An Interview with Tom Paxton

In a career spanning more than half a century, GRAMMY®-winning folk legend Tom Paxton has composed a veritable goldmine of American music. Instilled with an activist’s passion and a storyteller’s finesse, his songs—which have been covered by the likes of Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Willie Nelson—resonate with melodies as endearing as nursery rhymes and narratives affirming an intimate conscience.

With his latest album, Boat in the Water, Paxton, 79, continues to articulate his craft in such inimitably empathetic ways.

Can you sense how your songwriting has evolved over the years?

Well, that’s an interesting question. I’ve always likened myself to a farmer with a field, and each year he plants a crop in that field and with luck harvests it in the fall. In my case, I plant different crops but it’s in the same field and it’s the same farmer. So I don’t find that I write different songs from the ones I wrote at the age of twenty-five, but I hope that now and then I write a song that I was not capable of writing at the age of twenty-five. But they’re not that different. They’re still the same sound to them, people tell me.

The writer is the last one to be able to identify his own songs, but they tell me that a song can be recognized as being likely from me. I accept that’s true because I can certainly identify a song as probably written by Dylan or probably written by Leonard Cohen. There’s a style, there’s a sense to it. So, I don’t think I write differently—it’s the same brain, the same right hand—but perhaps there might be a depth to the songs now that there wasn’t then. I don’t know. I certainly don’t try to write differently than I wrote [back then]. I don’t know what that would sound like.

When you’re writing a song, do you have any audience in mind?

Oh, sure. Without being able to put a face to it, it’s the same group of people I’ve sung to for fifty-six years. They’re good people and we see a lot of things through the same lenses, and it’s really primarily for myself as a singer that I write the songs. But it’s also [for] the people that have been with me for years and years and years that I write. If not for them I might just keep it to myself and say, “I don’t have to write it. I already know that.” It is for the people who come to my shows that I write the songs.

Is it disillusioning if the audience doesn’t quote, unquote “get it”?

No, it does not. I feel like I’m responsible for what I do and what I release and I’m not responsible for how it’s received or poorly received. And so, I don’t worry about that. I just worry about getting it right for myself, to make sure it’s clear and musical and I hope entertaining, but at least engrossing; that people know that it’s sincere, that it’s a deliberate work of art. It’s not the work of a dilettante. It’s the work of someone who’s been doing it a long time and cares very much about doing it well.

You are revisiting some of your older songs on Boat in the Water. What was the reason behind that? What did you think you could bring to them at this stage in your life that maybe you didn’t the first time around?

Well, part of it was a conversation I had with producer, Cathy Fink, who’s an old, old friend. She said, “I’d like to hear these songs again.” She’d been listening to a bunch of my old records and she said, “You know, that song ‘Life’ is a wonderful song and I’d like to hear it again. Let’s put it on here.” I said, “Sure.” And I did the same thing with “Evry Time,” [which] is a song I think I wrote in 1962. It’s certainly one of the oldest recordable songs that I have, and I’ve sung it in a lot of soundchecks and a lot of dressing rooms. So I said, “Let’s take another shot at this one.”

Did it resonate any different with you?

Oh, I love the song. To me the song is really an evocation of my early love for the songs that Burl Ives used to sing. He used to sing lots of songs that did not have a steady beat to them, a lot of the old Appalachian songs that he used to sing. It was just kind of my homage to that kind of song and I’ve always loved it. It’s just a very simple song. It only has two verses to it, but it seems like a complete song to me.

In light of some of the songs you write that are critical of certain social or political ills, how do you manage to salvage the compassion and sense of grace and beauty that comes through in some of the other songs you write?

That’s not too difficult, actually. Each song is its own message. Each song has its own parameters. I don’t bring a political sense to a personal song. I also write songs that I hope will amuse a seven-year-old child. You bring the tools to the project that the project requires. And if you’re writing a song to amuse a seven-year-old boy, you include irreverence and a sense of fun, a sense of the ridiculous. You don’t bring a sharply tuned social mind whereas, if you’re writing a song satirizing a president who is an egregious liar, you don’t bring the same vocabulary that you use with the seven-year-old boy’s song. You bring a different vocabulary, a different sensibility. They’re all different songs and I tend to take them as the ideas come to me. The idea will come to me of something ridiculous and fun and rather innocent and I’ll go ahead and write that song and hope that it finds that seven-year-old boy or girl and amuses them. If I’m satirizing the president, I’ll use a different box of tools. Each song has its own perfection that you strive for.

So, writing a song in which you would satirize the president or critique certain social ills doesn’t compromise the compassion that is required to write the other songs?

No, I never write a song that denies the other songs I write. There’s no underlying similarity. I mean, they all come from the same fella, and I’m not going to write a song that directly contradicts any other song I’ve written. There’s got to be a consistency. Even if I’m writing a funny song for kids, I’m not going to say something in that song that I don’t believe.

Is songwriting a discipline that you return to all the time? Are you always receptive to new ideas?  

Yeah, I find the ideas come pretty regularly. There’s a kind of a receptive frame of mind that I seem to be a little more able to slip into now than maybe I used to be. I know that working with [co-songwriters] Jon Vezner and Don Henry is good for me. We just finished four dates out in the West and shortly before those dates I heard a melody from Jon. I said, “Give me a tape of that.” And I turned it into a song which we put in the shows out in California and it really went down beautifully. And while we were sitting in a dressing room in Berkeley, he was doodling around on the ukulele and he struck a chord and I said, “Whoa, what was that?” He played it again, and I sang a silly little phrase that is turning into a delightful little ukulele song. I’m always on the lookout, so to speak.

