The sign that hung on the studio door simply read, “You have nothing left to lose.” For Janis Ian, who was behind those doors recording her first album in twelve years, that was no catch phrase. It was a clear and concise statement of her life.

Breaking Silence, her new album released on the Morgan Creek label, is dark and moody, filled with the kind of vivid images that pull the listener in close, and then hit them hard. A skill which Janis has whittled into a fine art.

Born a second-generation American, Janis considers herself a true American success story. “My people came here to get away from persecution,” she says. “All the reasons we were told as we were growing up that America was formed were exactly why my family landed here.” Her grandparents were immigrants who worked at menial labor. Janis was born in 1951 on a New Jersey chicken farm where her parents worked, and her father later became a music teacher while her mother became an administrative assistant to a university dean. “I’m the first person in my family to own a house, so it really is the American success story to me.”

Janis achieved her first hit with Society’s Child, a song about racial discrimination, at the tender age of fifteen. The song was banned by radio because of its controversial nature and it wasn’t until Leonard Bernstein featured her on his TV special and called her “a marvelous creature” that it became a top-ten hit. Society’s Child established Janis Ian as a writer of substance, but because of its political nature she had threats on her life and there were areas of the country where she couldn’t tour–all at an age when simply trying to grow up is a struggle. She left the music industry at eighteen and returned in 1973 when Roberta Flack had a hit song with Jesse. Her 1976 album, Between the Lines, was nominated for five Grammy awards (the most any female artist had received at once), and produced what she says is her career song, At Seventeen.

As a child star in the 60s, Ian’s memories include Janis Joplin sending her home from parties where drugs were being used, and “hanging out” with Jimi Hendrix ‹trading guitar and organ licks–on the night Martin Luther King died. Her life has been such a fascinating journey that three major offers have been made for her autobiography, but she claims she doesn’t remember enough to write it. “I have some big blank spots in my early years because they were so rough,” she says. “I keep saying if any fans out there have any old ticket stubs I’d like to know where I was!”

In the late 80’s, Janis discovered that her accountant had failed to pay her tax bills for seven years. The government took her house and her savings, and left her with her clothes and instruments. So she sold her piano and stage clothing and moved to Nashville in 1988 to “begin again.”

Did you find Nashville a sort of healing place?

Very much so. I arrived here with 4 pieces of furniture and my records in storage in L.A. I had three guitars, my clothes, and my song notebooks in the trunk of the car, and I had me. I rented an apartment over a parking garage. The songwriter’s community of Nashville had basically said “why don’t you move here…we could use people like you here,” and they really made me feel so welcome. My first Christmas in Nashville I lived with Don and Polly Schlitz. And Thom Schyler was great. Virginia Team from Team Designs would show up at my door with coffee and donuts in the morning. People knew I was going through a rough time and they were really nice. The Bluebird was always open-armed to me. So it felt good. And it felt great to be out of L.A.

How did you dig yourself out of the hole you were in?

I really look at it that I lucked in because I had bought real estate in California when Seventeen was a hit, and it was worth half of my debts. And then for three years, my business manager, Al Hagaman, and I just tried to dig me out of the hole. And it got the point where you can’t dig because you can’t go on the road because they attach all of the receipts. And you can’t publish or sign a contract because they attach all of that. So in ’91, Al put together a deal where I sold my catalog from 1972 to 1979 to Toshiba EMI for a very high figure and that paid the rest of my debt and provided me with a serious down payment on a house and really got me the ability to start over.

What hurdles did you face as a young star?

Well I was fourteen so that’s already a problem. I couldn’t sign a contract without it going through the surrogate’s court for the protection of widows and orphans. And everything was very complicated because of that. I have vivid memories of stupid stuff like not being able to book the musicians because I was too young. Or to run a session. The hurdles weren’t that different from anyone else, except when you are an adolescent, it’s so hard just existing, that the added pressure of expecting yourself to be brilliant and to communicate and to become a whole and honest person is a lot.

What kind of problems did you have to deal with as a female in the recording industry in the 60s?

I remember violent arguments with TV people in L.A. when I was fifteen about wearing pants or wearing dresses. I remember those arguments when I was in my early twenties. Women don’t wear pants on stage or on TV, don’t do this, don’t do that. Constant fights over who would lead the band on a TV show. Constant arguments over using my own band. I run into that a lot. There’s this assumption that if you’re male and have a band – it’s your band. But if you’re female, they’re pickup musicians. I don’t know why that is.

So do you think the attitude has changed much over the years?

Well, the dress thing’s not an issue (laughs). I think it’s still an issue with bands. Particularly overseas when you’re working somewhere like Japan. You’re just not regarded as a musician. It’s an issue on the feminist side, too. Some serious feminists, and I say that with all due respect, came down on me a few months ago because I didn’t have any more women in my band. And I got really offended because it’s a three-piece band and I am the guitarist and pianist. Outside of me there’s just two other people, so we have a 33% ratio. But it was like I wasn’t in the band. There was this assumption on some weird level that as a female and as a singer I was not a serious musician. I think it’s still harder for women because the expectations are so weird. No one knows what to do with us anymore. We do it to ourselves, too.

What has helped you to gain respect as a musician?

I find that the fact that I can notate and I can score means that I can talk to a band in their language. I have had the respect as a musician of some seriously notable people. I mean, Chick Corea thinks I’m a wonderful pianist, Chet Atkins thinks I’m a wonderful guitarist. And that beats it to me. How much does the rest matter?

Do you teach classes on songwriting?

I don’t really teach…it’s more like I frontally attack young people for being songwriters (laughs). Berklee School of Music up in Boston called me to do a three-day master’s series about three years ago and it has kind of evolved into what I think is a wonderful relationship. And I think what has really made a difference is that I studied theater with Stella Adler who was one of the great teachers.

What kind of approach do you have to teaching?

When I go in to teach, I have two or three things in mind. First I want to get rid of the chaff and keep the wheat. So I want to discourage anybody who shouldn’t be there – which means I get really brutal with them. Second of all I go in with the attitude that we’re all writers together, it’s all first name basis – none of this Ms. Ian stuff – show me that you’re as good as I am or that you can be as good as I am. And number three, work your butt off, I like you–you don’t work, I hate you. It’s all real simple to me – real straightforward. And I think kids respect that.

What is one of the hardest things about trying to write a song?

One of the hardest things of all is to start. Just sitting down and getting over your own intimidations. Every professional songwriter I know – people who do it 100% for their living – is terrified every time they sit down to write. You’re always convinced that your next song is going to be your last, or that it’s going to be your worst, or that you’ll never be able to write anything as good as your hit. It’s a constant terror. I think all artists live in a constant state of terror. And part of our job is to know our own chaos well enough to be able to make sense of it when you can.

How do you get past that block?

When I sit down to write I use any and all means. In my early 20s I used to sit down and force myself to write a song a day just to write something. And they’re horrible – but they’re songs. Somewhere in your unconscious it’s going in that you’ve finished something. I start with titles, a feel, a guitar lick, a line. When I’m not writing and I’m real blocked I force myself to play – to practice and things come out of that. And then there’s a point when I stop pushing it.

You walk away from it?

I think it’s real important to allow your creativity to take its own course. It’s very hard to let your talent lead. Stella used to always say that your talent lies in your choices. To me your life is a series of choices and when you’re trying to be a creative artists, one of the choices has to be not to be creative here and there. Go to the grocery, walk around, do normal things.

Do you find the second verse the hard one to write?

I find second verses really hard. Third verses are sometimes like pulling teeth, but by then you’re in the home stretch, you just hit the wall and go through. But second verses sometimes are just mondo painful. There are songs that I’ve written where we’ve re-written the second verse and I’ve never quite felt like it was as good as we originally had it, but by then we had moved so far away that we couldn’t go back. Unwinding, which Maura O’Connell cut, was like that. We originally had a second verse that was real different, and I think I still like it better, but Kye’s instincts are so right on that sort of stuff that I would hate to cross it.

When you’re writing, do you keep the vocalist in mind?

Yeah. You need to consider things like breathing. Songwriters who are not singers forget that singers have got to breathe. And range. If you’re writing for pitching, you’ve got to watch your range. I don’t have a great range so I tend to watch that anyway. I have the opposite problem. I have to sit there and try to come up with a broader range than I would normally reach for. Awkward chord progressions that are in there just because you want it to sound different. Different for the sake of different is just so boring. I watch that. It’s nice to give a singer something that they can run with. Jazz singers in particular want something that they can play with. I have a tendency to put too many words into a line. So I try to back myself off and be calmer about that. Leave people room to play.

What is the difference in what you describe as a craft writer vs. an instinctive writer?

To me a craft writer at its utmost is the worst of Nashville. It’s what people are scared of when they move here. It’s someone who gets up and writes 9 to 5, writes for a specific artist, sits down and thinks what that artist would want to sing, treads a very narrow line, never gives the artist anything to stretch, never takes any chances, and doesn’t really have a good time after three or four years. An instinct writer at its worst is someone who is responsible for writing the lead song in the title track, and the movie is running three months late because they just don’t feel it yet. Or they’ve got a second verse on a song and you can’t understand what the hell they’re talking about. You want to cut this song but this second verse is weird, and they say “Oh, no, man, that’s how I felt it.” At its worst it’s incredibly boring. But at both of their best, I think you get this wonderful blend of an Elton John/Bernie Taupin. They are craft writers who really allow their instinct to breathe.

What other writers can you think of that are a blend of both?

There are not many writers where everything they touch is wonderful. Growing up, one of my favorite albums was Nina Simone’s “Wild is the Wind.” There wasn’t a bad song on it. There wasn’t a bad vocal lick, there wasn’t a bad piano note, there wasn’t a bad arrangement. It was this wonderful blend of songs like “Four Women” that were instinct married to tremendous harnessing of her own talent and craft. That’s what I strive for, and that to me is what great songwriters become. A Cole Porter where he is absolutely brilliant and witty, but he kicks off from this instinctive leap that you would never make yourself, and then takes it to a place that you would never think of. Moon River–one of the great lyrics and melodies. You can hear them thinking “Oh, we need a bridge.” But then the bridges are really unexpected in some of their songs. A lot of the Johnny Mercer songs you go “Wow, what’s that doing there.” I would never have thought like that and yet once you’ve heard it that way, that’s the only way it could be. Yesterday – I mean to take a song with an adequate bridge, and yet melodically that bridge is just brilliant. And I was reading that they just sat there and went “Oh, we’re recording and we need a bridge.” Boom. That’s why I tell the kids that I work with to just write. Because once you’ve gotten your machinery oiled, when the great idea comes along you can go ahead and harness it. But if you’ve got no control over your own talent, you’re gonna end up really boring. One of those singers who looks at their feet all the time. (Pause) Not that I’m opinionated on any of this (laughs)!

Do you think that a lot of songwriters “sell-out” to commercialism?

I wish to God I could be more commercial. That would be a great blessing in my life. I just don’t have the knack. I don’t see anything wrong with being commercial. I think it’s a gift. It takes a long time for a writer to know their own strengths. One of the strengths that I have is that I write sociologically political songs, or however you want to term them, and that’s what I do well. I write songs that make people feel and that touch people. I don’t write songs that everybody in the world can sing – that’s a different gift I have to work at that. Work at your weaknesses and keep track of your strengths. I don’t have anything against commercialism and I think it’s real dangerous when writers get on a high horse about it because it blindsides you. You end up turning down things that could be very important to you and you end up being snotty about things just because you can’t do them. Most of the writers I know who have a bug about commercialism can’t be commercial. When Elton John has a bug about it then I’ll say something. When somebody with a 20 or 30 year career of hit records says something, I’ll listen.

Tell me about the writing of ‘At Seventeen.’

Long and laborious. A three month process – and three months to me means I work on it every day. I got the verse and the first bridge to Seventeen in maybe a week, and I personally think it shows in the second verse that it was so hard because I couldn’t figure out what to do. So in the end I just ran with it, and to me it’s very sloppy. It says a lot, but it says it in this kind of inverted form. But I think that the second verse turns it into an intellectual song. And then the third verse was so hard because I didn’t know what to do with her at the end. I wanted a happy ending, and yet I didn’t know how to have a happy ending and still be truthful to the song and to myself. And it was real important to me by then that the song be truthful to me because I really felt like I had a serious career song, and it was the first one that I’d ever written where I felt that way. I really didn’t want to screw it up, and half of that three month time was spent in just not screwing it up.

You never had another singer record that song?

No, it’s had a lot of instrumentals, but it’s never had another singer tackle it. Which is interesting because a lot of singers have it as part of their repertoire until they start making records, and I think it’s until they find their own voice. I meet a lot of people who sang it in high school or in clubs when they were younger, but it’s really a career song – it’s my song. I’m so closely identified with it.

Tattoo, on your new album, is about a concentration camp survivor. What was the writing of that song like?

Another three month song. Tattoo was every night. Made me crazy.

And you did research for it?

Yeah, I don’t know why, I don’t know where that came from because certainly I grew up on holocaust stories being Jewish and second generation. For some reason in 1989 I had this hunger to read about it. I had read about it as a kid and then forgotten about it. I went to the Santa Monica Library and read everything I could get my hands on for three months – obsessively. I knew I wanted to write a song like that, but had no idea of even where to start. Those are the kind of songs that are really frightening to write, because if you blow it, you blow it so big. And if you do it well, you’ve got to let part of it be where you’re on a runaway horse and it takes its own head. I think it’s the best song – as a song – on the album. It’s the best work piece. I’d love to write a song like that a year. It was great for someone like me, coming out of the school of At Seventeen, to have written a story where you’re not part of it and you never bring yourself into it. I’m real proud of tattoo.

What about Jesse, Roberta Flack’s 1973 hit?

It was really about a missing Vietnam Vet. If you just look at the first verse and the first chorus it could be. Another three month song. I got the idea for Jesse when I was about fourteen at camp. It was Bobby or some 2-syllable man’s name. I got most of that first verse then when I was real young, put it on a scrap of paper, and then really didn’t sit down and write it until years later when I was going through some old stuff. It’s a wonderful chorus and I think I was so proud of my soprano that I had to find some place to put it (laughs). To me it’s a real singer’s chorus. It’s a weird song to me because it doesn’t really have an ending. I finished it when I was about twenty and it taught me that you can take your last chorus and change it up a little bit and your whole song changes.

When you and Kye Fleming wrote What About The Love, were you wondering about the kind of accessibility the song would have?

We just assumed no one would cut it. We hit the first chorus and looked at each other and said, “God it would be great if Amy Grant would cut this” and then we both laughed at the same time and said she’d never touch it. So it was really cool when Amy cut it. It teaches you to be humble. We were working on some other song in Kye’s living room. She was working on a bridge to something else and I got really bored – it’s really boring watching another lyricist work – and I started fiddling with the guitar. I came up with the part that started with the ‘and’ of 8 and really liked it. And then I got this little melody started in my head and said “Hey Kye, try that”. I said “I went to see my sister, she was living with friend, who’d turned into a preacher” and Kye said “To save the world from sin” and the whole song evolved like that – it was Kye said, then I said. It was a rough song to write, but it was like a two-day song and it pretty much flowed.

You have said that Some People’s Lives is the best song you’ve ever been involved with.

It’s a faultless song. It is now hopefully on its way to becoming somewhat of a standard. We wrote it in ’86 and pitched it to everyone in the music biz and nobody would touch it. We had some really nice reactions and as a songwriter it’s so rare that you get reactions like that. I remember Anita Baker actually called MCA to thank us and to say that it was one of the best songs she’d ever heard but it didn’t work for her album. And I thought “what a class act.” People never do that. Nobody cut it until Michael Johnson in 1988. I did an NAS show in L.A. and Bette Midler was there. I found out later that she requested a video of it, and learned it, and we didn’t find out she was intending to cut it until the middle of 90. So it was over four years until Bette cut it.

Have you ever had a bad co-writing experience?

Just one. I had written with a songwriter from England, and I don’t even know if he was directly involved in this, but I got a panic call from the producer and record company asking me to totally re-write three sets of lyrics in five days for them to go into the studio on the sixth day and cut them. The problem was that they had already cut the tracks and the background vocals, so it was real limited. I did a really good job on it. Then we got a fax saying that since they already had the tracks and the titles, they considered it a 20-80 split, and I just went retro. I don’t work that way, I’ve never worked that way. I don’t know anybody that does. And I said that was totally unfair and then they came back and said 30-70, still unfair, and by that time they had cut them and the record company wanted them for singles and they said we’ll do 35-65 or something really stupid, and it ended up where they couldn’t use them – we wouldn’t license them. Counting lines makes people crazy. And it’s a very bad business move because you’re assuming you’re never going to need that person again.

You haven’t recorded anything you didn’t write?

Except for a Nescafé commercial in Japan, and a McDonald’s & Budweiser commercial here. There used to be a tremendous amount of pressure for me to record other people’s material. Particularly as a kid, and I may have been wrong, I don’t know. I did turn down You Light Up My Life. And I would have done a really good job on it and I would probably record it now, but it seemed real important at the time since there were so few women writers, to prove the point. And now it’s just that I haven’t ever done it. Every time I hear somebody’s song that I’d like to record, I end up writing one better for me.

Did you have a more difficult time getting signed to a label on your latest album, as compared to your previous ones?

Yeah, we got told over and over while we were pitching this album that everybody loved it – no one turned it down because they didn’t like it or that they didn’t think it would make money. The continuing comment was “if she were only unknown.”

The label copy on your new album says you used “No synthesizers, vocal limiters or samples of any sort” were used.

That was written on the album cover as a challenge. We were all real proud. I like synthesizers, I use them a lot, but they tire my ears now. I’m tired of samples. On the vocal limiter, that’s a gauntlet to me. There are few singers left who you can plug into a 24-track machine and let them sing without using a limiter and I find that appalling. I find it awful that people don’t know how to work with their own technology. And it was real important to me on this record not to have a limiter on there. We cut Some People’s Lives live to two-track. Me, a piano and two microphones. We wanted to illustrate that can still be done. And the percussion sounds and slide basses were not synthesizers – they were real people playing in a room that sometimes had vaulted ceilings. There are people that work very hard with their instruments. There was this part in Breaking Silence where the guitar does a strut. That’s an acoustic guitar that I’m playing with harmonics. Everybody says that’s a synthesizer, but that’s really what human beings can play. I got tired of running into people who could program but not play.

Twelve years is a long stretch between albums.

Yeah. But it’s good in a lot of ways because I didn’t want a lot of those years on record. I didn’t like what I was writing. It took me a while to find my voice again, I think.

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Excerpted with permission from Performing Songwriter magazine:
The Performing Songwriter
P.O. Box 158159
Nashville, TN 37215
(800) 883-7664

Shawn Colvin’s right hand hits the strings on her Martin D-28 with a precise aim and rhythmic force that seems to cause every sinewy muscle in her forearm to vibrate in sympathy. With her head thrown back, eyes closed, and right foot tirelessly tapping out perfect time, the rhythm and mood of the moment seem to have taken over. Then she leans forward, leaves the melody behind, and carries the listener away with her on a vocal journey of unexpected highs and lows. Always personal and never predictable, Shawn has just welcomed you inside her world.

Growing up in Carbondale, Illinois, Shawn formed her first band at age twenty. After that, her musical journey took her to Austin, Texas in the late 1970s as the lead singer for The Dixie Diesels, and eventually on to San Francisco where she gigged regularly at a small Berkeley club called LaVal’s Subterranean. Then in 1980 she made the move to New York, met multi-instrumentalist/producer/writer John Leventhal and was in a pop band with him until 1983 when she decided to go solo again. It was during that time that Colvin began to find her own style of writing. She won a 1991 Grammy in the Contemporary Folk Category for her debut release, “Steady On,” and on the strength of her 1992 album, “Fat City,” she has been garnering rave reviews, sold-out concerts, and an even broader following.

