Did you come up through the Women’s Music Scene or the Folk Music Scene?
I would say more folk, because I live in Boston and there’s such a strong folk scene. I think a lot of people in many parts of the country, they don’t have a context for folk. They think folk means Peter, Paul & Mary. They don’t get that it means Indigo Girls, Shaun Colvin, Patty Griffin and things like that.
How do you label yourself these days?
I am comfortable with folk, as long as it is understood. But if there’s risk of it not being understood, I prefer acoustic singer/songwriter.
I really admire your songwriting. I’m just curious if you were a writer before you were a musician?
I became a musician pretty early and I was writing songs in college. Simultaneously in college I was taking a lot of creative writing classes and was writing a lot of short stories and fiction, but I never really pursued that.
What is your process for writing a song?
I always work with the guitar. And usually I am coming up with some chord changes and melodies first and begin to find that there are lines or emphasis that fall in with the feel of the song. There has to be something that sparks the song. Like there might have been something said to me, or something that I read in a book or an intense experience or another song. Sometimes I’ll learn another song. Like before I wrote Hold On which is on the new record, I had been learning how to play the Cat Stevens song “Trouble.” And then I started writing, “There’s always trouble…” and it took off from there. The songs are nothing alike, but there’s the word trouble. It just kind of got me into a certain head space to listen to that song. So I can be inspired by that kind of thing. Sometimes I’ll spend some time writing in my journal and then I’ll find that some of the images that I had written about start coming in.
You mentioned your song, Hold On and I wanted to ask you about that, because it really struck me and I was wondering if it was at all autobiographical. (The song is about a break-up.)
All of the songs on this record are somewhat autobiographical, but with tons of imagination thrown in. I had people ask me if this was an autobiographical and if we were okay. But, we’re great, we’re fine. We’re totally together. And I know people are concerned. But we are doing great.
It’s got to be hard when you write personal songs and people wonder about your life…
Yeah, I mean remember having this conversation with Liz a couple of years ago when she said, it was okay for me to write something other than just I’m so happy and in love because, people experience a huge range of stuff in relationships. If you just wanted to take a little bit of something and run with it with your imagination, don’t let me hold you back. I feel like I did that with this record. It’s not like I can’t relate to the stuff I wrote, but I expanded it to the extreme “what if” scenario.
I agree. It’s nice to have that diversity in the songs.
I think one of the most real and personal themes of this record that is true to my life. There’s a theme of searching for where to go next. St. Lucy is the patron saint of blindness and that song starts the record. It was pre-parenting, like do we really want to do this? Do I really want to be an artist all my life? And these questions about whether to stay in this relationship or whether to be an artist sort of flow through the record. And the last song, Dark Weather to me is the book end to St. Lucy. It’s like all right, we’ve been through all this and we’re going to get through it together. To me that closes the record.
You touch on a lot of social issues in your music. What inspires you to write about these things?
I only write about things that are related to the heart. I write about them because I was really feeling either really upset or concerned about what’s going on in our country and the world right now. I think it’s important to give voice to the kinds of heart-pain that people are going through regarding the war. No so much that George Bush, or anyone, is going to listen to this and change their opinion. I have a feeling that most people who get my record, in most cases are already of this progressive persuasion. But I feel like it’s a lonely place to be sometimes in this culture an to have some of these things articulated, it might help bolster some of those who are actually out there doing something about it.