Do you ever fear giving too much of yourself away in what you write?

Oh, no. No, I don’t feel that at all. I do write personally but it’s usually not as Tom Paxton. I use the first-person singular a lot because it’s more suitable for songs, I think, to be personal like that. But it’s very seldom that it’s Tom Paxton who’s being personal. It is the narrator in the song who’s sharing, but of course it’s always the writer who is easily identifiable. But I think I just kind of shrink from making Tom Paxton the subject of Tom Paxton’s song. It seems to me to be such an egotistical thing to do. I just thought of a way of putting it: I’m a ham, but I’m not a show-off.

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Vulnerability is Powerful: An Interview with Kylie Odetta

Eighteen-year-old singer/songwriter Kylie Odetta emerges from the din of pop stardom to reveal a serious talent with her most recent EP, High Dreamer, having consciously pared down its production by complementing her vocals with discreet, often piano-based arrangements.

Moments like “Let Me Love You” and “I Can’t Erase It” are intoxicating, conjuring the sort of hushed intimacy that artists like Norah Jones and Corinne Bailey Rae have cultivated so well in recent years. Put another way, Odetta commands the listener’s rapt attention in ways that are at once empathetic and achingly tender.

“Being vulnerable is a very powerful thing,” Odetta said recently, calling while traveling with her family from her home in Greenville, South Carolina to Augusta, Georgia. “I don’t have a fear of being too vulnerable. I think that can only allow me to connect with people more.”

For her music to reflect and resonate with such emotional honesty, Odetta acknowledges the need to be honest with herself. “I’ve found that I cannot write good songs when I’m happy,” she conceded. “I have to be feeling something that’s really digging at me. Songwriting is a way to get it out of me, and then I’m happy again.”

Of course, as plenty of other artists have discovered the hard way, what’s good for creativity may not always be good for maintaining a healthy day-to-day existence. As Odetta explained, however, her darkest moments are balanced by her spiritual beliefs, wherein she finds solace. “I believe in God,” she said. “So there’s always a battle going on inside of me, of the artist in me wanting to just live in that sad or angry state and stay there for a while and look at all those emotions and indulge in it; and the other side of me that knows that everything’s okay in the end and that I’m going to be okay.

“Sometimes,” she added, “it’s difficult to choose which mental path I want to take.”

Her faith doesn’t explicitly inform the music she makes, as Odetta says she hopes to reach more listeners than perhaps she would if she were a quote, unquote Christian artist. Indeed, facilitating a fundamental bond with an audience was Odetta’s main goal for High Dreamer all along, she said, “and it transformed into something that I feel is so true to myself as an artist and the most real thing I’ve put out yet.”



For more information, please visit Kylie Odetta online.

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Learning Curves and Musical Curiosities: An Interview with Rhiannon Giddens

Now is the time for Rhiannon Giddens.

Having followed her muse beyond the homegrown string-band tableau she’d cultivated for the last decade as a founding member of the GRAMMY® award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, she has of late expanded her musical palette to reveal an even richer promise. 

Released back in February to become one of 2015’s most celebrated works, Tomorrow is My Turn finds Giddens mostly interpreting songs popularized by such female musical forbears as Patsy Cline, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Geeshie Wiley, and Dolly Parton. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, the album reveals an already gifted artist coming into her own while at the same time standing on the shoulders of giants.

“My only hope,” Giddens told Write on Music earlier this year, “is that I honor the work that they’ve done and hopefully carry it forward. That’s all we can ever hope as artists is to honor the past and to keep it moving.”

A similar scenario unfolded when Giddens was last year recruited by Burnett for the LP Lost On The River (The New Basement Tapes) — along with Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes), Marcus Mumford (Mumford & Sons), Jim James (My Morning Jacket), and Elvis Costello — to compose music for a batch of newly discovered Bob Dylan lyrics dating back to The Basement Tapes. Her lead-vocal performance of “Spanish Mary,” in particular, is among the set’s most exhilarating moments.

Tomorrow is My Turn represents a new beginning for you yet you’re using this opportunity to shine a light on, particularly, female singers whose careers have preceded your own. How did that direction take shape? Was that something you wanted to pursue or did it come from Mr. Burnett?

It definitely came from me. It was just sort of this idea that I’d had brewing a little bit that I wasn’t going to put it to the Chocolate Drops to record because it’s a slightly different thing. So I was kind of holding onto it until T-Bone came asking about doing a record. That’s when I kind of went, “Well, what about this idea?” He thought it was a great idea and he loved most of the song choices that I’d made. He tweaked a couple of them. But, yeah, it came from me. I’m real pleased we were able to do it.

The album’s not strictly pop or soul or R&B or folk, yet it’s all of those in some way.

That’s how I think, you know? The Chocolate Drops are a totally different kind of thing within a certain limitation, and this was kind of similar. I did make decisions about how far I was going to go as far as the songs I was pulling from. It’s kind of like a “feel” thing. I wanted to stick to stuff that was more rootsy and connected to the stuff that I already sort of do, for this record. I had a feel about how far I wanted to go. And there were some choices that were made in terms of the songs we left off the album that reflect that too. Like, “Well, this doesn’t quite fit. We’ve got a little narrative or a little cohesion going here and this doesn’t really fit so I’ll have to leave it off.” Throughout the whole process there was a pruning that was kind of going on.

The Sister Rosetta Tharpe song [“Up Above My Head”] is really funky.

Yeah, she’s amazing. Throughout this process she’s one of the ones that comes to the forefront of people that I want to try to highlight and to say, “This is not just some obscure… It’s not like Geeshie Wiley, some obscure blues woman that you should know who it is. This is a pillar of American music.” I mean, she is unbelievably important in terms of her influence and to what became rock ‘n’ roll guitar is unimpeachable. It’s like, you cannot deny her influence and yet people don’t know who she is. That’s a problem for me because it continues to reflect the narrative of American music where the black artist is the innovator and then gets forgotten about. 

Tharpe was innovative in rock ‘n’ roll in general, but particularly as a guitarist.

Well, that’s the thing. It’s her style of guitar playing, that’s it right there. That’s what makes her so special, is that she checks so many boxes that you wouldn’t expect. 

Yet she doesn’t get mentioned with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard…

It should be in the same breath. It should be “Chuck Berry and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.” You know what I mean? She should be right up there, and the fact that she’s not is a problem. 

Was there any anxiety in making the album — considering it’s a debut album for your solo career — that you were presenting too many dimensions, too many aspects of a first impression?

Well, we definitely wanted to make sure that the final record had a cohesion to it. We didn’t want it to be too far-ranging, definitely. That took a while. And we did prune it; we left off five songs because we had quite a few recorded. It was important to make it shorter and more cohesive than longer and more complicated. We definitely felt that.... I think what we ended up with is just enough, just enough variety all within a certain aspect of Americana but not going too far. 

Along the same lines, was there ever a discussion about how to make some of these songs, particularly the lesser known and most dated ones, relevant or contemporary?

That’s one thing we never talked about. I think if you just attempt to not copy the original, the first material, you’ll be fine with the rest of it. We’re all modern people with modern equipment. You know what I mean? That’s what matters. That’s the way I’ve always approached it. I’m always surprised when people talk about how modern this stuff is because for me it’s the interpretation of the song that makes sense. That’s what happened. That’s what came out. There was no, “Let’s make sure this sounds up to date.” If you follow your muse and you’re all kind of listening to what your muse says, that should happen because we’re all modern people with modern influences. So, it’s just trying to get out of the way, really.

Having worked so intimately with the songs on Tomorrow is My Turn and also with the ones from The New Basement Tapes — even though there was no music to those when you first received them — what did you take from those experiences that may have informed or encouraged your own songwriting?

All the songs that I study kind of go into this songwriting pot that I have going on in my brain because I get into the words. Part of what I love about them is how they’re written and so that whatever attracted me to that is something that I naturally gravitate toward anyway. The master class that was The New Basement Tapes was incredibly helpful for me as a songwriter, as a budding songwriter. I feel like I’ve been given lots and lots of tools over the last couple years to really work on my songwriting craft. I’ve been able to work with other people. 

I’m definitely in a big learning phase and creating phase with songwriting.… I don’t want to just sit here and try to write fourteen songs for the next record. I’m not really interested in that. What I want to do is explore what songwriting means to me, what it is that is going to be my contribution to the music world at large other than interpretation. Because I know I’m always going to be an interpreter. That is something I do well and is something that is important not to lose sight of, but I also feel like I do have a voice to be heard. I want to make sure that there’s something really important being said. I’m not really interested in throwing songs out there for the sake of me writing songs.  

As an apprentice of songwriting, to be put in a room with Elvis Costello, in particular, must’ve been pretty cool and intimidating at the same time.

What was great about that experience was that I didn’t know any of those guys. I didn’t know Elvis’ work, to be honest. I knew a couple of things, maybe. I just know of him. I didn’t know Jim’s work. I didn’t know Taylor’s work. I knew a bit of Marcus’ work [with Mumford & Sons]. So, really, I just kind of approached those guys as guys, and Elvis was kind of the elder statesman and a teacher. I didn’t have that stuff in the way. I had plenty of other stuff to deal with, don’t get me wrong. [Laughs] But I didn’t have that fear — “Oh, my God, that guy wrote ‘X,’ ‘Y,’ ‘Z.’” — It’s like, “Oh, this guy knows a lot about songwriting. I’m about to hear him and listen to what he has to say.” And so that actually made it great for me because I just took who they were and just learned… I learned stuff from all those guys. 

You exhibit such a passion for music and music history, from how it informs your work and makes it so eclectic. Where does that comes from?

I’ve always been a curious person. I’m a reader. I’ve always been a reader. I’ve always liked history. Then I went to school for classical music. When you’re an opera singer, when you’re studying opera — and maybe not everybody does this; maybe it just goes back to my own personality — I studied. If I was doing an opera set in eighteenth-century France, I checked books out on eighteenth-century France and I studied it and I checked out why this character would act the way that she does. You want to learn about the composers, who’s writing the music. 

Then I got into Celtic music, and you’re approaching Scottish and Irish music as an outsider. I feel like it’s a responsibility to understand as much as you can ... so you’re not doing the song out of context. So I just got used to researching, I suppose. I like it and I like the power [that] I felt like it gave me over the song. Particularly when you’re doing Celtic music, people will come up to you because you’re a person of color and they can be very insensitive. They go, “Why are you singing this music?” It’s like, “I’m sorry, do you walk up to the random white guy playing blues on the corner and say, ‘Why are you singing this music?’” Hell no.... When you know more about the song than the person who’s coming up to you and asking you, it gives you power. You can go, “Yeah, let me tell you about this song. This is why I’m singing this song.” I think all of that is really important. 

You need to find that common ground between yourself and the song and its history and context.

When you’re singing a song, you should have that common ground. You have to have common ground with it. I’ve been asked by white artists or students — because I do teach in workshops — and they go, “How do I approach this work song or this spiritual? Can I sing this?” And I say, “Of course you can sing it. Should you sing it like an eighty-five-year-old woman from Alabama? No. You shouldn’t try to sing it like that. I can’t sing it like that because I’m not an eighty-five-year-old woman from Alabama. You have to find the core within the song that speaks to your core. Otherwise, why are you doing it? Obviously there’s something that’s making you want to do the song.... You know when you’re singing something that maybe you shouldn’t be singing.... Maybe it’s the wrong time. I know for me, “Last Kind Word Blues,” I just about got in there. I wouldn’t have wanted to sing that song even a year earlier, but I just feel like I have enough whatever it is to sing that song now at thirty-seven, thirty-six when I recorded it. You know. Everybody has this sort of thing inside them that’s going, “Put this away for another time.” And I’ve done that before. 

But doesn’t it take a while to trust that instinct?

Well, yeah, it’s something that you develop. You always develop it as an artist and as a person, really, as you get older. That’s not to say that you can’t make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. “That wasn’t quite right.” It is a process, but the more you engage with it the quicker you can trust it. 

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An Interview with Rickie Lee Jones

In interviewing Rickie Lee Jones about her music, come up with a question that piques her interest and you’ll likely end up fielding a few comparable inquiries of your own in return.

That Jones should welcome or even seek out such insights from those who admittedly appreciate her music isn’t all that surprising, however. Indeed, with such expository songs as “Chuck E.’s In Love,” “Stewart’s Coat,” and “We Belong Together,” the two-time GRAMMY® winner has not only distinguished herself as one of the most gifted and versatile singer/songwriters of the past 40 years but among the most sentient as well.

On her first new work of original material in more than a decade, The Other Side of Desire, Jones marries influences (from jazz to blues to Cajun to rockabilly to pop) that are often indigenous to New Orleans, where since leaving her Los Angeles stomping grounds last year she has lived and written songs with renewed passion and purpose. “I’ve got nothing to prove,” said Jones, 60, recently from her Big Easy abode. “I feel and want to spread a little joy, so that’s what I’m doing.”

And that’s what she’s done with the songs that make up The Other Side of Desire, culminating in one of her most intimately personal and poignant albums to date.

“One of the things I wanted to do was to write things that I could sing for the rest of my career and not have to do only old songs,” she explained, “things that would be fun and that the audience would want to hear as much as their sentiment with the old songs.

“I’m pretty sure that anything I write is relatable to anything else,” she added, “and there wouldn’t be that much of a difference because they’re all coming from my own personal color palette.”

Are you a songwriter whose songs naturally reflect your environment? Or, in the case of this latest album, did you deliberately intend for it to reflect musical influences of New Orleans?

Well, the first thing was to build a new life, and I also wanted to write a new record; and those things happened simultaneously. I think that’s why the environment is woven into the work, because they were one in the same. Then I thought, Why not? I’ve always shied away from that stuff because there’s something contrived about it, even if you make good work … because it always has an “I’m playing you” kind of thing about it. It’s not fair, really, to anybody, because so many people do that. They take an idea and they squash it to death, so that somebody who might sincerely feel that way, it’s harder to convince. At least now I don’t feel that way so much, because I think the sincerity of your heart is what people hear. But it’s harder to be heard, right? If you’re the twenty-seventh person making a record of Nelson Riddle stuff, even though the twenty six before you had never done jazz in their life… Anyway, all those reasons had made me shy away from thematic things, but this time I knew I didn’t want to do anything in L.A. and that act in itself is gonna make it reflect what I’m hearing around me and so in a roundabout way I did make the choice to reflect this music.

It seems to me that if you use any sort of filter into which you invest your heart and soul, your heart and soul would still reflect through the filter.

Most definitely. I think that there’s no getting around my personality and in this case they’re really simpatico, these kinds of music and how I feel and what I want to say.

One song from the album that struck me straightaway is “Infinity,” and for a couple reasons: its sense of transience; the way the lyrics are sung almost in a murmur, like water rippling off a rock; how the snare shots seem to punctuate each moment as if delivering each one to history. It’s a striking piece of music.

That song, in particular, that was a dream. I woke up and wrote it down exactly as it was and went into the studio the next day. It was a Sunday. Somebody had to come in [to produce it]. I heard it all whole. … Then I just sang it. It just came out like that. “This is where we’ve always been and it will always come again,” was so exciting to sing. It was very exciting. … I had a picture of what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how to articulate it. I said to the producer, “I’m trying to evoke these sounds and feelings from the ‘80s or things that were more dance or ambient kinds of tracks.” I didn’t really know any names or things to use, but that was as close as I could come to tell him what I was trying to do.

On another song on the album, “Christmas in New Orleans,” you wrote a lyric, “And I still can’t recognize the sound my scars make when I sing,” that hit me especially hard.

Finally! I thought that was one of my better lines, and you’re the first person to mention it. Thank you.

It’s such a powerful reminder of how deep you cut in your music. You’re one of the few musicians I’ve seen in concert who doesn’t shy away from vulnerability. I’ve seen you cry on the stage, just overcome by a song in the moment. It must take a lot of guts to be that honest. Is that something you consciously strive for?

You’d have to be really courageous to do it [by design]. I think it’s just the way I am. It’d be hard to make a choice to be vulnerable. I can’t imagine any other way to sing a song but the way I sing it, because that’s the joy of singing it, is that I feel all of it every time I sing it. It’s like stepping into a movie instead of watching it, and I can be anybody I want to be in the course [of it]. I’m also the narrator, so it’s very wonderful and complex. Sometimes in acting or feeling one of the parts, when I pull back to be the narrator I get choked up sometimes and I do cry. I don’t mind that, but my dad said to me, “You must not cry. You have to pull back so they can cry, because if you cry they can’t.” It was really wise. As much as I enjoy feeling all that, as a performance it doesn’t really… I’m not ashamed of crying, but it’s not my favorite thing to do. But I allow it now. I don’t chastise myself for it. I just try not to go that deep.

Are there emotions or certain experiences that are too profound or painful to share in a song?

Yeah, I would say that’s true. I’m not sure if I would use the word “emotions,” but there are subjects that are still sore or active or haven’t been resolved and so to sing them is really to just bring them up on the table — and it’s not good. So, when that happens I just avoid those songs until I can sing them. You know, like, puppy dogs make you cry. Singing about my child is always emotional. Singing about anybody in my family, as a matter of fact, is emotional. And on stage, everything’s turned up louder. So, if I was sitting in a café with you and said something about my dad I might feel a tear, but I could breathe and hold it back and finish talking. But on the stage where things are turned up loud, it’s a much harder thing to do. So, I try to just avoid things that… You know, I don’t know if that’s true if I try to avoid them. I wish I would try to avoid them. [Laughs] But shows are really instinctual. I go here, I go there, and I always feel like I’m going in these directions because of the collective consciousness that’s directing me. That’s the audience and what I’m feeling from them, the way that their laughter, the way that their sighs tell me what direction to go in.

That’s in a live setting, but are there subjects you would avoid to even write about if you hadn’t processed them earlier?

No, no. Anything that wants to be said gets to be said whether or not it… I’d probably write some violent songs and listen to that expression and see if it finds its way to something else whether it’s a line or some part of a cynicism or whatever. When I’m writing everything gets to come out.

Some songwriters I’ve spoken to have conceded that they’re sometimes reluctant to reveal too much of themselves in what they write, but that’s clearly not how you approach it.

No. I’m just exploring all… There are so many ways to tell a story. I tend to naturally like to tell a story rather than tell a feeling, but in the course of telling the story can build feelings. But it’s not so much, “I feel like this,” and, “You did that.” In the past it hasn’t been the best way I’ve told a story. This record is kind of different. I think there’s a lot of “I”: “How can I tell you how I feel?” [“Valz de Mon Pere (Lover’s Oath)”]; “O Cheri, come and take a ride with me” [“Jimmy Choos”]. I mean, as I’m talking now, [I realize] I figure heavily into this record. I didn’t really think of that before. That’s kind of good. It’s healthy.

One reason I believe people are so affected by your music is the honesty in your voice, and of course that element resonates even when you’re interpreting works by other songwriters. When you take on someone else’s song, what do you generally latch onto first? Is it a lyric or narrative? Is it the melody?

I think it’s usually both. There are only a few songs in my career — I’m thinking of “My One and Only Love” [on 1991’s Pop Pop] — where I was attracted to a melody, but didn’t relate so much to a lyric. Like, “Sympathy for the Devil,” I did [on 2012’s The Devil You Know] because I did this Rolling Stones tribute so I had to pick a song and I picked that song because it relies so much on the band and so much on the “woo-woo” [witches chorus]. I thought, This is a powerful and frightening story, and I don’t know if anybody ever hears it because they’re busy dancing around.

If you break it down and tell it like you would tell it if you were just making up a song with a guitar, “Allow me to introduce myself, I am the scariest motherfucker that you’ve ever met. I’ve killed people for 2,000 years, and by the way I have my eye on you as well.” In the course of doing it — because, you know, it’s how I am — I tend to become the demon. It’s fun, but it’s scary.

I like playing it live because I like the series of things the audience goes through. They laugh at first, nervous laughter. Then it’s the laughter of recognition — and I don’t try to hurt them with it; I don’t go too far — but then either they keep giggling and looking away or they slowly listen to the text of the song. By the last verse, they’ve converted now. They did it. I really love that because it’s like I showed them the song instead of the Rolling Stones performance.

If I can do that with somebody else’s song — if I can show them the song again — I feel like that’s a worthwhile goal, because usually I don’t have a goal. I just want to sing a song because of the way it makes me feel, but some of these songs are used up and it’s kind of exciting to me if I can sprinkle something new about them.

In a far different lyrical context, of course, but that’s also what you achieved so convincingly with your rendition of The Beatles’ “For No One” [on 2000’s It’s Like This], which is, for me, one of your all-time greatest performances. 

“For No One” I heard when I was little, 11 or 12. I liked the story, but what is the word for it? “There’ll be times when all the things she said will fill your head. You won’t forget her.” Even at 11 or 12, I knew how that felt, that melancholy of loss, that all your life you would have this little scratch inside and you would always have to live with that sorrow. That’s the part that attracts me about that song, in particular.

Going back to something you said earlier, that you have nothing to prove now… What, then, drives you to still be creative? Considering that this is the first album you’ve written for since The Evening of My Best Day [in 2003], what made you want to return to writing?

Without something to prove is what makes me able to take the lid off and play music again, because no matter what I did there was always … this sense of loss that permeated everything I did. I’m not sure how — it feels a little miraculous — but it was probably just having to work so hard so long, but I was able to go, “There’s no relationship to the past. I am making a record here in this year right now and I have a name so I have an audience out there, but for the most part people under 30 don’t know who I am. This is a strange blessing because I can speak to them for the first time, but I have no hope or expectation of a resurrection or anything. All I can do is do the best work I can and hope that it does something good for somebody somewhere.”

Finally, you learn whether people notice you or not — I don’t know why — you still have to go up on the stage and play the song. … It was a relinquishing of my own thing: Am I ever gonna get my crown back? Finally it was, No, you aren’t. And I [thought], Thank God.