Shawn’s solo performances have been described by fans and fellow musicians as the quintessential study in dynamics. Armed with a voice filled with colors and shades, Colvin takes the listener on a free-wheeling ride in and around a melody while she hammers, slides, bends and pulls on the guitar. That symbiotic relationship between her vocals and her instrument–the blending together of two elements going in different directions–is what makes a Shawn Colvin concert worthy of experiencing over and over again.

In addition to her compelling performances, Colvin’s lyrics are also worthy of spending time with. Much like reading the intimate, self-analytical poems of Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath–their rhythmic words invite you to share in a diary of private thoughts and personal visions. Colorful descriptions and metaphors of joy, despair, dreams, and the past let the listener become part of the experience, and put her writing in a class of its own.

For all this, Shawn seems to have absolutely no idea that her unique style has become so widely emulated by the new wave of songwriters and acoustic performers. Nor does she seem to realize that there are hundreds of “Shawn Wanna-Be’s” that hit the open-mic stages each night, especially in the New England area where she built her musical reputation. To her, her music seems to be more of a feeling than an art to be studied or imitated. It’s just a natural outpouring of emotions, rhythms and melodies.

Did you always want to write, or were you more comfortable playing other people’s music?
No, I think I always wanted to write. I wrote a lot when I was a teenager and was learning the guitar. And I’ve always been a good chameleon–I can really cop another person’s vocal thing. I learned a lot of people’s guitar styles–obviously, cause that’s a good way to learn. But I wasn’t endowed with the kind of creative gift in my opinion. And the music that I wrote then wasn’t really good, it was derivative. Maybe some good melodies here and there. But I did write. I mean as soon as I picked up the instrument I wrote ten or twenty songs during the first year I was beginning to play. Then I just put up the writing. I don’t know why, but I did.

When did you pick it up again?
I didn’t really write again until I moved to California in 1979 and was in a quandary about what to do with my life. I was playing music, but to pass the time I would write snippets of things, they never came to anything, I never finished anything. Then I moved to New York in 1981 and met John Leventhal who had a band that was doing really sophisticated Steely Dan-esque kind of pop music. I loved the way they sounded and I began to write with him. He gave me music and I started to write the lyrics. And again I would be loathe to play any of those songs for anyone. They were not very genuine. But the relationship with him kept me at it because where I would falter he would push and vice versa.

When did you start writing on your own?
There was a breakthrough after four or five years of this where he gave me a track of music and instead of just writing the words over his production, I took his production and transposed it to the guitar. I dropped my E strings to D, a la Richard Thompson who is my second wave influence–Joni Mitchell being my first–and made this song into kind of a droney folk groove and I wrote “Diamond in the Rough.”

Did that open the door to your own writing style?
Yeah. That seemed like something I could really stick with. It was the first song of that style. And from that came everything else that’s on my first album. From that door opening and that stumbling upon my voice, if you will, came a system, a security, a net, that I could fall into and go and do something that I really did think was unique to me. And it definitely had to do with being confessional and personal.

Do you feel somewhat exposed by the personal nature of your songs?
They are personal. I sometimes feel as though I should apologize for that, but I’m too quick to negate myself as a songwriter…that’s part of what’s taken so long (laughs). I’d like to push myself and challenge myself beyond it, but it’s been enormously gratifying for me to write this stuff and my motto is stick with what you know. I didn’t have it in me to paint fictional pictures. I think that when you do that you’re going with things that have to do with you anyway. But I didn’t have the skill to make an interesting story, and I don’t know that I do now. But what I did have was a strong feeling of where I came from and where I was at. And it had been a struggle. Part of me wanted to document that. I also just needed to express it, and I had really gone through some things and come out the other side. I was just moved to shed light on that.

Are you comfortable singing those songs to such a large audience?
I think the thing that has made it possible for me to write personal songs and sing them year after year is the sensibility for good writing. In that just opening your veins all over the paper is not necessarily going to be interesting. I wanted to speak to people. I was interested in being good and in moving people, not just “I’m going to say what I want to say.” So there’s a poetic aspect to them. Some songs I would just go way overboard on the emotion and then I’d have to rein it back in to make it accessible. You have to watch for a twist that you can put in or a way that you can make the point in a more unexpected way. So it’s not hard for me to play the songs. There’s an artistic content to them that satisfied me to the point that…they’re nice pieces. You don’t have to know they’re about me, you know. I wanted people to be able to sing them themselves.

Is there any song that is uncomfortable for you to sing?
There’s only one song that I still feel funny about playing. I feel like it’s maybe taking it a little too far, and that’s “Monopoly.” I did wrote it in ten minutes and said exactly what I wanted to say. I don’t do it every night. I’ve had it on the set list for the past two months, but there’s a lot of times where I’d just turn around and say “skip it,” you know, because it just makes me feel vulnerable. That’s the only one I have trouble with.

Do you feel good about it as a song?
Well, it was an experiment and yes I do. I think you’ve got to be brave in this business or in anything where you become somewhat public because you’re not allowed to really experiment or fail in public. Well, let’s put it this way–not gracefully. No one supports it. And it’s art. I mean who’s to say that the thing that this person did is not getting them to the next absolutely brilliant place. It’s a process.

I love the “Hearts of Darkness” documentary on Francis Ford Coppola’s making Apocalypse Now. He talks about his dismay and despair about what a disaster he felt he was creating. And it was so comforting because it was a wonderful movie that was embraced, won many awards, and made a lot of money. But in the midst of it he was sure that he was doing the worst thing he had ever done in his life. Every artist can relate to that.

So “Monopoly,” I don’t know. If anybody came and accused me of taking advantage of my position and opportunity to put anything I want on an album, I’d have to give ’em an ear, but I’m not sorry I wrote it. It said exactly what I wanted to say. And I liked turning it on itself and saying that I really didn’t want to write this song. That’s the basis of it. It’s really how you feel when you can’t get somebody off your mind and you wish they were off your mind. You feel like you’ve just been kind of screwed around by the powers that be. Plus I know every songwriter has felt, when they’ve written a song about a relationship that’s broken up and people console them by saying “At least you got a song out of it,” you just feel like going “Oh, shut up” (laughs). That’s not why you fall in love.

Are there specific places that tend to inspire your writing?
I have found that airplanes–or any form of transportation where I am not the driver–have been a good time for things to come out or for problems to be solved. Like if there’s a section to a song that I can’t seem to finish, I’ve had solutions come up when my mind’s been suspended.

Do you write daily?
No. I’ve never written daily unless I’ve been under complete pressure to do so. I’m a very reluctant writer (laughs). I keep vowing to change that, but I don’t and I’m in such admiration of people who do. I ran into Lucinda Williams–and I think her stuff is just fabulous–and asked her if she writes all the time, and she said “No, I write when I have to and I do it under pressure, and I think it’s going to be a disaster,” and I just said “Praise the Lord,” you know (laughs). Finally somebody who does it the way I do. When I write it’s more like a spurt of writing and put it away. Or a spurt of writing, put it away and get it out the next day, and if I’m totally dry on it I’ll put it back away again because I don’t want to force it.

Were you under more pressure, deadline wise, during the making of Fat City?
Yes! I was pressed for time and I had a lot of songs one-half and three-quarters finished–not just one but a lot–and I was forced to become disciplined. It was really a great experience because I was terrified and had kind of made peace with the fact that I was just going to do bad work. And I found that I can set times and go into a room and it still can happen.

Do you keep some kind of journal?
I do keep a journal and a songwriting notebook. I’ll get a verse, a rhyme or a title I’ll just try to keep notes of things because 90% of the time I’ll end up using things that I just jotted down absent mindedly.

Do you use rhythm a lot to get an idea for a song?
Yeah. If you get a groove going and you kind of say nonsense over the groove then some words come out that you couldn’t have predicted. Some you keep, some you don’t. “Cry Like An Angel” was written like that. I would go down to this pond in North Carolina every day just bopping along to the rhythm of the song and I would do it over and over in my head. I had tons of words and most were thrown out, like I had the word mortician in that song (laughs).

So it’s a matter of just flooding the rhythm with more lyrics than you could ever use and then weeding them out and making a story out of it. Because when you just start free-associating like that over some rhythm you end up not realling talking about nonsense, but talking about yourself. It’s wierd, it’s cool, it’s scary, you know. This stuff comes out and you go “I haven’t thought about that in years,” but it’s you. So it’s kind of a cool way to write. You end up having a perspective maybe that’s not so forced. There’s room for things to creep in that you couldn’t have thought of.

Have you had much success with co-writing since developing such a definitive style?
“Set The Prairie On Fire,” which I wrote with Elly Brown (a New Yorker who used to be in a band called Grace Pool) is the exception to the rule–with the rule being that I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music. Like on “Round of Blues” I wrote the whole song but Larry Klein said that it needed a bridge. So he wrote the bridge and I wrote the words to it. But Elly and I really shared every part of the song equally. She wrote some of the words, I wrote some of the words, she wrote some of the music, I wrote some of the music.

When you finish a song, are they really finished or do you go back and pick at them?
They’re pretty much finished. I have a short attention span and even when I’m not completely satisfied with a line here and a line there I generally leave it as it is. I’ve got a dilemma, though, because I wrote “The Story” and it makes mention of not having any children and not being married. And I’m getting married. So once I get married the question is…well it’s probably so silly to even ponder it. I should probably just sing it like it’s written. But I did think maybe I should go back and kind of update it for what’s going on now and keep the same spirit. It’s kind of a challenge because I’m getting married and the people who love the depressing confessional kind of stuff go “don’t get too happy,” you know (laughs). I mean there’s still a lot of conflict in life even if you get married, it doesn’t solve your own damn problems. And that song’s very angry, so to hang on to my identity in that song and be married could be interesting.

Tell me about “The Story.”
That song was sensitive because it was very directly about my parents. I kind of chose to write as if I were speaking to my sister in the song. I wanted to attempt to write about…well, you can’t say the words “dysfunctional family” any more without it sounding like a buzz word, but that’ll pass. It’s a valid term and it applies to me. It’s tragic when families are like mine, I believe, unhealthy and dishonest within their structure and everybody takes on these roles to try and make the whole thing balance out. It’s destructive to everybody. No matter what role you’re playing. No matter if you’re kind of in the heroic and the do-gooder role–which I was not (laughs). And I really wanted to try to put that into a song. It was a challenge because that was a real tempting one to just moan and spew. It was one where I had a lot of harsh lines that I had to just kind of put down and then pull back.

