Songs To Remember

"That's an output I guess,” chuckles Colvin as she ponders the 'twin peaks' of her creative output in 2012, her eighth album, All Fall Down, and her memoir, Diamond In The Rough, on the line from Detroit, Michigan. The processes involved in the making of the two couldn't have been further apart as it turns out though, making one feed into the other. The “happier” experience was making the album with an old friend, musician and producer Buddy Miller, whom she first met back in 1975 when the South Dakotan was trying to get a break working in Austin, Texas. Miller convinced her to try her luck in New York and sing in his band.

“It was very relaxed,” Colvin says of the recording. “He's a sweet man, he knows exactly what he's doing, so great combination there. We recorded at his home, very relaxed: clock isn't running, instruments everywhere, you know, cats, people dropping by. And Nashville is a wonderful place to make a record; speaking of people dropping by, we had Emmylou Harris come by, Alison Krauss came by; I mean it was a drop-in kind of revolving door policy going there and it was a joy.”

These days more people would know Miller for his association with Robert Plant and his 2010 Band Of Joy album, but he's of course primarily a country artist, singer and guitarist, and has toured with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and Linda Ronstadt as well as Colvin and many others. In fact, he's in an occasional band with Harris, Colvin and Patty Griffin called Three Girls & Their Buddy.

Writing a book is, of course, a far more solitary exercise, and Colvin admits it was challenging, but “during the last year of working on the book I was also working on songs,” she says. “So I would take a week or two here and work on the book and then I would take a week or two there and work on the songs – it was a back and forth kind of process. I asked Buddy, after he told me who the band was gonna be – he picked out the band – if any of them had any music to give me, 'cause I do like writing lyrics when somebody else has done all the work,” she giggles.

The band included the guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade, along with bass player Victor Krauss. Colvin ended up co-writing with Frisell, Krauss and Jakob Dylan, who added a few lines to Seven Times The Charm, which she co-wrote with John Leventhal.

“There were some older songs on the record that I was put back in touch with because I was writing the book,” she says. “One of them is one I learned when I first knew Buddy Miller, and he reminded me of it, a song called On My Own. One is called Knowing What I Know Now, which I wrote with John Leventhal a long, long time ago in New York City, and American Jerusalem is another one – that's a cover song by Rod MacDonald that I learned in 1981 or '82. So especially writing about those days in New York reminded me of songs that I knew.”

In February last year, Colvin was invited to perform Leonard Cohen's Come Healing at the inaugural PEN Awards For Songwriting Excellence, at which Cohen and Chuck Berry were recipients. “It was great,” she remembers. “Paul Simon, being this great lyricist, somebody asked him once what were his favourite lyrics and he said Be-Bop-A-Lula!” Simon inducted Berry on the night.

Shawn Colvin will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 28 - Friday 29 March - Bluesfest, Byron Bay NSW
Monday 1 April - Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC