Tag: The Last Waltz

Shawn Colvin Still Going ‘Steady On’ With 30th Anniversary Acoustic Album

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Shawn Colvin’s new album will be intimately familiar to fans who have loved her from the start. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of her landmark debut album, Steady On, Colvin re-recorded the full album acoustically – and she’s posing on the cover with the same guitar strap she wore on the back of the original packaging, too.

Since her auspicious arrival on the scene, Colvin has sold millions of albums and won multiple Grammys, including her first one for Steady On, in the category of Best Contemporary Folk Recording. If you’ve seen her perform over the last 30 years, you’ve certainly heard these songs — “Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” “Diamond in the Rough,” and “Ricochet in Time,” among them. She invited BGS for a hotel room conversation while she was in Nashville for AmericanaFest, where she’s performing the album in its entirety.

BGS: When you went into these sessions, were you hoping to capture a certain sound for this version of Steady On?

SC: No, just an acoustic tone, a stripped-down, non-produced, sort of bare-bones rendition of the songs.

Because you’re so familiar with these songs, were you able to work pretty quickly?

Even though I co-wrote a lot of them with John Leventhal, he would give me pieces of production and I thought, the way I need to figure out how to write is to strip all this production down to just me and a guitar. Almost every song on the record began that way. I stripped it down. It’s the beginning of what became the produced version of Steady On.

I was curious if you wrote most of those songs on the same guitar.

Oh, I think so, yeah. The Martin D-28.

What is it about that guitar that suits you so well?

I bought that guitar in 1974, and it was a 1971. I was 18 and it was my dream to have a Martin guitar. I think I paid $400 for it. And it was just my guitar. I mean, that was a big deal for me to spend that kind of money. I played that guitar on the road I don’t even know how many years. I still have it. It’s pretty beaten up. And I retired it, but yes, in 1988 or ’87 whenever that was, that’s the guitar I was still using.

How many songs had you written up into the songs that were on Steady On?

Maybe three or four.

Wow. So these are some of your earliest songs.

Oh, yeah.

That’s pretty remarkable.

Well, I wasn’t really a songwriter. I wanted to be and I practiced at it, writing lyrics to John’s fully-produced pieces, which were really pop. And I love pop music, but I wasn’t very good at writing lyrics to it. You know, my heroes were all singer-songwriters from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Joni Mitchell in particular. Very personal stuff, and that’s not what I had been writing. I realized, I think I have my own story to tell and I opened up to that and then I liked what I was doing.

Were you living in New York at the time?

Yeah.

How did that city shape you as an artist, do you think?

Oh gosh, the city shaped me personally and artistically in a huge way. I underwent a lot of personal changes there, a lot of growing up, a lot of waking up. It’s a dose, as Levon Helm said in The Last Waltz. But I met people I’m still friends with to this day that really nurtured me in my 20s and helped me grow up. My best friend Stokes is still there in New York that I met in 1980. And the music scene was so rich!

I started out in Buddy Miller’s country band. That’s how I got to New York. He hired me to come sing because Julie had left the band. And he needed another, what we called then, girl singer. So I was in a band like that. I played solo acoustic at places like The Cottonwood Cafe and The Bitter End and I did anything I could make a buck at. I was also in a country band with Soozie Tyrell. I did rockabilly bands.

We were just putting together bands piecemeal, you know “Hey, can you make this gig?” Everybody was up for whatever, all the musicians, and you cobbled together a band from gig to gig, whatever you could get, just whatever we could do. So I learned a lot. I played a lot, which is part of my advice to anybody who might want it,who is a young up-and-comer. Play live. Just do it and do it and do it, you know? I think it makes you confident and good and better your craft and you learn. You’re a student.

What was your live show like at that time? Was it just you and the Martin, singing solo acoustic?

Yeah.

You were never intimidated by that?

Nobody ever listened.

What do you mean?

When I was doing bar bands four hours a night in the city, sometimes they did. That was the goal, to play well enough that maybe someone would listen. It’s where I developed this percussive guitar style that I have, because I thought, what can I do to make it sound like more instruments and do something a little bit different? So I made more noise that way. Sort of a rhythmic thing.

I think of that as your signature sound because I haven’t seen a lot of artists doing that.

And that came partly from Joni Mitchell, who made progressive, clicky sounds on the guitar. And I always thought she was using the back of her hand to go against the strings, this fleshy part of your thumb in the back of your hand. I realized later she was using her nails against the strings to give that click. But I developed it my own way.

As a new artist, how did you find your audience? Or how did your audience find you?