How does your family feel about the song?
My brothers, I don’t know how they feel. My sister likes it. My father likes it. My mother’s mad at me. I sent a copy of this song to my sister before I put it on the record, and asked her what she thought. She said, “This is fair. It’s artistic, it’s fair, it’s good.” And I had other people say, “Look at writers through time and the things they’ve written about and what people have exposed.” And I’m proud of the song. I think it’s really good.

I remember the first time I played “The Story.” I was at The Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass and people got it. Women have come up to me who have a connection with their mother through this song–you know, the “cast iron dress” bit. What I’ve found is that there are women who went through that housewife 50s thing who can feel an element of sympathy from that song. That everybody was trapped into that role thing. And my parents were certainly part of it. My father can look back on that and have some perspective, but my mother can’t. We just don’t talk about it (laughs).

What is the background of “Kill The Messenger”?
It’s about Jane Siberry from Toronto. I went to see a concert of hers at The Bottom Line and it was one of the best shows that I’ve ever seen. She’s a great woman and performer–a bit of a Peter Pan and a bit of a seductress and has the great ability to combine whimsy and compassion. She’s quirky but accessible. And her show was theatrical in a very accessible, warm, wonderful way. I walked out of that show going, “Well, I should just hang it up.” And that’s really great for an artist to feel (laughs), it really is–it pushes you.

On her record called “The Walking” she thanked her songs for being there. You know, for just always being there. And “Kill The Messenger” is kind of about writer’s block, and it’s a sibling of “The Story.” It’s about feeling pulled down and used by people. It’s just somewhat of a bitter song. And somewhat of a plaintive song about wanting to feel the wonderful feelings of clarity and forgiveness when you’re at the best of your human nature instead of your worst, you know. Your worst being full of envy or hatred or greed or self pity. And I used her much like I did my sister in “The Story” to just sort of be a character to appeal to and in this case one that could sort of understand my plight and maybe harness the muse more easily than I.

What was the writing of “Poloroids” like?
It probably took a year, but it was the way I described before. I mean, I got the first verse on the way to therapy–see this transportation thing really helps! But I was on this bus and it just came, “Please no more therapy/Mother take care of me/piece me together with needle and thread,” and I just went “whaaa, thank you!” It had a cadence to it that was really infectious, kind of sing-songy and I just spent a lot of time getting involved in the rhythm of it and jotting down anything that came into my mind. And a lot of it was trash and a lot of it was funny, and a lot of it was applicable.

Did you really dream the last verse?
Yeah I did. I had this dream where this couple wasn’t walking a plank off of a ship, but they were walking a plank over a huge excavated hole in the ground. And they were totally in love, it was the sweetest damn feeling, you know. And he walked out first and she took a poloroid, then she walked out and he took a poloroid as she held up this flash card type of thing that said “Valentine.” The good will between these people must have been something that I was striving for because I had had relationships with a lot of ill-will, (laughs) which just seems so wrong, but it was in my life.

What about “I Don’t Know Why”?
I wrote it when I first moved to New York. I was on a subway and I wrote the whole song in my head. I felt very lonely and horrible at the time. I had this idea of what I would say to a baby and I’m sure it was more of an attempt just to console myself. The idea to make up something to comfort a child is probably what eased my depression at the time. I just wrote the whole thing really fast in my head, music and words, and didn’t even play it for months.

Then a friend of mine came to town and asked me if I’d written anything and I played that song. But because I didn’t write–because I was kind of invested in the identity of not seeing myself as a writer–I just didn’t consider it a real song (laughs). I just thought “everybody makes up rhymes, everybody writes little poems, this is just a simple little thing that I wrote and there’s no need to call attention to it.”

What has that song done for your career?
I owe a lot to that song. It was like a gift. I hate to be cosmic about it, but that’s the truth. I mean it dropped into my lap. Around 1985, when Fast Folk Musical Magazine asked me to do something for them–and that organization is for songwriters–that was the song I had. In Boston there’s a lot of college radio, and they got ahold of that album and started playing my song. And I got a following in Boston based on “I Don’t Know Why.” So instead of playing bars for the money, I was lured to make this trip to Boston every three months to a club called Passim where people came to hear me play, and hear that song. And every time I’d go back to Passim I felt that that was an audience that wanted to hear what I was writing so I always tried to have another song finished by the time I’d go back there. I guess it was even more important than “Diamond In The Rough” because I was made to feel welcome in the songwriter’s field through the people in Boston that listened to those radio stations.

Do you feel like you can write for other people?
No I don’t. I pitched something recently only because I was asked if I had anything, and I had something that I thought really would fit. It’s something that I’d like to work on because it’s an alternative source of income. And it’s a valid thing to look into. But up till now it’s just all been so personal that I don’t think of it in terms of other people singing them.

Do you think you’ll start writing about other people’s situations?
I have a desire but as yet it hasn’t translated into anything palpable. I mean, when I pick up a pencil or pen or whatever, it’s still attitudinal–it’s emotion driven. And it might come from some other situation but it’s never a story that I have to tell of somebody else. So I have the desire, but it hasn’t ever really come to fruition. Maybe it will.

How did you develop your very distinct vocal style, and the way you blend it so perfectly with whatever you happen to be doing on the guitar?
I don’t know that I have a distinct style. I truly don’t have any perspective on that and when I hear myself singing back it’s still difficult. I have a vague idea of what you’re talking about and it would be easiest to point out the two main influences that I’ve had which are Joni Mitchell and Richard Thompson. Both are very strong guitarists and melodicists and singers and do intricate and interesting work as performers who accompany themselves. And I have a strong identification with that. I kind of consider myself as a singer first and foremost, but something that really helped me come into my own is that there’s not a separation between me singing and me playing the guitar. The two together were something where one fed off the other. I worked hard at developing a guitar style that felt good and also would work to entertain people over a long period of time all by myself. Something interesting and strong.

What about the way you tend to leave the melody and take a song in different directions?
That’s just something you have to feel. As a matter of fact, one of the dumber things my manager said was “Stick to the melody, I know you’re really great at improvising, but stick to the melody until the people get a handle on it,” (laughs). But I can’t. And I’m glad it still works, and it’s just something that I feel.

How did you get put into the folk category?
The folk tag gets a little annoying. That came out of New York right around the time of Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman, the neo-folk, new folk whatever they started to call it. You had an acoustic guitar and that’s what you were. I listen to alternative radio stations and hear a lot of folk rock. The new Soul Asylum single, REM stuff, Toad the Wet Sprocket–it’s great folk rock. But they’re all in their twenties so they’re called alternative and I’m in my thirties so I’m called folk (laughs). Sometimes it seems that way. But I don’t wave a flag for any type of music and I don’t feel compelled to put to rest any ideas. Maybe I will some day.

What kind of goals do you have or new things you’d like to try?
There’s tons left to do. I want to be a producer. There are not many prominent women producers. You know, there’s your top ten list of producers and they’re all men. People don’t just pick up the phone to call this woman or that woman to produce a new album, at least not in my experience. And the men who are good at what they do are very good, but it’s just silly that there’s not more women. I produced a record for my friend Lucy Kaplanski that should be out on Rounder this year and I had a blast. I knew my subject, I knew her stuff, her voice, and I knew our budget. It was quick and it was simple, but that’s what I needed–something that was not going to totally overwhelm me. And it was wonderful. I loved it.

Do you have much control over the marketing of yourself?
I have some control over it, but you have to choose your battles. My records haven’t sold millions, so as far as where I make my demands I’ve sort of bent toward the musical side of things. I can put my foot down real hard there. When it comes to marketing it wears me out. It’s a lot of energy that I have not wanted to waste, especially on this last record. I’m not 100% comfortable with it. It’s a little too safe. I don’t know how to get around that. You go get your picture taken and you go through ten million rolls of film. I don’t find it deplorable, by any means, but it’s just a little too polished as far as I’m concerned.

Have you had much success with your videos?
I find videos extremely annoying. I’ve done four, but getting them played is a problem. VH-1 & MTV are like radio stations. The rules change a lot, and there are just more videos than can be played. So they sort of tend to be like radio stations where MTV is sort of an alternative/hard rock radio station and VH-1 a sort of adult contemporary/soft rock/oldies station. And they’re really pretty much locked into that. Whereas when Steady On came out VH-1 was really open and they played me, and they played Bela Fleck’s “Sinister Minister,” and they played the Subdudes. But they really reeled it in.

What advice would you give to a struggling songwriter?
I don’t know anything to say but be true to yourself and believe in what you do and stick to it. Because if you’re like me, you wouldn’t want to bend yourself around so much to please someone, then get somewhere with it and then have to live with it. So if it’s good for your soul and it’s making you happy, stick with it. Just don’t give up. I’ve never seen someone fail or miss out who wasn’t kind of pushing ahead with the best of intentions and with the belief in themselves. If you’ve got a goal, a dream that really suits you and you put it into motion, it generally takes you to somewhere. You’ve got to kind of be willing to see where it takes you, and just enjoy the ride.

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Reprinted with permission from The Performing Songwriter Magazine.

TAXI CEO and seminar moderator, Michael Laskow, introduces Steve Seskin at TAXI’s convention, the Road Rally 2002: Steve Seskin is one of the most successful writers in Nashville today. The ironic part is that he doesn’t live in Nashville. He’s an A-list songwriter with a boat-load of songs recorded by people like Tim McGraw, Neil McCoy, John Michael Montgomery, Kenny Chesney, Colin Raye, Peter Frampton, Waylon Jennings, Alabama, Mark Wills, Peter Paul & Mary, and on, and on, and on. Some of Steve’s other hits include “I Think About You,” “Life’s A Dance,” “No Doubt About It,” “You Got Love,” and “Welcome To The Club.” He is a man who has really truly proved that you can grow up in New York, live in San Francisco, and still become a major player in Nashville.