I’m just a musician. I’m just a singer. I got a band. I’m playing in your local town. I know what I’m worth. The things you said to me are so wonderful to hear because they’re how I see myself, that what I’ve contributed is a kind of an emotional honesty that hopefully rings through. But in the end when you die, you die. Sometimes it seems like we feel like if we’re really famous and if we’re really successful, we won’t really die. It seems like we’re running real fast so we won’t die. So, that’s been the expectation of hope that has permeated this work, a hope of a joyful time. That’s really all I wanted was to have some fun, and I feel like that’s kind of happening. It’s pretty cool.

For more information, please visit Rickie Lee Jones online.

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Interview: Singer/Songwriter Miel de Botton Realizes Enduring Musical Ambition and Passion on 'Magnetic' Debut

“I’m still kind of pinching myself,” says Miel de Botton on the line from her home in London, keen to discuss her forthcoming debut, Magnetic, whilst offering insights to circumstances that both instigated and hindered its making. 

Indeed the Swiss-born philanthropist would be the first to concede that while the double album realizes her life’s abiding passion — to craft and interpret music for the masses, to sing intimately personal songs that reflect universalities of the heart, particularly French chansons she first heard as a child that continue to resonate with her as an adult — it does so as a result of much self-scrutiny and reflection.

Raised in relative affluence, coming of age amid the implicit (and sometimes overt) expectations of scholastic and professional accomplishment, particularly those of her father — Gilbert de Botton, who died at age 65 in 2000, was a venerable financier and fine art benefactor — she wavered between his wishes and her own ambitions. She studied law at Oxford, later worked as a clinical psychologist in Paris. As she entered her forties, having married and divorced while raising two young children, de Botton ultimately decided to pursue her artistic promise in earnest.

Produced by Andy Wright (whose credentials include works by Duran Duran, Simple Minds, and the Eurythmics), Magnetic is whimsical in some moments, solemn in others, and altogether inspired throughout. 

Was there some sort of realization that your passion was translatable as talent? Most people reach a point where they recognize that they can’t go any further than their passion.

It’s interesting. It did take a long time, and I think that time was actually beneficial to me because it was a time of maturing. Then suddenly things did seem to all line up and doors were opening. I had a lot of enthusiasm and passion and … I had a beneficial environment, I guess, that I’m very grateful for. I wish it for the maximum number of people out there, but I can’t fully explain why me at this stage because I’ve myself got a sense of wonder about it. 

How did you connect with Andy Wright?

That was one in a series of coincidences which were, I think, quite magical. I was working with a band before and I couldn’t find a producer who was giving me a reasonable offer. I asked this lady, who’s my healer, and I was just chatting to her and I said, “I’m really having trouble.” She said, “Why don’t you come to this event next week. I think this producer, Andy Wright, might be there.” So I looked him up, and I thought, My God, this guy is the real deal. So, yes, I met him there, and his first question was, “Are you incredibly ambitious?” And I said, “Why, yes sir!” [Laughs] 

The chemistry between you two in the studio has been good?

It’s been really good. I think initially we were both a little bit on our guards and didn’t really know what was going to come out of this. Gradually it just grew stronger and stronger to the extent that we’ve just got this great creative synergy where I come in with my words and my melodies and he puts them to orchestration and instrumentation. It’s just so fabulous. It blows me away every time.

Have you been singing throughout your life or have you only come to it within the last few years?

I’ve been doing it throughout my life just to bring me a feeling of joy and a kind of healing thing in in my life. I just love to do it, singing and dancing. But in a more structured way I’ve only been doing it for three years, but I have been very actively doing it with two voice coaches who are classically trained. They have developed my voice; it’s been really amazing. I’ve seen it develop with their teaching, and that’s been an amazing process. 



You’ve mentioned elsewhere that Leonard Cohen is one of your biggest influences. How did his music first enter your life and ultimately have such a profound effect on you? 

He was played to me in my childhood by my parents. The music that went through the house was mainly classical. We had some Janis Joplin, and a lot of Leonard Cohen. So I sort of grew up with him, liking the melodies but obviously not understanding the words so much. Then, when I was a teenager, I connected with his words. That was when I really connected with him.

Growing up you weren’t encouraged toward the kind of ambition you’re now pursuing, but rather toward a traditional, education-based kind of career. Your father, in particular, was someone who greatly supported the arts and who appreciated the talents of those artists. Still — and it seems contradictory — it seems like he didn’t feel that a vocation in the arts was on par with, say, being a doctor or a lawyer.

It’s an interesting question because, I must say, I think this was very much lying dormant. People would say I had a pretty voice and I had a lovely voice and things like that, but it was not something that stood out. That’s why I think the timing was… In a way, maybe it was meant to be. In any case, it just took some time to mature. Nobody really thought it at the time, including me. I loved to sing and that was my dream, but I’m not sure I even voiced that, to be honest. I think it was just something that I loved. I never thought of it myself even as something vocational. So maybe it was all just a blind spot that we had, I don’t know. 

So this wasn’t a case where you professed your desire to pursue your musical ambition and you were denied.

No, no. But maybe the blind spot was due to the fact that we were all very academically pushed and that this was not something which would have been considered necessarily a career, a serious career. So I think there was some of that involved, but none of it was voiced. 

What I’m getting, then, is that your father wasn’t necessarily disparaging any sort of artistic course. He didn’t even know it was there to encourage.

Exactly. To be honest, he was quite disparaging about the psychology initially. He always said it was akin to flower arranging. He was much preferring the law; that was really his preferred [option].

In a general way, though, your father’s wishes for you were ultimately in looking out for your wellbeing. He wasn’t encouraging you to pursue something just for the sake of pleasing him; he was trying to get you to do something that would provide for you in the future.

Exactly, but in so doing he definitely did have trouble accepting the psychology. When he saw that it was serious, then he accepted it. But he said, “You finish your law degree.” Then he wanted me to continue to become a solicitor or a barrister, and it was my brother [author/philosopher Alain de Botton] actually who intervened and said, “Leave her in peace. She wants to do psychology.” 



As you’ve now come to music after doing other vocations, some of which were rewarding in their own ways but ultimately weren’t as fulfilling to you as a career in music, what finally convinced you to turn your passion into a professional pursuit?

I think it’s a combination of internal and external factors. I was a clinical psychologist before and I did that for many years, but I had stopped doing that quite a while ago. I had a personal tragedy. My father died very suddenly. I decided just to take a break, raise my two children, and I think there was a growing freedom in me in feeling that I really wanted to pursue what I wanted to do in life, and that life can be short. But I think it was just gradually with maturing with a feeling of freedom and joy, and that was coming out in singing and dancing with people around me, and they picked up on it. I think that’s how it happened. Everybody, friends and people who worked with me, [were] suddenly picking up on it and all saying, “You should speak with this person. You should speak with that person. Your voice is really lovely.” It was mainly about freedom and joy and enthusiasm after a lot of hardship — I [also] got divorced — a lot of sadness. Out of that came a feeling that I wanted to be free of that and fully express myself. I think the inner then influences the outer.

Do those hardships you’ve been through inform your songwriting or come through in your music in some constructive way?

Yeah, definitely, maybe in the same way that Leonard Cohen uses it. There’s a mixture of melancholy mood and searching for joy. One cannot really go without the other. I think if you’ve lived through the melancholy you long for the joy. 

Magnetic will be released on March 9. 

For more information on Miel de Botton, please visit the artist’s official website.

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An Interview with Dwight Twilley

“That’s the story of my career,” says Dwight Twilley on the phone from his home in Tulsa, his hearty laugh and facetiousness belying the bane of what could’ve been: Mere weeks before his death in August 1977, Elvis Presley almost recorded one of Twilley’s songs. 

“It was being discussed with the publishers,” says Twilley of “TV,” two minutes, sixteen seconds of reverbed, shivering rockabilly in praise of the almighty boobtube. “If you think about it, that probably would’ve been a pretty damn good tune for him.” 

It would’ve been a pretty damn good time for Twilley to have caught a break, too.

“TV” originally appeared on Sincerely, the debut LP by the Dwight Twilley Band, which besides its principal singing and songwriting namesake boasted one-man rhythm section and erstwhile vocalist Phil Seymour and lead guitarist Bill Pitcock IV. Though it earned rave reviews upon its release in 1976 — Rolling Stone hailed it as “the best rock debut album of the year” — Sincerely was a commercial disappointment, due in part to disputes at the band’s label that, nearly a year after lead single “I’m On Fire” had entered and exited the Top 20, effectively squelched the band’s momentum. 

As Elvis himself had once famously bemoaned, “Who do you thank when you have such luck?”

Twilley’s troubles didn’t end there; in one way or another they’ve underscored most of his professional career. And yet from his formative days in the Dwight Twilley Band — the group broke up in 1978 following the lackluster sales of its sophomore LP, Twilley Don’t Mind — throughout such solo highlights as “Girls” (featuring former label mate Tom Petty) and “Why You Wanna Break My Heart,” Twilley hasn’t let his professional frustrations and misfortunes eclipse his musical enthusiasm. 

The latest installment of that enthusiasm is Always, Twilley’s third LP of original material in four years. Featuring such musical cohorts as Tommy Keene, Tractor’s Steve Ripley, and veteran session bassist Leland Sklar, the album boasts the sort of shimmering melodic pop and boisterous rock ‘n’ roll that longtime fans love. 

Sure, it’s familiar ground for Twilley, but few cover it so well. 

Always is your third studio album in four years. Are you a more prolific songwriter these days? Or have you always been prolific and you’re just now releasing more of what you write?

I was always very prolific, but I had so many problems in the music industry as a kid that, now that I’m self-contained and have my own studio and record company, it’s up to me when I want to record and how much. I never had that opportunity before. 

Is songwriting something you enjoy? Some artists like having written a song, but not sitting in a room with a pencil and a guitar trying to write one.

It’s a lonely feeling, because there’s nobody there to help you, usually. It just comes second nature with me. I’ve been doing it so long… The hardest part about it for me — it’s not the actual writing of the song because mechanically I just kind of do that second nature without really thinking about it — is the idea.

Coming up with the idea?

Yeah, coming up with the idea. “What am I writing about here? What am I trying to say?” Once I have that, I don’t have to think about it. The song just kind of appears.

To what length will you chase an idea or inspiration? Can it drive you nuts to the point where you just discard it altogether?

No. Sometimes if I don’t think about it, it works out better because those just come to me; and it’ll come to me at the strangest times. In fact, we’ve kind of promised ourselves that we’re going to stop recording for a while and do some other things — appear live more — and I have some other projects that I’m interested in doing. Even though you’ve promised yourself that you’re not going to write anymore or do anything else then you’ll come up with two or three good ideas.

You live and work in Tulsa, which isn’t exactly the center of the music universe.

No, but it is well known for some of the most talented musicians in the world. It’s not known just here. People around the world are very aware of Tulsa being a place for musicians that have thrived. I’ve always said part of the reason for that is this town just treats their musicians like shit. [Laughs] It’s why so many of them leave here and become big successes, because they certainly couldn’t do it here. If you want to be in the music business and you’re in Tulsa you better really love it or you better be really good.

