From: owner-small-repairs-digest@smoe.org (small-repairs-digest) To: small-repairs-digest@smoe.org Subject: small-repairs-digest V1 #114 Reply-To: $SENDER,small-repairs@smoe.org Sender: owner-small-repairs-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-small-repairs-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk small-repairs-digest Friday, October 10 1997 Volume 01 : Number 114 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [s-r] Auckland show/Survey ["Katherine McLeod" ] [s-r] check out this site for shawn articles... [BigHAIR844 Subject: [s-r] Auckland show/Survey Gee.... it's gone awful quiet out there in Small Repairs land... I must be the only one with too much time on my hands... :) Anyway - to the point - are there any Aucklanders out there who made it to Shawn's show on Friday? Cos if you're out there, we want the goss on Neil Finn turning up at the show... well, I do, at least. Also, I did say I was gonna resubmit my survey since I've seen Shawn live since I first submitted it a few months ago.. and I'm still not over it! ;) So here's the revised version... 1) city - lovely beachside suburb of Cronulla in "the winner is" Sydney... (sorry, little 2000 olympic joke we like to make...) 2) state/country - nsw, australia 3) Age - 24 4) Gender - F 5) occupation - Surf Life Saving Aust - beach hazard researcher (yes, that *is* a real job!) and network administrator 6) number of times you've seen shawn live - TWO, count em' TWO!!! And both last week... 7) favorite shawn song - Round of Blues (or maybe Shotgun...) 8) additional comments - generally taken as "so who else do you listen to...?", so I'll say a bit of everything really ... from Tori Amos to Charlie Sexton to Beethoven (occasionally) to Texas to....err... 80s stuff..(Jean made me say it!!)(sorry Jean - just kidding!) and lotsa stuff in between. 9) name (optional) - Katherine or Kat (not Kathy if you want me to respond...not that I have anything against Kathys...I'm just not one of them!) ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from the list send mail to majordomo@smoe.org with 'unsub scribe small-repairs' in the message body. FAQ & other info: http://www. tisd.net/~casey/shawn/small_repairs.html *REMEMBER* all posts not directly related to Shawn must have the tag 'NSC:' is their subject line - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 17:49:21 EDT From: BigHAIR844 Subject: [s-r] check out this site for shawn articles... Hello all... was buzzin about on America Online and came across a new site called Music Boulevard. It is an online CD store, but manages to provide some articles along with each artist. There are some here that you may have not seen. So check it out! Here is the addy: http://www.musicblvd.com/cgi-bin/tw/1528358876433135_104_14803 i snagged one of the articles for ya; hope it is new to some of you...Enjoy! SPIN February 1997 by SUE CUMMINGS HOME IMPROVEMENT Always expecting the roof to fall in, Shawn Colvin searched for a room, and a voice, of her own. Sue Cummings trails a once reluctant, now accomplished singer/songwriter. The lady painted on the cover of Shawn Colvin's new album has eyes that tell you something is wrong. Set in a milk-colored face like a Jan Vermeer portrait, there's one in her left socket, but two in her right. Then you notice the lit match in her hand, and the damage it's done -- a blaze set on the blue-green horizon, fanned by a rising wind. "Light the sky and hold on tight," Colvin sings in "Sunny Came Home," A Few Small Repairs' lead track, inspired by the painting. "I close my eyes and fly out of my mind into the fire." The edges of the woman's lips curl up into a slight, wicked smile. Colvin discovered Julie Speed's art in a gallery in Austin, Texas, the town where each now lives. Speed had painted an entire series of women outdoors, all standing in the foreground with "disaster on the horizon," as Colvin describes it. "I'm from South Dakota, and there's nothing to do there but watch the storms come in: That was it, that was excitement. So there's this whole idea of being out in the flatlands, everything okay -- but then feeling like the world is falling in around you." Considering her successes the last few years, it's remarkable that Colvin's lyrics still invoke that same ominous foreboding. Her debut album, 1990's Steady On, won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording; two nominations followed for 1992's Fat City, an album that featured a guest appearance by her guru, Joni Mitchell. Colvin's other supporters include Suzanne Vega, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Richard Thompson , and tough-girl TV host Rosie O'Donnell, whose invitation to Colvin to appear on her show has brought her to New York City for the week. Even Speed's starkly surreal painting now hangs, in all its bad-reproduction glory, in a prominent display window outside lower Manhattan's Tower Records. Colvin, perhaps remembering her own early '80s days as a struggling New York folkie, shakes her head in amazement. "Julie would just shit," she says, laughing quietly to herself. Colvin's cult is drawn in by lyrics that articulate the complexity