” But she didn’t call me. She got herself a boyfriend, and drama ensued within two days (the fruit does not fall far from the tree), but she didn’t need to call me. She had her daddy.
Her first food was whipped cream. She walked at ten months; she never crawled. She laughed out loud in her sleep when she was less than two weeks old. They say it’s not possible for them to laugh at that age, but she did. When I asked someone about it, I was told, “She was chasing angels.” I believe it. She never slept through the night, ever. Not even to this day, I don’t think. She talks faster than she can think, and her chatter is punctuated by great, deep gasps in an effort to keep the flow going. It’s a sort of irritation to her to have to breathe if she’s speaking. When she was four, she announced to me while in the bath one day, “I am in love with my clitoris.” After I reprimanded her for farting loudly in a Chinese restaurant, she shot me down by glancing around and saying with a shrug, “It’s okay. They speak Chinese.” I can only assume she farts in English. At the most unexpected times, she will bury her face in my neck and say, “My mama,” and I am always, always amazed by this. Someone calls me “Mama.” Indeed, I became someone else.
Caledonia, 2002
(Photograph courtesy of Kristina Minor)
Little did I know that the real test for me was going to be writing songs with this new identity and everything that came with it. I’d just had my first hit record, and I followed it up with a baby. Not a smart career move, but I never did care about that. Still, I was aware during the first year of Callie’s life that I had to make a follow-up record to A Few Small Repairs and that there would be an expectation of making another one that would do well. When we made AFSR, we didn’t know that it would sell. We just made the best record we were capable of, and that’s still all I know how to do. I would lie awake with her, nursing her, putting her to sleep, and think, What in the hell am I going to write about?
Lyle Lovett said to me once, “Shawn, if you ever decide to have a kid, don’t write a fucking song about it.” With apologies to my dear friend Lyle, how could I not? She was this wonderful, terrifying, adorable, maddening, thrilling, and crazy bomb detonated in the middle of my life and my career. I wanted to write about the baby—she was my whole life—but it seemed as if every ounce of good creative energy I had was invested in parenting her. I could not find any poetry for it. Words failed me.
I traveled to New York to work with John. Mario and Callie joined me. That was a nice balance; it was great to have my child there so I didn’t h
ave to miss her or worry about her, and I could do my work as well. Things came together. I was no longer depressed. I was no longer looking for the escape hatch. But writing for that album was still torturous. I was stuck. And it was made worse by the fact that A Few Small Repairs had been so free and seamless and effortless. I thought we had cracked the code. Ha.
What finally happened was, I gave myself permission to express the fear I was feeling. That was the taboo part, and it was keeping me stuck. During that first year, I had such an urge to run away. It’s in my personality. I don’t like being made to do anything. But it’s so wrong to want to run away from your baby—how could I say that? Years before, I had started some lyrics as a love song: “I can pack myself up in a matter of minutes / And leave you all far behind, / All of my old world and all the things in it are hard to find … / If they ever were mine.” I returned to them, and that worked. I could sing about wanting to run but not being able to, chastising myself for having to grow up under the gun, finally. That was the song “Matter of Minutes.”
The record is called Whole New You, almost called Bonefields, but we thought that was too dark. It’s a strange, confused, moving piece of work. It was never promoted, and it never sold, and I largely ignore it in my live performances, which is a shame, because there are special songs there. Some, like “One Small Year,” I can’t even play, because John does it on piano. That one has a line about not knowing my own face, and I meant it literally. “Nothing Like You” is a love song to Callie. So is “I’ll Say I’m Sorry Now.” “Bound to You” is about the bond between us, “Mr. Levon” about the depression. I’ve always liked the reference that there is light at times when you are in that state but it’s abstract and disoriented, “like California under glass.” That’s always the way I felt in California, like I was under a glass dome. “Another Plane Went Down” is an eerie journal about the fragility of life.
