From: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org (shindell-list-digest) To: shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Subject: shindell-list-digest V2 #67 Reply-To: shindell-list@smoe.org Sender: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-shindell-list-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk shindell-list-digest Saturday, May 13 2000 Volume 02 : Number 067 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [RS] Three Shows in Four Nights [ptpower@juno.com] Re: [RS] Friday Night Show [SMOKEY596@aol.com] [RS] has anyone seen this review? ["Norman A. Johnson" Subject: [RS] has anyone seen this review? Interesting review below. Has Joan Baez performed Mary M. or did the review just confuse Joan with Dar? Norman ********************************* http://www.mcall.com/html/news/am_mag/d1_shindell0324shindell0324.htm In-transit Richard Shindell is better for his travels with the likes of Joan Baez, Cry Cry Cry 03/24/00 By GEOFF GEHMAN Of The Morning Call In control of his soul Richard Shindell was driving Route 80 in Pennsylvania when he dreamed a delightful apocalypse. What if, wondered the songwriter, who often what-ifs in the car, a legion of motorists were so hellbent on conquering their brethren, they missed their exits on the New Jersey Turnpike? What if they vanished into the Delaware Water Gap, into the ambush of an Old Testament sun? Shindell's vision became the song "Transit,'' in which road-raging lemmings ignore a nun changing a tire en route to worshipping with prisoners in song. The Middle Easternized pilgrimage unfolds on his latest recording, "Somewhere Near Paterson'' (Signature Sounds), which he will sample Saturday night at Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem, where he attended Moravian College for two years with Godfrey's regular, former band mate and role model John Gorka. A cloverleaf of bittersweet, back-door stories, the disc suits a self-described "misanthropic ex-seminarian lapsed-Buddhist agnostic for Jesus.'' "I'm seeing how vindictive society is becoming,'' explains Shindell from a Valhalla, N.Y., home shared with his history-professor wife and their two young children. "Everybody is doing so well -- well, not everybody -- and the stock market's up and schools and prisons are being built. Yet people seem so mean, so bloodthirsty, especially on the highways.'' For nearly three years Shindell's travels have been particularly welcoming. In 1997 and 1998, he toured with Joan Baez, whose recordings of Scottish ballads he's treasured since childhood. Three of his songs appear on her 1997 recording, "Gone from Danger," a collection of numbers by younger singer-songwriters. One of Shindell's compositions, "Reunion Hill,'' features a Civil War widow's memories of nourishing parched soldiers on her property, partly as a tribute to a husband killed in battle. Released on Shindell's same-named 1997 CD, it was conceived as a sequel to Baez's version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.'' Shindell thanks Baez for more than inspiration. She instructed him to stop mumbling into the microphone, to commune comfortably with larger communities. "When you're onstage with someone like Joan Baez every night, you learn to carry yourself,'' notes Shindell. "Not that I've reached that level yet, but you do learn to have a better rapport with an audience. It was a real nice side effect.'' Baez's endorsement of Shindell as "one of the best songwriters of this or any other era'' boosted his trio with Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplansky, fellow friends and harmony lovers, careful writers and musical sponges. Cry Cry Cry's sporadic tour ended in January, a year longer than the initial projection of one month. The tour, in turn, has helped an eponymous 1998 recording sell approximately 55,000 copies, a robust figure for musicians signed to small, word-of-mouth labels. Pleased by Cry Cry Cry's success, Shindell also is pleased to return to solo performing full-time. The group "was what it was. It was a great time. We had fun. It was good for all of our careers,'' claims the 39-year-old native of Port Washington, N.Y. "It was good for me to brush off my sideman persona. I don't know, 100 years from now we may get back together. But we always intended to go back to our regular lives.'' Cry Cry Cry and Baez raised Shindell's career another rung. The increase in fans, sales and fees -- not only his, but Kaplansky's and Williams' -- persuaded his manager to create a recording contract that would make him more a master than an indentured servant. Charlie Hunter and Shindell found a willing partner in Signature Sounds, a label based in western Massachusetts, in the basement of the owner's house. Signature pays to make and promote Shindell's recordings. He finances production, paying Williams, Kaplansky and producer/guitarist Larry Campbell (Bob Dylan, k.d. lang), sacrificing advances for greater artistic control. Musician and label split profits 50-50, a friendlier arrangement than the traditional 86-14 ratio, which, because of various nitpicking expenses, often falls to 7 percent. Perhaps most important for a songwriter, Shindell owns his master recordings (Hunter negotiated the same deal for Williams with Razor & Tie). That means he, and not Signature, will be paid if, say, "Transit" scores a documentary on road