of life as a 40-year-old woman, delivered by a voice that can nurture, cry, scold, and rejoice -- all within the five minutes it takes to finish "Polaroids," Fat City's signature song about her escape from South Dakota to New York. A slim figure with short, almost spiky blond hair, Colvin strikes her acoustic with the intensity of a rocker, so hard that while touring with Richard Thompson, she turned to wearing fake fingernails when the friction ground her real nails down to the quick. Like Roseanne Cash's Interiors, critics have called A Few Small Repairs Colvin's "breakup album," and she indeed wrote it after her divorce from Thompson's tour manager Simon Tassano. But nothing about Colvin's method is that simple. During the taping of the show, Rosie O'Donnell makes the assumption that the forceful, uptempo "Get Out of This House" is about evicting a boyfriend. Colvin corrects her. "Actually, it started out as a song about buyer's remorse, because I had just bought a house. But after a while, it became fun to think of it that [other] way." The lyrics swing in both directions, from "I got myself this house and you can't come in," to "I got myself this house now and I can't get out." When Colvin sings, "Go jump in the lake," she's not addressing an unwanted lover; she's standing alone in her second bedroom, looking out the window at Lake Austin. Furnishing that room is the task at hand this afternoon, when Colvin will search the antique shops along Lafayette Street for a desk. The one she has in mind is a model from the '50s -- not too large or small -- a size conducive to the task of songwriting. "I've never had a desk," she says, then pauses. "That's not true. I bought this one rolltop desk once. I had it when I moved to New York, always tucked away somewhere, and I didn't want to write at it." In the past, Colvin has called herself "a reluctant writer," and so it's not surprising she would want to create the perfect haven to coax words from her pen. Unfortunately, all the vintage desks in SoHo cost five figures, and years of scuffling have trained her not to splurge. Drifting from San Francisco to Texas, Boston, and the proving ground of bohemian New York, floundering through experiments in rock, jazz, and country, finally taught Colvin exactly where her strengths lie. "I think it takes a dedication to being honest with yourself. Because that's the only thing you've got to offer, your lyrical sensibility, your musical sensibility -- I don't think anybody creates anything without borrowing or stealing. There's few true originals, genius types. I'm talking about somebody who just seems to spring out of nowhere. Like Joni -- and Joni admits to having been influenced by Dylan quite a lot, because he just let it flop. If he was pissed, he was pissed, if he was in love he was in love. I've heard her talk about it, but you wouldn't know that to hear Joni Mitchell sing or play." A younger generation of women -- Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette, Courtney Love -- influence Colvin's cynical "New Thing Now." "I was feeling a little sad and frustrated about what a hypey business I was in, and how much I actually gave a shit about it. The last thing I want is it to be perceived as a slam on anybody. I wouldn't be reading music magazines if I didn't want to see myself in them. It's kind of pitiful that at the same time I'm wondering if this isn't all a little shallow, I'm wanting to be the next new thing." She finishes the thought by quoting her lyric: "It feels so good to doubt you / I could almost live without you / But not quite." Committed or carefree, single or married, famous or obscure, Colvin is always riding that tension, working the subtleties of her own uncertainty into a profound chiaroscuro. At New York's Supper Club, she introduces "Wichita Skyline," a Small Repairs track written in the dreamy Jimmy Webb-Glen Campbell vein of "Wichita Lineman," with help from her longtime collaborator and former boyfriend John Leventhal. "I must have been high to believe that I would ever leave," Colvin sings in the tune. "Now I'm just a flat, fine line like the Wichita skyline." In Kansas City, she confesses to the crowd, it was hard for her to sing that verse, having never been to Wichita. "Anyway, I totally understand what it feels like to be from there: `Just notice me, please.' "You know," she adds with a wry note of triumph, "you gotta just keep crankin' the songs." Shhh... posted without permission... ;) ~jean bH - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from the list send mail to majordomo@smoe.org with 'unsub scribe small-repairs' in the message body. FAQ & other info: http://www. tisd.net/~casey/shawn/small_repairs.html *REMEMBER* all posts not directly related to Shawn must have the tag 'NSC:' is their subject line - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------ End of small-repairs-digest V1 #114 *********************************** ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from the list send mail to majordomo@smoe.org with 'unsub scribe small-repairs-digest' in the message body. 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