I started to make a name for myself a little bit down the Eastern seaboard, Cambridge and DC, New York, and some other areas in Massachusetts, and Philadelphia. So I was getting finally to play listening rooms rather than bars. I had a little bit of a draw. I got to go on college radio stations and they would play cassettes of mine. It was really helpful, especially in Cambridge, so I got some fans that way that weren’t just the New York people. Then when I put out the record, I wasn’t prepared it for what was going to happen. It was on Columbia Records and it was time for the big push. I’m like, “Sure, no problem.” And it was a grassroots global push. So that meant drive-time and morning radio shows, if they’d have me.

And God bless the label reps in all these different cities, which you don’t have anymore. Their job was to take you around the radio and try to get them to listen to you. And they had a reputation so they could usually get you in. Whether the radio station was really interested or not was always sort of up in the air. And then I would do press, anybody that would talk to me, a magazine and a paper — local, big, small, whatever, other radio if I could — and then I’d do a show at night. Sometimes there were 10 people. And I did that a lot. It was a groundswell, I guess you could call it. Radio stations did start picking up songs from the album. And next thing you know, I’d go back to a town like Boulder and people would come.

That is grassroots for real.

Oh yeah, for real. But you know, those people that have been with me from the beginning have stayed. I have a loyal following. It’s fantastic, yeah.

When Steady On was released in 1989, how did you define success at that time? What did success mean to you?

I remember being in Boulder and I had a day off and I like to ski. I was in a rental car and I was driving to… I can’t remember if it was Keystone, someplace close to Boulder, and I heard myself on the radio and I almost went off the road. That was to me a measure of success. Then the Grammy Award of course was pretty cool. Who could have thought that up?

How do you define success now?

I’d say first and foremost, if I write a song that I like, that’s the best feeling. It’s gotten harder to do for me. There’s less time, because there’s so much roadwork. Less drama in my life, to force me to the paper. There’s really not a better feeling than finishing a song. Writing is hard, but the fact that I can still sell tickets, that’s success to me. Not everybody’s in that position. I think those two things — and I can still do it. Physically I can still play and sing as well, in my opinion, as I ever have. So it’s kind of longevity and luck.

Photo credit: Deidre Schoo

Uri Kohen Unites a World of Music at Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival in Ireland

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This summer, BGS UK is celebrating the festival makers – the men and women who put their time, their finances and their sanity on the line to bring us the music we love. For the past decade, Israeli-born Uri Kohen has been flying the flag for roots music in the west of Ireland with his Westport Folk and Bluegrass Festival in County Mayo. What started out as a labour of love has become an event that draws people back, year after year, from across the globe. We caught up with Uri to find out more.

BGS: Uri, describe your hometown of Westport for those of us who haven’t been there.

It’s beautiful! It was voted as Ireland’s best town to live in and we still very much hold that title. It’s particularly famous for the mountain overlooking the town, Croagh Patrick, where St. Patrick sat 40 days and nights and banished the snakes from Ireland. We’ve got some of the best restaurants in the country, and they recently built an entire cycle lane all the way round called the Greenway which brings people in droves to ride their bikes. Brilliant pubs, too.

But it’s not where you’re originally from.

No, I grew up in a kibbutz in the west of Israel.

Is there a bluegrass scene in Israel?

Not particularly. I’d never heard bluegrass before I came to Ireland. But in the 1970s an English couple moved to a kibbutz called Ginosar, and they started a festival called Jacob’s Ladder. It was focused on Anglo Saxon music, so there was English folk, Scottish ballads, and American folk too. There was even a massive scale square dance! They’re still running it and it’s a super cool festival. You do hear bluegrass instruments getting into Israeli music now – pop albums with banjo.

What were your musical influences, growing up there?

My parents were socialists so the music they listened to in their early 20s was real workers’ music. My dad had spent two years in the US so he was influenced by that; he researched Alan Lomax and was a big fan of Leadbelly! And of The Weavers, Johnny Cash, and Peter, Paul & Mary… Pete Seeger came to Israel in 1964 and my dad actually got to meet him. But when I started stealing my parents’ records I chose the Bob Dylan and the Leonard Cohen.

You mention that they were politically inspired by the folk artists. Was there a lot of music making on the kibbutz too?

Yes, but bear in mind that most of the people that lived in my kibbutz were immigrants from Eastern Europe, so at that time Israeli music was heavily influenced by Russian music, led by accordion, clarinet and fiddle. The accordion was the main instrument and it’s still very popular to do public singing there – people pay good money to go and sing along with someone who leads them in communal singing. My granddad, who came from Austria, had played in a mandolin orchestra when he lived there, and I have a picture of him doing that which is cool.

You didn’t want to be a musician yourself?