[Steve begins by playing his song “Grown Men Don’t Cry” a recent #1 Steve wrote for Tim McGraw—followed by applause form a roomful of 2500 songwriters]

Steve Seskin: Good morning. I’m really impressed that you’re all here at this time. I know things went on pretty late last night. This is my first time at a TAXI Road Rally, and it’s pretty cool. A lot of good stuff is going on. I’ve got a few topics that I chose to talk about today. Before we dive into those, I just wanted to give you a little bit of background about me, for those of you who aren’t familiar with me at all.

I grew up in New York City. In 1972, I moved to San Francisco where I began a career as a singer-songwriter. I say “singer-songwriter” in the sense that every single song that I wrote back then was for me to sing. I had no notion of anybody else ever recording my songs. There is nothing wrong with that, if that’s the scope of what you want to do as writer and as a singer-songwriter. It was great for me. For 13 years that’s all I did. Occasionally, people would say, “That song would be good for so-and-so.” I’d say, “Yeah, well how do you do that? How do you get it to them?” It just didn’t occur to me. Everything I wrote back then was based on things that happened to me. Everything was in first person. You could pretty much know what was going on in my life by whatever song I just sang. I think that it’s a great place to start as a writer, but I don’t think it’s a great place to stop. There was a big change for me when I realized that I could write about anything.

In 1985, I did some shows with a woman named Crystal Gayle, who some of you may know from Country music. I have to tell you, I had never listened to Country music much. I grew up listening to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Steely Dan, Cat Stevens—singer-songwriters and folk groups—but no Country music. So when Crystal Gayle came up to me and said, “You ought to go to Nashville,” I looked at her like she was nuts. Me? Nashville? No. She said, “I just think they’d like what you do there.” And boy, she was right. I took a trip there about two months later. I didn’t know a soul. I had one appointment at ASCAP, and I got to play three songs for a fellow there. He got me some appointments with some publishers.

What really attracted me to Nashville is the songwriting community and the fact that there is one. That’s growing other places now. I think that things like this conference are great for all of you to network and to meet. I don’t know about you, but for me, for years, writing songs was a lonely endeavor. I was in my room by myself. The notion that other people did this, or that I could talk to them about it, was pretty foreign to me. In Nashville, you’d be eating breakfast somewhere, and like at the table behind you, you’d hear, “I don’t think it needs a bridge. If we just develop the second verse…” And then over here they’d be saying, “Well she’s cutting on September 15th. When are you going to do the demo?” And I thought, wow, there are other people that do this, and they’re everywhere!

I was very attracted to that and it kept me coming back to Nashville. As Michael Laskow said, I’ve never lived there. I love living up in San Francisco. But I’ve made a commitment to Nashville. Nothing that happened to me would have happened if I had just stayed in San Francisco. San Francisco is a great music town. We have fabulous players up there and fabulous musicians. But it’s not a music business town. It’s certainly not a songwriting or publishing capitol, which I define as Los Angeles, Nashville and New York, basically. But if you don’t want to live in one of these places, you need to make frequent trips to one of them. It can’t just be like once every ten years either. I have been to Nashville seven times a year, times seventeen years. Somewhere around 130 times I’ve been to Nashville in the last 17 years. I’ve gotten to the point where I do it like clockwork. I go just about every month and a half or so. I go for ten or twelve days. I have to tell you, a lot of people in Nashville think I live there. If you think about it, other than your close friends, people like an A&R guy from a label or a producer—how often are you going to run into them? So when I’m in town, I make sure I run into everybody. People constantly say to me, “Hey where have you been?” And I just say, “San Francisco.” And that’s just fine.

Anyway, I’ve been going to Nashville ever since. I’ve been through bad publishing deals and great publishing deals. I’m in a really good one now. I think it’s important to have somebody in your corner in a major music market, at whatever point you’re at—whether it means getting involved with a publisher with a single song deal, or getting a staff deal at a publishing company. A good publisher really does his or her job. Every time you write a song, you are the songwriter and the publisher. If you want to effectively do that second job, then keep your own publishing. Be your own publisher. There is nothing that says you can’t do that. But be prepared to do that job. It’s a full time job. I don’t want to do it. I’d rather write another song, personally.

To me, the thing with getting involved with somebody in the music business is to try to get involved with somebody who is passionate about what you do—not just because you feel like they think they can sell what you do. That’s going to be part of the equation for them for sure, but there is nothing like meeting a music business person who is just as passionate as your are about your art and selling it, and who is also passionate about you. They’re a fan. They dig you. They dig what you do. I’ve been very fortunate in that sense to get involved mostly with publishers in Nashville who are real fans of mine. They understand what it is I’m trying to do.

Every writer should have some sort of vision of who you are, and what you’re trying to say, and what kind of writer you are. As you develop as writers, I think it’s really important to figure out what your niche is. What is your thing that you need to be true to? By this I mean, for instance, I’m a very literal writer. As a listener, though, I love moodscapey kinds of things that just evoke a feeling, and I don’t really know what the heck they’re talking about. To this day, I don’t know what Steely Dan was talking about most of the time. However, it’s great music, and I can listen to it all day long. As a writer, though, I wouldn’t be as good as they were at that. I’m a storyteller, and a fairly literal storyteller. I gravitate toward what I do best. I can write love songs like Diane Warren, let’s say. But not quite as good as she does. So I dabble in other things, but I mainly stick to what I do best. I’m always trying to broaden that, but I think you owe it to yourselves to keep trying to figure out who you are—what your voice is, as a writer, and to keep nurturing that. You’re going to have to nurture that in the face of a whole lot of people saying, “You can’t do it. This isn’t good enough.”

Do you feel somewhat exposed by the personal nature of your songs?
They are personal. I sometimes feel as though I should apologize for that, but I’m too quick to negate myself as a songwriter…that’s part of what’s taken so long (laughs). I’d like to push myself and challenge myself beyond it, but it’s been enormously gratifying for me to write this stuff and my motto is stick with what you know. I didn’t have it in me to paint fictional pictures. I think that when you do that you’re going with things that have to do with you anyway. But I didn’t have the skill to make an interesting story, and I don’t know that I do now. But what I did have was a strong feeling of where I came from and where I was at. And it had been a struggle. Part of me wanted to document that. I also just needed to express it, and I had really gone through some things and come out the other side. I was just moved to shed light on that.

One of the things that I worked on quite a bit early on in my career is developing my own level of self-critique. A lot of you are going to these one-on-one things and getting feedback. Heck, the whole backbone of TAXI besides getting music out to other people in the industry to trying to make something happen for you all, is also the critique service and feedback. I think that’s great. I think TAXI goes a great job at that, by the way. However, I think it’s limited in the sense that you have to understand that when you get feedback from anybody in this industry, they come to the table with baggage. What I mean by baggage is they have years of their own opinions. They are also telling you things within the scope of the music industry and what will sell—what they can sell, and what they’re willing to pick up a phone for and call somebody to listen to it based on what they can plug in to sell. Art and commerce are an interesting mix. My notion of it is that there is nothing wrong with mixing art and commerce, as long as you don’t let the commerce poison the art. Create the art from a pure place. As soon as I finish a song, I might think, wow, that’s great, and I’ve done all of the re-writing I need to do. The next thing I think is, wow, who could cut this song? But I never think of who could cut this song while I’m writing it.

I know there are people and writers that don’t agree with this. There are writers that do great work on demand writing for projects that are ready. It’s like the old Motown days. Lamont Dozier was at the Northern California Songwriters Association last year, and he was talking about how Berry Gordy would walk in and say, “By 4 o’clock, I need a song about rain, by the ocean, with love. Do it.” And they did it. They wrote some of the greatest songs ever written. I can’t do that. I have problems with that. I have to write whatever I’m feeling like writing, and whatever moves me. Then I try and figure out who could do this song. There is nothing wrong with that. I don’t need to starve with this. None of us need to starve to be vital writers and artists. I don’t quite agree with that theory either.

So I wanted to start this talk about creativity. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about where I think songs come from, or at least where they come from for me. Again, I used to write songs just about myself. It was all very momentary. Whatever happened last week, that’s what I’d write a song about. I wrote about ten songs a year, because let’s face it, our lives go through peaks and valleys, but they also go through periods where not much is happening. So if you only write about yourself and your own life, you’re not going to have stuff to write about all the time. These days, I write 40 or 50 songs a year—not that quantity is that important. I spend 120 days a year or so writing songs, locked in a little room. I love it. But I don’t have enough stuff going on in my world to write all of those songs about.

One of the big jumps I made as a songwriter was to realize that I had the ability to write about anything and anybody. I can read the newspaper, and as long as I had a reaction to what I read, as long as I was moved in some way, as long as I said, “Wow, that’s great,” or, “Oh man, that’s terrible. Can you imagine going through that?” I could then be like an actor and put myself into that position and write a song about it. I could talk to friends who were going through a rough time, or somebody who had just fallen in love with somebody and was really happy. That kind of thing. I could literally write about anything.

The other thing I realized early on is that I could write about it in any person that I wanted to. We’re not tied to writing about things as they happen. If something happens to somebody else, I am just as apt to write it in first person as I am to take something that happened to me and write a third person story song about it. I’ll write it in whatever the most powerful way is to tell that story. Each song presents itself differently.