Can you discern how recording and writing in Tulsa has influenced how your music comes out? In other words, does your environment affect how your music ultimately sounds?

I don’t think geographically it makes that big a difference to me. I think it’s just the whole freedom that I have, having my own studio that I’m in total control of. And it’s built onto my house so I can just walk out of here and be home, and I can stumble out of the house and be in here in my secret laboratory. Most of my life I had to get the big record company to pay the big dollars to be able to afford an album to record on X amount of days at X studio and be done that date, this whole big to-do.

[With] this, I just have the complete freedom to work at my own pace and not have to worry about being thrown out of the studio at midnight or something; or some other artist is coming in; or the record company thinks you’re going over budget. I just don’t have those worries anymore.... I kind of take more of an artistic freedom to go, “I don’t really care what other people think or how a record is supposed to be structured, what the rules are anymore.” There really isn’t much radio anymore and there isn’t much of a record business anymore. 

For a few years now I’ve sat back and thought about it and thought, I’m a recording artist. I’m an artist at recording. People will say, “You should’ve done that; it’d have been more cool if you did this or did that,” I think to myself, I’m going to do whatever the hell I want to do because I’m in control of my art. This is the way I want people to hear what I do, and so that’s what they get. There’s nobody at any record company who can tell me to do it different.

Does the home studio complement your creative drive or does it lead to obsession?

Sure, you can become obsessive. You can take a long time to work on one record just to get it exactly the way you want it. I can be that way from time to time, but the proof of my discipline is in my last three albums. That’s a short amount of time to release three all-new studio albums, and I’m very proud of all three of them. My fans seem to appreciate them. That gives you a good feeling knowing when you release a record there are people all around the world that it makes very happy. That makes me feel good. I kind of stand behind my work in that way. Sure, I could get really obsessive, but at the end of the day I’m a recording artist and so I want to make a good product, a good piece of work. 

When you’re in the studio do you ever tailor a song — how it sounds or how it feels — to what you think it’ll translate to on the stage?

No, not usually. I do sort of a different stage show. I like my stage show to be more of a rock ‘n’ roll event, where records to me are more artistic and, in a way, prettier. When I go out on stage I really like to scream my guts out, though I do a few songs in the course of the album that are definitely good screamers for the live show. But I prefer not to — in the middle of my rocking show — slow down and do acoustic things, which I think are real important to have and you want them on the record, but you don’t necessarily want to do them live that much. 

You can kill the momentum of a high-energy show if, four or five songs in, you say, “We’d like to slow it down a bit.”

Yeah, that’s kind of the way I feel about it. I don’t like my live shows to slow down at all. [Laughs]

Do you know anything about the status of the documentary [Why You Wanna Break My Heart: The Dwight Twilley Story] that was being made about you?

As far as I knew that all crashed and burned. And now some people are working on the concept of trying to breathe new life into it. A portion of it was filmed. We’ve talked to a few people, and are looking around for somebody who might want to take over the project and complete it. And I have some ideas of my own in that regard.

What gives you the biggest thrill in making music? Is it finishing a song? Is it getting an idea in the middle of the night that inspires you to write one?

I think the most satisfying moment I have is when I lay down a guitar or piano and I put the main vocal on it correctly — in other words, the right words in the right place — and the song sounds like what I’d wanted it to be. That’s my most exciting moment. From then on it’s just the mechanics of building it into a record, which is a fun process. Don’t misunderstand me, now. I enjoy that process, but there’s nothing more thrilling… Because you know what the best song always is? The new one. And there’s nothing like having a new one. After you have the new song you have that excitement for a while. Then it becomes something you’re working on. Then you just look forward to the next song.

Once you’ve reached that point where the song has achieved that basic shape of how you imagined it originally, is it instinct that then tells you when you’ve finally finished the song? Some artists have trouble putting things away.

This whole album was a little bit like that. One of the things about it — it was a hard record to make — was when towards the end of recording the last album, Soundtrack, my dear friend and companion and co-worker, Bill Pitcock IV, passed away. Bill had been with me since “I’m On Fire,” and the last ten years or so we really worked closely together in the studio, all the time. We’d just do things… I could just sing a note to him and he’d know exactly what I wanted. It was kind of one of those things where you barely needed to talk. My wife, who engineers the records, would say, “Pitcock speaks Twilley,” because we just had a way of communicating. 

We didn’t have Bill there every step of the way. We’d record some songs completely by ourselves and kind of feel proud of ourselves: “We didn’t even need Pitcock on that.” Now we don’t feel so proud. It doesn’t feel quite as good anymore, the feeling of knowing that he is just not here.

So it was suggested, “Why don’t you call on some of these friends who you’ve had through the years and get them to play on this record?” I thought that was kind of a good idea, but it kind of made it take longer waiting for the availability of different players and putting it together. There were times we called it “the record that wouldn’t die,” but eventually it did finish. 

But you can get caught up on a little tangent — and it’s a real thing — because you’ll hear the record and think, It’s all there but there’s some little thing missing. You just know there’s some little thing missing. Most of the time — if you rely on your instinct and don’t freak out on it — you just put that one little thing in there and it makes the record sit. It will settle down and say, “Okay, I’m fine now,” because usually the record will tell you what it wants.

Despite all the setbacks and frustrations that have occurred throughout your career, you must feel a sense of satisfaction that you’re still doing what you love exactly how you want to do it.

Very much. I would guess you would most likely be able to hear that in the album, Always. 

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