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.
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.
From: https://addictedtosongwriting.com/shawn-colvin-born-to-be-telling-her-story/