rage. That means he can rightfully request compensation if, say, a student in his birthplace of Paterson, N.J., downloads the song from the Internet. Customizing Shindell's career has improved his stock. "Somewhere Near Paterson'' is placed at listening posts in Borders bookstores. It's sold with coffee in 700 Starbucks stores. It's marketed on richardshindell.com, along with the host's guitar tunings and favorite books (i.e., Stephen Jay Gould's "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History''). This blitz has helped the recording sell more than 500 copies per week. That Soundscan figure is more than double the sales apex of Shindell's previous disc, "Reunion Hill." Hunter admits Signature is too small a player to make Shindell a household fixture. But having more control over his soul, says the fan of memorably distressed voices (John Prine's, Guy Clark's), is a priceless bonus for someone who prefers to worry about his family than nickeling and diming. "People have to be a little light on their feet these days,'' insists Shindell. "You don't want to sign your life away, and have everything change on you, and find yourself with a deal that doesn't make sense anymore. Nobody's signing big long-term deals because nobody knows what's happening with the technology. "On the one hand, downloading is terrifying,'' he adds. "You always want to get paid for what you're doing. But of course they thought that with radio and CDs, that people would be copying without paying and that never really materialized. "On the other hand, downloading could be an enormous boon to musicians, especially marginal or unknown musicians. It's incalculable how it's helped people who aren't signed to Sony or EMI or Time Warner, as if you can tell them apart anymore.'' Shindell delivers this cynicism easily, without anger or italics. His songs, too, are emotional seesaws. In the rocking, roiling "Confession,'' a pill-addicted stock broker alternates between rueful enthusiasm and desperate prayer. In the disarmingly gentle "You Stay Here,'' a Bosnian leaves loved ones to find coats, guns and God. In "Waiting for the Storm,'' a man sends his family to safety, opens windows and doors, moves furniture outdoors, and awaits the deluge in a rocking chair. All this stubborn drama is heightened by a Western bluegrass wallop, and by Shindell's firm, flexible baritone, which hints of chestnut, wisteria and colored beach glass. Sneaky confessions are a specialty of Shindell, who once studied to become a pastoral psychotherapist. That is, they're usually not his own, and they often contain sealed secrets. The narrator of "Reunion Hill,'' for example, sees her husband in a soldier's face she cleans, and feels his spirit in a hawk. Yet she refuses to reveal a dream on Indian Boulder. "Well, yeah, there are certain kinds of things I don't want anyone to know,'' admits Shindell. "I don't have any sort of moratorium about writing about my kids. I can tell you that being a parent means you're constantly exhausted and you never have enough time. I'm just not a big fan of diary songwriting. But it's not because I think it's wrong; it's just because I don't like it. I just tend to make things up.'' Shindell also downplays his habit of channeling female voices. In "The Ballad of Mary Magdalene,'' which Baez has performed, Christ's former follower can't understand why their tenderness is considered scandalous. Wounding and sweetly withering, it got Shindell dubbed "the Nicholas Kazantzakis of new folk.'' A former resident of a Buddhist monastery, he likes the reference to the author of the novel "The Last Temptation of Christ," which stars another compassionate, raw Mary Magdalene. "Having a great mother helps, but I don't really see writing from a woman's perspective is unusual. It's not like I'm writing 'To the Lighthouse,''' says Shindell, naming Virginia Woolf's novel. "It's not like I'm getting that deep into a woman's head. I'm writing 3„-minute songs. I'm stepping into the shoes of a woman just as I'm stepping into the shoes of a truck driver or a soldier. I just try to think from another person's point of view as concretely as possible. "It's a fine line,'' notes Shindell. "You can't be too general. But if it's too particular or idiosyncratic, you don't leave any room for people to put their own life into it.'' Of course, listeners sometimes make songs their own, jumping over the threshold, dominating not only a room but the entire house. Complete identification invariably leads to assuming Shindell has lived what he's written. More than one fan has been disappointed, he points out, to learn no one in particular infected his most-performed song, "Are You Happy Now?'' None of Shindell's ex-lovers departed with the spices from the rack, or the candy intended for trick-or-treaters. These deeds provoke the tune's jilted narrator to smash her pumpkin, and compose a kiss-off to a woman who complained he never wrote about her. "I'm always concerned when people take it too seriously, because I don't take it seriously,'' insists Shindell. "I mean, I wrote it tongue-in-cheek.'' This advice was ignored by an admirer of another Shindell song with another helpful tip. She accepted "On a Sea of Fleur-de-Lis'' so absolutely, she decided to live in an elm tree. ------------------------------ End of shindell-list-digest V2 #67 **********************************