I wanted to give you a couple of things I heard from Randy Newman years ago. He said things that always stuck with me. Those of you who are familiar with Randy Newman’s music know he writes about everything. Somebody asked him once, “How do you write about all of these things?” He had a song about a coal miner, and it was written in first person. The guy said, “It sounds like you’ve been digging coal in the mines for 20 years.” Randy Newman said, “Well actually, I met this coal miner on the subway in New York. We went out to get some breakfast, and he told me about his life digging coal in the mines. I went home and wrote a song about it. It’s a lot easier than digging coal in the mines for 20 years.” He said, “That’s my job. I’m a songwriter. Not everybody can do what I do.” Not everybody can do what we do. Part of our job is to be, if you will, Cyrano de Bergerac almost, the voice for somebody else, to put forth something that happened to somebody. He also said that our job as songwriters is to be a grand observer—to always be listening. I don’t know about you, but I can’t go to a movie without saying to my wife, “Hey, did you see the way he just looked at her? Do you have a pen?” I’m constantly ‘on’. It’s a blessing and a curse, as you all well know. I hear people say things all the time, and part of my job as a songwriter is not only to listen to what they said, but possibly to add a different context to what they said. I had a really strained relationship with my father that is pretty darn true to life in the second verse of “Grown Men Don’t Cry.” Another example is about a year ago I was taking a hike in Virginia. I was at a songwriters’ retreat, and this guy was talking about how he couldn’t help but get his kids really expensive gifts for Christmas. He was just kind of a softy. He always bought them things he knew he shouldn’t. My friend was with me and said to the guy, “Man, I wish you had been my dad.” I had always wanted to write a song—and the song ended up being called “Father’s Day.”

The lyric goes:

Another Father’s Day and I know what I’d like to say
I wish you’d been my dad
I wish we’d spent more time
I wish you hadn’t gotten mad when I tried to speak my mind
And I needed you
It didn’t come through
And I never understood
Back then to all my friends
You were the hero of the neighborhood
But I wish you’d been my dad

Well, that’s a big jump. I guess the point here is that I would have never written that song with those words if that guy hadn’t said “I wish you’d been my dad,” about a completely different thing. I’m always looking and watching.

I’m going to give you one other example of this—what I call “the transfer of emotions.” Every day something incredible happens in your life, or somebody’s life, or you observe something amazing. I chronicle emotional moments. How many of you write down titles and stuff as you think of them? Yeah, we all do that. But what I also try and do—and I’m not standing up here and saying none of you do this, maybe you do, but for those of you who don’t—I write down and chronicle emotional moments that happen. I’ll give you kind of a funny one that happened. I was standing in line at a grocery store, and right behind me was this woman and her two year old son. He went to reach for the candy and he tripped. He hit his kneecap into some sharp pointy thing that was sticking up. It was bleeding and he started just bawling his head off crying right in the middle of the grocery store. His mom picked him up, and she held him up and kissed his kneecap. She said, “All gone.” Nice try mom. Then she did it again. She said, “All gone.” And then eventually he calmed down, and he looked at her. When she said “all gone” to him, it didn’t really do that much for me. It was okay. But it was when he looked back at her and said, (in the voice of a two year old -ed) “All gone.” I said, “Do you have a pen?” (audience laughter) I don’t know why I never carry one. I should, but I never seem to have one!

I wrote this thing down in a little book. It said, “Kid falls into candy and mom comforts child.” Blah blah blah. “Finally he’s okay. The nurturing kind of thing.” For two years that sits in a book. I’m just giving you this as an example, because I do this all the time. Two years later, my wife comes home from work one day. She had just had of one of those days. I kind of took care of her, and nurtured her. Two days later I was thinking about that, and I was looking through my book and I was thinking about writing. I didn’t have anything on my mind to write about. I’ll just play you a verse and a chorus of how it ended up to illustrate what I’m talking about…

You don’t have to say a word
From the sigh that I just heard
I can tell you’ve had one of those days
Baby, you can talk to me
Or we can sit here quietly
Just let go
It’s gonna be okay
I’m here now to hold you through the laughter and the tears
I’m here now to chase away your fears
When you get your scrapes and bruises
When the world simply refuses
Baby, I will love you through whatever’s wrong
Until it’s all gone
Until it’s all gone

My point is, I never could have written that song that way if the baby hadn’t fallen into the candy counter, and if my wife hadn’t come home after work after a bad day. There is a transfer of the emotion.

The thought I want to leave you with is: Be observant. There are song ideas everywhere, everyday. A lot of things that I write in that notebook never become songs. It just took two minutes to write it down, though. It’s not a big deal. I know there are things sitting in my notebook that happened two years ago that are going to be songs five years from now. Something else in a synergy sense needs to happen to make that moment turn into a song. So please start doing that if you’re not doing that already.

The other thing that Randy Newman said that I think is really interesting is that we have a responsibility to our times. That has always stuck with me. The music that we write reflects the era that we live in. We don’t often think of ourselves in that way, but think about people listening to the music being made today 50 years from now. All you have to do is think back to, like Forties music. Let’s just (talk about) love songs, (for example). Relationships between men and women – and men and men, and women and women, hey – have changed in the last 100 years. We relate to each other differently. And the songs reflect it. A love song lyric of the Thirties and Forties wouldn’t fly these days. It would almost sound corny, and yet sometimes it’s still nice to hear from back then. But it’s a different time, and I think it’s important to stay on top of that and know the time you’re in.

I also think that we have to realize that we have the freedom to fictionalize. Anybody sitting in this room that doesn’t realize that, please listen to that. We have the freedom to fictionalize. Meaning that even if you write something about you and an event that happened to you lyrically, you owe it to the listener and the song to leave out the boring parts. You can edit, and make things up. I love to make things up. I don’t know about you, but I rarely get whole songs. An event happens, and it inspires a verse, maybe a chorus. Then it’s time to make some stuff up. That’s my favorite part. Do you think all of the great fiction writers thought of the whole book, that the whole book just happened to them? No. Something happened that made them want to write that book. They were inspired or moved by something. Then the characters led them where they wanted to go.

There is this guy named Andy Breckman. He’s a screenwriter, and he has a song called “God, I Love To Write.” I’m going to do a terrible job of quoting it, but I can quote the best parts. It’s a story song and it starts off, “Railroad Bill was a friend of mine, and he’d go walking home.” And he says, “One day Bill on his way home from work saw this cat stuck up in a tree,” and it goes on about how he was going to go save this cat. And then his character revolts. It says, “Bill said no. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to save no cat in no tree. This is a stupid song and no folk singer is going to make a fool out of me.” And then he goes on, “Why don’t you have me save a beautiful woman on a railroad track? What is it with this cat fixation you have?” (lots of audience laughter) It goes on and on. At one point, he says to Bill, “Look, I’ve got the pen in my hand. You are the character. Get up in that tree and save that cat!” And Bill says, “No I’m not going to do it.” It goes on and on, and then in the third verse it says, “Just then, a lightening bolt came down from the sky and struck Bill dead where he stood.” At the end it says, “The cat came down from the tree, had a bowl of warm milk and went to sleep for the night. Bill is survived by a wife and three children. God I love to write.” (more laughter) I think there is interesting stuff in there. We have a lot of power with that pen. Just ask people who we’ve been in relationships with who did us wrong. They know. How do you judge a good relationship? By how many songs you got out of it. Some of the worst ones are the best ones, really.

My friend Alan Chamblin always says, “Never let the facts get in the way of the truth.” A great writer never lets the facts get in the way of the truth. What’s the truth? An emotional truth. Why are you writing this song? What’s the feeling you’re trying to evoke? I think that’s the important thing. Here again, you have to know what kind of writer you are.

I have a friend, Bob DePiero, and in Country music, he has probably written about 30 Top10 hits. Every single one of them is a fun, roll-down-the-top, ride-to-the-beach radio song. That’s what Bob does, and he does it really well. He said, “Music is for people to forget about their troubles. It’s to roll down the top, drive down to the beach, and forget about their life and all of its problems.” And I said, “No, Bob. Music is to move people, to make them feel, to make them think, to make them cry, to make them laugh, to move them.” And you know what? We’re both right. It’s for all of that.

Music is fabulous. Imagine the world for half a second without it. I think there is a reason why there are all kinds of music. Some people dig jazz. Some people think jazz is too busy for them. They want a folk song, kind of thing. Other people like country music. Other people hate it. Pop music, alternative rock music – it’s all good. It’s nice that it all exists because it gives us the choice as listeners of an amazing array of things to listen to. I think here again you have to figure out who you are and how you’re going to fit into that mix. I don’t write fun radio songs like Bob DePiero does as well as he does. I wrote a song called “Daddy’s Money” that was a fun radio song. Who did I write it with? Bob DePiero. I was there. I remember contributing to it to some extent. But I’m not going to be writing a whole bunch of those any time soon, because it’s not where my focus is. I tend to write social issue songs, and things that I really care about. That’s just what I do.

When people ask me, “How did you make a dent in this crazy music business?” I do think that one of the reasons that a lot of my songs have been recorded is because they are somewhat unique in nature. I do write some love songs, but I haven’t had too many of them cut. In Nashville, like I’m sure is true in L.A., everybody writes love songs. So when I get a love song on hold with an artist, and they’re thinking about what they’re going to record, I’m guessing 150 love songs on the same topic as mine come through the door. Well guess what, one of them probably has a little better melody than mine, or one of them has a little more unique line. But when I write something like “Grown Men Don’t Cry,” for instance, and when Tim McGraw got interested in that song, it stuck around because there weren’t 100 other “Grown Men Don’t Cry’s” coming through the door. By topic, I’m talking about, it’s unique in nature. I’m not telling you that you should do this, but I’m just saying this seems to work for me. When an artist or a producer has a slot, and they’re looking for something they haven’t been able to find, mine might fit that slot. That’s opposed to the type that they have so many choices to fill that slot with. Even if you write mainly love songs, try and come at it from a little different, left-of-center place. I think all of us are trying to do something that has been done a million times. Everything has been said. Have you ever felt like that? Like there is nothing else you could possibly say? Baloney. There is another way to say it. I think we have to keep thinking of unique ways to put things.

Another thing that I wanted to talk about this morning are the opportunities that you may not be aware of to get your songs out. Everybody wants so-and-so to do their songs – big star #101 – whether it be Pop music, or Country music, or whatever. Why not? It’s a nice goal, but it’s difficult to achieve right from the get-go. However, I think there are lots of opportunities, right here at this TAXI conference, for instance. I heard some really good music last night on this stage. Maybe most of it was written by the people that were doing it. Maybe not. What I’m urging you to do is to go out into your local communities – I know a lot of you live in all parts of the country – and find the hot new band. Find the singer-songwriter who is out there who maybe doesn’t have all of the songs they need. Pitch your songs to people that don’t have a record deal that are still trying to get one.