I couldn’t play so I became a sound technician, which is the Failed Musician Syndrome. I loved rock and roll, and even as a little kid I was DJ-ing for friends and at school parties. I didn’t have equipment – I just used to sit all night and tape the songs from the radio. The ability to shape people’s mood by playing them good tunes is something I love to this day. Then at 14 I joined a sound company in my local village and I became fascinated by speakers and microphones. I really learned my craft touring the former Soviet Union as a sound engineer for the Israeli army’s bands. We had to work with whatever equipment we found there, and it wasn’t much.

Uri Kohen

How did you end up moving to Ireland?

It was like an actual dream. I woke up one day when I was about 16 with this epiphany and told my parents I was moving to Ireland. I didn’t know much about Ireland at all but I was charmed by it. Once I had the idea it was where I wanted to be, I read books and watched films about it and as soon as I saw The Commitments I knew that’s the way I wanted to live my life. Own a pub, live in the countryside. So that’s what I did! I flew to Dublin on a one-way ticket. I’m sure my parents were upset about it, but then again, my father went to kibbutz which wasn’t what his parents raised him to do… They’d taught us to do our own thing and so in a way they were probably proud of it.

Westport seems like a pretty remote part of the country to end up in.

There was an Israeli man by the same name, Uri, who lived here, and I knew of him, and he’d said sure if you’re in Ireland come over for a look. I went down and stayed in his house for three weeks! Within a week or two I got a job in a pub, and about the same time I met Leesa — who is now my wife. I don’t believe in fate but still, I couldn’t believe I ended up here, and that everything just worked out so well.

So you moved to Ireland, knew nothing about bluegrass — and now you run the country’s biggest bluegrass festival. Explain.

Well, I’d been running pubs and I’d almost left music production behind. Then one year some friends asked me to help them put on a Kurt Cobain tribute night and suddenly we had 200 people and six bands, something this small rural town had never seen before. Until then we’d just had a local band called the Kit Kat Boys because they’d play two songs and have a cigarette break. It inspired this idea to really develop the music scene in the town with a strong emphasis on production values and quality acts.

Anyway, I had the idea of doing a festival in the style of The Band’s The Last Waltz. I was imagining music like the Grateful Dead, and then someone said, “Why not do it with bluegrass?” I said, “I don’t have a clue what bluegrass is, but let’s do it.” And the great thing about Ireland is that the bluegrass family here is so keen that they came in droves. I couldn’t believe it. I remember the campers arriving on Thursday… I was so confused. I said “We don’t start til tomorrow!”

What has running the festival taught you about Irish bluegrass?

First of all it is way bigger than what we think. Both from a musician’s perspective and a fan’s one. Second, you don’t need to be an expert to enjoy this stuff. When I came to this music Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt meant nothing to me. What’s important for the crowds is that the acts are good — not whether you play Kentucky-style or California-style.

Festivals are famously risky from a business point of view. Did you ever feel out of your depth?

In the second and third years I lost a lot of money because I was determined to book the best bands I could. But the response was amazing and it just grew and grew. I think I hit the jackpot choosing this style because these musicians want to play all the time. I brought the Loose Moose String Band from Liverpool and they almost played for 72 hours straight. And I’ve seen Tim Rogers — who’s the number one fiddler in Ireland and the managing director of the festival — once do a session for 11 hours solid.

Every night we have a gala concert but everything other gig is free and bluegrassers are so approachable that seasonal musicians who just have a fiddle lying in their house can come and join the sessions with the headline acts. It’s like playing on the street with Bruce Springsteen – when people see it for the first time they are blown away. For instance, in 2012 Roni Stoneman played an afternoon set, and there was a young feller, 13 years of age. Roni, in her 70s, plays “Dueling Banjos” with him. He returned to the festival year after year, and now he’s one of the most sought-after banjo players in the country.

So who excites you in this year’s line-up?

Brennen Leigh and Noel McKay, a country folk duo from Austin, Texas, are going to close the main stage on Saturday night with some special guests. And I can’t wait to see The Local Honeys, a duo doing old-time music from East Kentucky, doing a gospel hour on the Sunday morning. We’re also bringing over a six-piece from Alaska called Big Chimney Barn Dance, and Blue Summit from California, with the brilliant AJ Lee. It’s their first-ever visit across the water! There’ll be sixteen different acts including bands from Paris and the Netherlands and of course Ireland and the UK.

Sounds like you’ve got the beginnings of your own Bluegrass Eurovision.

As I like to say, it takes an Israeli man to bring a French band to play traditional American music in Ireland. I truly believe in world peace through bluegrass! We have all the worlds’ problems sorted here.