Events

[FOLK] Shawn Colvin is proud. And she’s got every right, every reason to be. At 62, her career has taken some unexpected twists, not the least of which was scoring a #1 single and a pair of 1998 Grammy Awards for “Sunny Came Home,” a murder ballad about a gal that’s not content to simply grab the kids and flee her situation for greener pastures—so she burns the house down, with him in it.   

But Colvin was never looking for chart success and has never thought of herself as a singles-oriented artist. She’s a folkie at the core, and she came of age at a time when the pathways to finding an audience were perhaps less congested, but there were also less ways of reaching people. In order to amass listeners, you had to perform, tirelessly, trekking from city to city, looking for an audience to connect with. There were no video platforms, no social media networks to help build excitement. She put in the time and paid dues, long enough so that she didn’t even release her debut album, Steady On, until she was already in her 30’s, (it, too, snagged a Grammy, for Best Contemporary Folk Album, in 1991). More so than the residual effects of “Sunny…” it’s likely the grunt work of her early years that enables her to continue packing halls today, recording and regularly embarking on collaborative tours like the one she’s on with country storyteller Lyle Lovett that comes to UB’s Center for the Arts on Thursday, March 15.

“I guess I’m a little surprised to be able to continue doing this,” she said, calling from a hotel room where she’d been waiting out a snow storm that’d forced the duo to cancel a gig in Maine the night before. “Twenty years ago, 62 seemed a long way off, in retrospect. But, especially if we’re paying attention to the present state of things, I’m really just grateful more than I am surprised or anything else. I think I’m good at what I do, I believe in myself and I can hold my own, but at the end of the day, that doesn’t mean I get to have a career, that doesn’t mean I’ll definitely sell tickets. I think those things are attributed to the way I built a strong fan base coming up. It’s a slow, steady, grassroots approach and it worked out for me — I made loyal fans. But it’s hard work because you’re going out and opening for the people the crowd really wants to see, you don’t get paid much money and sometimes you don’t get paid much attention to, either. When I got my deal with Columbia, I got sent around the entire country. I’d spend all day doing radio promos and then finally get to play the gig at night and sometimes not many people would show up. But the outcome is that I built a career.”

It’s a career that finds her busier than ever lately. In the last six years she’s published a memoir, released  and toured to support her most recent collection of her own songs, All Fall Down, put out her second covers album, toured with Don Henley, toured with Marc Cohn, recorded an album and toured it with Steve Earle and, last year, celebrated the 20 year anniversary of her most commercially successful record, A Few Small Repairs, with an expanded reissue release and full band tour. Each of these jaunts has had a substantially different flavor, and the current run with Lovett is no exception.

“With duo shows like these, we’re on stage with each other all night,” she said. “Lyle constantly changes his set list, too, and we don’t discuss it before we go on — he sets the bar high. So, we’re working off of each other, we take turns. It’s a question of dynamics.”

Just prior to embarking on the tour with Lovett, Amazon released her latest, The Starlighter — a disc of lullabies taken from a book that Colvin enjoyed as a child, Lullabies and Night Songs, written by Alec Wilder and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Though Amazon had initially approached her about recording a children’s album, the results are more compelling and nuanced than something meant exclusively for kids, and the project allowed Colvin to put down her guitar and concentrate exclusively on her vocals… a rare treat for both artist and audience.

“I think people will find that I’m using a different part of my voice,” she said of The Starlighter, which is accompanied by a series of intriguing stop-motion animation clips that bring many of the stories to life. “There’s something about playing guitar and singing — one lends itself to the other, it’s a symbiotic relationship. This is a different ballgame, yes. The music is slower, jazzier and not quite as obvious as what you might expect from lullabies.”

Colvin describes the ‘…Night Songs’ book as having become a part of her, and says that singing the songs now, so many years since she first learned them on piano as a child, she understands them better. It’s a clarity that extends well past grasping the subtext of lullabies, however. Colvin says she’s fit from years of swimming, skiing,  and running, and often feels like she’s 30. But some aspects of growing older she welcomes wholeheartedly.

“You’re going to get more accepting, get wiser, and you’ll slow down,” she said. “You get to appreciate the bullshit you won’t put up with anymore.”

Definitely something to look forward to. Catch an Acoustic Evening with Lyle Lovett and Shawn Colvin at UB Center for the Arts Mainstage Theatre, Thursday, March 15.