I want to share with you a little story that will illustrate this. My friend John Ims wrote a song called “She’s In Love With The Boy.” Back in 1994 I think, it was Trisha Yearwood’s first hit in Nashville. How did that song get pitched? I’ll tell you – I was there. It was in Kerrville, Texas at the Kerrville Folk Festival, which is a songwriter festival that I go to every year. John was sitting there at a campfire, because at night we’d all sit around and swap songs. He said, “Let me play my new song,” and he played it. A woman named Christine Albert was sitting there. She is a really good singer from Austin, Texas. She was getting ready to do her second or third independent record on her own label. She said, “John, I love that song. Can I record that song on my new album?” He said, “Sure.” This album was destined to sell probably only 2,000 to 4,000 records, so it wasn’t exactly going to be a financial bonanza for John Ims. But so what? At worst, you’re just getting music out in the universe.

What a nice thing to do. And at best, I’ll tell you what happened. She did that CD. She sold it off the stage at her gigs, and she also sent it Nashville to about six or seven producers trying to get herself a record deal for the next album. One of them was Garth Fundis. He heard her record. He didn’t like her enough to sign her, but he heard that song and really dug it. He put it in a file. I asked him once how this happened and he told me he put it in his file called “Songs I Like.” That was not a big filing cabinet! (laughter) At the time, he was not producing anybody that that song fit. That was 1993, approximately. What was Trisha Yearwood doing at that time? She was singing demos for me and everybody else in Nashville. She was the best demo singer in history. She could walk in and sing a song in 20 minutes and get it right, and put feeling into it. Two years after Garth Fundis got that song and put it in a drawer, Trisha Yearwood got her deal with MCA Records. Who did they hire as the producer? Garth Fundis. They had a first song meeting, and he pulled open that drawer and said, “I’ve got a song I want you to hear.” It became her first single. It was BMI’s Song of the Year. It has gotten over 2 million plays so far. It sold 3 million records. Where did that song get pitched? At a campfire in Kerrville, Texas. So, get your music out in the universe any way you can. If you perform, get out there and play. You never know who is going to see you.

Also in that same tone, I want to ask how many of you perform – get out and play? Well, it’s not like the rest of you are screwed, but I will tell you this. I can’t imagine being a writer who never performs. I know some writers in Nashville who never perform, and the only feedback they ever get on their songs are like from A&R people, and producers. But the truest, most real thing that I ever get about a song of mine is from an audience. There is nothing like an audience en masse. They don’t have any baggage. It either works or it doesn’t. Even if I pull you aside and say to you, “Hey listen to my new song. What do you think?” Baggage. You don’t want to hurt my feelings, or you think it might be a good thing for you to tell me it was great. Whatever. I’ve poisoned the interaction. But with an audience, they don’t buy into that. You either get them or you don’t. I don’t mean just applause. Those of you who play know what I’m talking about. You can feel it. I can feel when a song is working. I can feel when it’s not working. A lot of them I rewrite because I get a song out and play it, and I realize there is a certain point in that song where I’m losing people. There is something I’ve said where I think I’ve chosen the language that they are going to go down the road I want them to do down, but I haven’t. They’re going down some other road.

So take advice from A&R people and the critiquers at TAXI, and from your wife, or husband, or mother, or child, but take it with a grain of salt. Know that all of those people come to the table with a certain amount of baggage. Your wife, or husband, or significant other will love everything you do probably. You’re brilliant, as you should be in their eyes. But it’s not exactly a barometer of what the rest of the world is going to think. They love you. I met a woman once who said, “My husband hates everything I write because he’s really jealous of the fact that I do this and spend all of this time with music. He’s always very critical.” I told her to leave that marriage!

I don’t really have time for this whole topic, but I will say just this about it: Rewriting: please be good to your songs. Be true to yourself. Be willing to work hard. I have written songs in like three or four hours for the whole song. Alan Chamblin and I wrote a song called “Don’t Laugh At Me.” We wrote that song in about four hours. And you know what, at the four-hour mark, we went to lunch, came back, and everything felt right. It was done. We have another song called “Cactus In A Coffee Can” that is a story song. It took us 100 hours, six months of phone calls, of driving to North Carolina together, of hashing it out. We must have tried 25 lines for this one line in the song that didn’t quite work. What does that tell you? That I’m willing to spend 100 hours. Do I like spending 100 hours? No. I’d much rather everything just come rolling out, and in four hours I’m done. It’s a masterpiece. Does it happen like that often? Not for me. I don’t know about you. I’m willing to work. I have a level of self-critique and a standard that I need to achieve. I don’t always easily achieve it. Also I try not to beat myself up when I can’t easily achieve it. I’d rather commend myself for having the standard in the first place. You cannot judge songwriting by any standard other than itself, in the sense that you can’t judge how long you spend at it with how much it yields.

If you have a job hanging sheet rock, let’s say, and you put up a piece of sheet rock and then you spend the next eight hours admiring the left hand corner of it. The boss comes in and says, “You’ve only put up one panel.” “Yeah, well but look at it. The left corner is gorgeous, the way it fits in there.” Then he says, “You’re fired!” However, if you write songs, and if I spend six hours writing a song, and at the end of that six hours I have one line, or one piece of music that I love, that’s a great day. I think of the muse as some sort of really sneaky little devilish muse. But also a fair muse sooner or later. My notion is when I spend 100 hours writing “Cactus In A Coffee Can,” that the muse was very impressed. One day he or she looked down and said, “You know, you guys deserve this ‘Don’t Laugh At Me’ thing. Four hours – here.” I don’t know, it’s just a theory. Be willing to work hard, is all I’m trying to say.

Thoreau once said that every writer’s duty was to give “first and last, a simple and sincere account of their own life.” More than his sage words reached 26-year old singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan. In preparing the songs for her latest release, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (Arista), the Canadian songstress, perhaps inspired by Thoreau’s Walden experience, retreated to an isolated cabin in the mountains for nearly seven months of meditation and soul-searching. “It was just an amazing time for me,” she relates.

The results of her temporary sabbatical are intensely personal, emotionally rich, dark, moody, stirring songs like “Good Enough,” “Plenty,” “Possession,” and “Circle.” Listening to these songs, one can almost hear McLachlan going through cathartic changes, making discoveries about her self and her life. Indeed, several times during this interview, Sarah talked about the songwriting process as a self-therapy. “It’s given me so much, as far as learning about myself,” she says.

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Sarah McLachlan studied guitar and piano as a child. She remembers being drawn to the sounds of such seminal folk/rock artists as Cat Stevens, Joan Baez and Simon & Garfunkel. Later, as she reached her teens, it was Peter Gabriel’s music that touched her most. “The emotional response you get from his songs, because of the honesty, that really inspired me to find my own voice and write from that point of view,” she says.

At 19, she signed a recording contract with Nettwerk Records. The first ten songs she wrote comprised her debut, 1988’s well-received Touch. Her sophomore effort, 1991’s Solace announced McLachlan’s talents to the world and brought into focus her intimate, moving vocal power and evocative songwriting gifts.

Currently on an extensive tour supporting her new release, Sarah McLachlan recently stopped to share her thoughts on writing, art and solitude with The Performing Songwriter.

You said that it took about six years to learn how not to edit yourself and remain open in your music…
(laughs) Hopefully I’ll get that back again someday.

What kinds of things can a songwriter do to reach that place in their writing?
Well, for me on this new record, it was mainly secluding myself, being away from society and being away from everything. I locked myself up in a cabin in the mountains and stayed there for seven months. It was just an amazing time for me to really focus on a lot of stuff that had sort of been lurking behind the scenes in my brain, but never had the time to come out. Or it kept being put aside, because there were so many distractions. Also I think, I got incredibly in tune with the earth, with nature, like I hadn’t before. I couldn’t write a thing for three months. My brain was eating itself. It was terribly cold out and I couldn’t do anything creative. I was just frozen.

Everything was churning around inside but nothing would come out. Then spring happened and everything totally opened up. I was blossoming as well. Most of the songs–I had written four previous to going to the cabin–were written then, about seven of them, between April and May. The place that I got to in myself of feeling calm and peaceful and also for the first time in my life, feeling I’m happy now. Not ‘I would be happy if . . . ‘ There was always that going on with me. I finally got to a place where I was totally happy and peaceful and living in the present tense instead of in the future, you know and projecting things.

Did you go into that experience with any sort of agenda?
Well, in the process of not being able to write, I kept a journal, these sort of morning pages. I wrote three pages before I’d do anything else, just to try and clear my head. Most of it was totally banal like mmm, coffee smells good, I have nothing to say, I have nothing to say (laughs) for ten times. But sure enough, about midway through the second page, sometimes I’d really open up and all this stuff would come out. You know, you’re not really awake yet and you’re just sort of spewing whatever’s on the top of your head sort of free form. And there was no editing happening there at all, because no one was going to read this book. I could say whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to hide behind anything, and I think that really helped me. To be really open and honest with myself, that was good. I’m pretty good at deceiving myself or I’ve known myself to do that in the past (laughs).

Did you listen to music while you were there?
I listened to a lot of Tom Waits, and Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, which is one of my favorites.

The opening lines of your songs are always captivating and they seem to contain the germ of the whole song in just a few words.
I figure the first two lines usually tell the whole story of a song (laughs). The first two lines are what comes out first when I’m writing, and they basically tell which direction, for me lyrically, the song is going to go. Sometimes those two lines will sit for months by themselves, until they find a completion to the story, or a completion to the stage that I’m in of trying to work through something, until hopefully I’m somewhere near the other side of it, when I can be a little more objective and write it down. It’s the same with titling the songs. Most of the song titles come from the last word in the second line (laughs).

Say you have those two lines and the music wants to continue. Will you let it go on without words?
Unfortunately, I often try to fill it in. I’m sort of still a bit stuck to that convention of writing a song with a four-line verse, the more traditional phrasing of a stanza or whatever. So if there are only two lines, there usually end being four lines. I work at making it four before I stop (laughs). But there’s also this thing, when I go in the studio, Pierre (Marchand, her producer) is great at editing. He’ll say, why don’t you just not sing that line, do you really need to say that, you kind of already said it. He has done that, which is something that I can’t really do, because I’m not as objective about it. And I don’t see things from the same direction that he does, which is why he’s so good to work with.

Do you demo songs before you go into the studio?
Well, I demo them in a very simple way, with acoustic guitar or piano. Sometimes a drum machine. But my sort of restrictions on myself for going into the studio are making it strong by itself in the simplest form. So if you’re hiding behind a lot of production, if you take it away, you can still play that song and it’ll still be strong on its own.

You mentioned a drum machine. Do you ever write with just a groove?
I have never have before. I’m pretty lazy as far as technology, and I think it’s something I’ll probably have to get more into, because I’m sort of exhausting the instruments that I’m using, or exhausting the inspiration that they give me. I can go back and forth, but I don’t have a piano, so I end up doing a lot of stuff on guitar. But when I was in Montreal I did, so a lot of this record came from piano because it was such an exciting thing, a new sound, a new instrument. That happened with electric guitar as well. I started writing with that, because it was a new sound. So maybe I will get into the drum machine. I just have to learn how to use the damn thing first (laughs). I always fight against technology. I want to be grass roots and I want where it comes from to be organic.

Well it sounds like you have a good combination with your producer, because he strikes me as a technically minded guy…
Oh, he’s amazing that way, because he’s such a techno-head. But at the same time, he totally comes from the organic sense of letting the song happen in whatever direction it goes in. Just following and not pushing the song for any wrong reason, whatever feels right go with it.

A lot of your songs have an air of mystery and darkness. Is there something you do during the writing process to conjure this mood?
(laughs) I just think it’s what’s in my brain. It’s not that I’m really pessimistic or anything–I’m not. But I sort of like the effect of two sides of things–one being really pretty and one being really ugly, like when you lift up a pretty rock and there’s all these mites and worms underneath it (laughs). I think that sort of came from this one poem I read in grade nine. It’s funny, the little things that stick with me my whole life. Wilford Owens, he’s a World War I poet and he wrote about being in the field in the war and all the horrors that went on. But somehow, without glamorizing or romanticizing it, he made it incredibly beautiful. In the same breath, he’d be talking about something horrendously grotesque. I just really loved that. That’s actually where the title of the record came from too, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.” It was taken from a line in one of his poems. “Quick boys, in an ecstasy of fumbling we fit the masks just in time . . .” and I thought that was amazing, that “in an ecstasy of fumbling.” It was so beautiful, and since grade nine I’ve been trying to fit that into something (laughs). I sort of have a little library of phrases and words in my head that I like. Like “murmur.” Never been able to use it yet, but it’s a beautiful word. I like words that say so many things. Language is such a beautiful thing and words are so amazing.

Tell me about writing “Possession.” Were you writing from a male point of view?
Yes. I tried to put myself into their shoes, into the mind of someone who is so obsessed with another person that they could conceive murdering them. It took me awhile to justify that one. As a woman, living with that fear in the back of your mind every day with the possibility of being raped. And so, it’s kind of weird for me, but then I save myself in the third verse by saying I’d never really act on it, except in my dreams. And maybe that’s putting me into a false sense of reality, but it did help. Not just that, but writing the whole song, was kind of a cleansing thing for me, because I had two people in particular who just became incredibly intense with the fantasy world that they created, and demanded that that was reality and we had to be together. And they went to great lengths to make this happen. It became frightening, but it ticked me off that I had to look over my shoulder every time I walked out the door. There was one point where I was told I’d have to have a bodyguard. It was like, screw that, I don’t want to live in fear. It makes me so angry.

When you’re writing a relationship song, do you keep a particular person in mind while you’re doing the lyric?
Yeah, I usually do set up a fairly clear image of who I’m talking about. “Plenty,” for example, is definitely aimed at another individual. I tend to switch people in a lot of the songs. Sometimes I’ll say “you,” and sometimes “I” and I’m not really sure why I do that.

What was the inspiration behind “Good Enough?”
A lot of things. That song has been such an amazing experience for me because I’ve learned so much from it. There’s so many different stories that I attach to it now. But it sort of came from, initially really missing my best girlfriend. It started out as fiction, about a couple in which the woman was pretty much alienated by just about everybody, because her husband was really abusive and domineering, which sort of somewhat mirrors my mother and father’s relationship. And basically, I am the friend coming in, saying hey, you deserve more than this, why don’t you come with me and I’ll take care of you. The video that I’m going to do for that song is the first sort of dramatic narrative that I’ve done. Everything else has been pretty abstract, trying to find a parallel universe to describe it differently. But we’re going to have a little girl, a man and woman, and a friend, possibly an imaginary friend. We’re going to look at the relationship between the little girl and her friends and also between the mother and the little girl. And there’s quite a bit of alienation from the father, who’s been behind the scenes the whole time anyway.

How much input do you have as a songwriter as to how your songs are interpreted in a video?
A lot. I’m very lucky in that the record company I’m signed to has given me a 100% creative control, pretty much from the start. It’s been amazing. I’ve directed a couple of the videos, and the ones I didn’t direct have been my concept, because I simply don’t know the language of film. I’ve entrusted my vision to other people, and have been quite well represented. I’m actually working with one of my best friends on this film for “Good Enough.” Her name is Kharen Hill, and she’s done most of my photos in the past six years. She’s amazing. We talked a lot about what the song meant, and we got this whole narrative thing going. It’s going to look really beautiful, and it’s the first one that’s going to be literal.

Love is usually something that’s idealized in pop songs or expressed in a co-dependent, I’ll die without you sort of way. What do you try to do with the concept of love in your songs?
In the past, I thought it was really a great thing, but it turned out to be really bad, so what does that mean? I tend to try to analyze the mistakes, or what went wrong. Why did this not work? Usually I turn to myself and ask what’s wrong with me, or where did I go wrong? Then I turn to them and ask where did you go wrong? So I guess I’m trying to show that hopefully–it depends on the song–it’s not any one person’s fault. It’s like there’s two people involved. I’m focusing more on the emotion of what people go through when love does go away, or when people break up. The anger, the frustration of why did it go wrong. I tried so hard, or maybe I tried too hard (laughs). It depends. On this record, on “Plenty,” I decided I was in love with somebody. The problem was that I had projected the image of the perfect man on to them. And they sort of played up to it as well. Then it sort of crumbled fairly quickly, and there was a frightened little boy behind that facade. It was wild for me, because it was the first time I’d really deceived myself in such a grand manner. I wanted to believe it, so I forced myself to believe.

Are songs an act of discovery for you?
Yeah, and sometimes long after the fact. Going back to “Good Enough,” one of the things I was focusing on was don’t tell me why he’s never been good to you, don’t tell me why nothing’s good enough. For a couple years, every time I’d see my mom, I’d say, you know, you deserve more, you deserve to be happier than you are. Why are you putting up with this? Basically telling her that the only thing she knew sucked. So she never wanted to see me, and I wondered why. I couldn’t understand it, then I wrote that song. Around the same time, I tried reverse psychology and didn’t hassle her anymore and just accepted that she had accepted. Then she opened up. She completely changed and she started saying, I’m not going to accept this anymore, I’m changing this and this and this. It was fantastic, because I wasn’t beating it into her, she was doing it on her own. That song taught me that. I have a lot of emotional attachment to that song.

Is it difficult for you to keep emotional connection with your songs over the course of a tour?
It does fluctuate, but I’ve found that with these new songs on Fumbling, it’s been really easy to keep the connection. I don’t know if that’s because they’re fresh and new or if it’s because they’re the strongest songs that I have yet. The good thing is that usually I can remember the places that they came from when I sing. I don’t remember what they’re about so much as the place that they came from, the mood that I was in, the strong, quiet place that I was in when I was writing it. And that gives me a lot of happiness. Sometimes I’m going through emotions, singing the songs and not even listening to the words, but having some weird memory of sitting under a tree and feeling happy (laughs). Other times I’m thinking about my laundry list. The weirdest things go through my head when I’m singing. I’ll think about what I said five minutes before, like man, that was stupid (laughs). But I’ll still be singing.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about what goes through their minds when they’re singing their songs.
(laughs) All sorts of crazy stuff. Just life, like oh man, The Canucks lost, what a drag, and you’ll be singing very well and emoting, but little flashes will come in of other things. Then all of a sudden I’ll find myself at the end of verse. How did I get there? Wow, I guess I got through it, but I was someplace else. That happens fairly often in certain songs.

Sir Laurence Olivier once said that when he was acting Hamlet on stage and bringing the audience to tears, he was sometimes wondering if his shirts would be ready at the cleaners the next day.
(laughs). It makes sense. You do something like that every night. One night–and I never ever watch TV–but I’ve become involved in hockey, and it’s really fun. So I was watching a game before a show and when I got out there on stage, the TV had sucked all my memory away. Before every line of every verse and chorus, I was terrified right up until it came out that it wasn’t coming out, that I’d forgotten it. It just freaked me out. Not too many people noticed it in the audience because I’d hit most of the lines. But I asked an actress friend of mine and she said that it’d happened to her before. You’ve just got to trust that it’s there. You’re just blocking it because of your fear. You’ve got to get rid of that fear, so think about that laundry list, think about mowing the lawn, and it’ll be there.

What would you like to accomplish as a songwriter?
I’d like to keep trying to be able to work through things. Songwriting is such therapy for me. It’s given me so much, as far as learning about myself. I’d like to be able to keep doing that and that’s it. That’s everything to me, just being able to work through things. I guess an offshoot of that is other people listening to it and being able to get something for themselves.

Do you have the sense that what you’re doing will last?
Yes, it certainly will last for me. I’d like to think I’ll keep writing and getting better and better. I hope (laughs). I’m really proud of what I’ve done so far, and that pride hasn’t diminished in any way.

What advice would you give to someone looking to make music their career?
I’d tell them to go read Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, because his advice is better than any advice I could ever give.