Shawn Colvin's move to a smaller record label has put the singer-songwriter in control of her destiny, she tells Tony Clayton-Lea
A new record label often equals a new approach. So it is for South Dakota singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin, who over a year ago departed major label Columbia/Sony for the rather more sleek if lower key and individualistic label Nonesuch. The move seems tailor-made for someone as good as Colvin - she has a reasonably widespread if niche market appeal that doesn't sit comfortably with a label that prefers to use their resources to keep rock stars cocooned within a lifestyle they have been accustomed to for years.
Because of the label change, she says, she is now pretty much in charge of her own creative destiny. She realises she is now (and, indeed, has been for some time) a moderately successful singer-songwriter, not as well known, perhaps, as her teen idol Joni Mitchell, but well enough known to make a living out of her trade. "I got the benefits and made the compromises inherent in the relationship between an artist and a major record company," she explains, "and for a while that worked - it was a standard way to go."
Indeed, to an extent greater than Colvin admits, it worked really well - she had a substantial hit with 1996's A Few Small Repairs and very decent sales on various other records (her Columbia debut in 1989, Steady On, which also won Colvin her first Grammy, and 2001's Whole New You). But the way she tells it, relations between her and record company executives gradually started going south. "I was not an artist that could give them what they needed - I was getting older and it was clear that they weren't going to support me for the long haul. So I left, and now I'm with a record company where I have a lot more control over my life. They're smaller, they probably don't have the kind of clout that Columbia have, but it's a better home for me in a million other ways."
COLVIN IS THE real deal, an artist who has been through the hoops - love, marriage, divorce, drink and drug problems. Her songs are rooted in such personal experiences, the yin and yang of life's rich and occasionally bloody-minded fabric.
"I don't write about world situations," she says, "or much fictional material. It's a very typical singer-songwriter overview of things - navel gazing, I suppose! There were, of course, many great songwriters that I learned from, so part of my growing up was finding out how and what to learn from them - and how could I say or write anything that would be as good as their work. But everyone has their own perspective, and no one can write it as well as you. I think what a writer has to do is to edit well and make a song a good stand-alone piece, rather than just something that reads like a journal entry."
How does she manage to do that? "I just go with something that catches my ear. I try not to determine exactly what a song is going to be about; I just wait until there's a germ of something that makes sense - be it in a line or a melody or even a song title. I don't always know what it means. If you do it that way, then you're working with some sense of intuition and perhaps a small bank of images. It's a little more mysterious that way. When you fill in the blanks you can get more and more specific, or even pull the song together.
"Occasionally, I have a sense of perspective about the song after it has been written, as if the song is more fully formed after it's finished. Also, when you perform most songs night after night you get deeper into them, so perhaps there are layers there that you didn't originally realise."
The classic singer-songwriter genre, says Colvin, is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Compared with the genre-defining years of the 1960s and 1970s - when the likes of Neil Young, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell became icons for several generations - the current breed just doesn't cut it. "That era of the singer-songwriters ruled the roost in a lot of ways. I think the genre will always exist and there will always be fans of it, but now there are a lot of hybrids. At this point, I think it's quite silly, at least in my country, to view what is on the radio as popular, as if it's a microcosm of what's out there."
COLVIN SUGGESTS AS an alternative the more personalised communications arenas of My Space and their ilk: "Word of mouth via the internet is great for communicating what it is that people like. Satellite radio, too, is good for that - it's eclectic and across the board. The standard ways of gauging what's popular - the traditional music charts - I don't pay attention to those any more.
"I've embraced the whole internet thing. I have a My Space account, and I find it an extremely efficient means of getting my thing across. Anyone can speak to you, and you can put music onto it and get music off it. You cut across the middle man in all kinds of ways - you're in control of your destiny, in however small a way that can be."
Colvin's new album, These Four Walls, is yet another fine record to add to her catalogue - songs of hard-earned respect, tough tales empathetically told. She has been singing her heart out for nigh on 30 years. It is quite a long time, isn't it?
"I'm surprised that I've been allowed to do it for so long, but it's really the only thing I know how to do. If we're all meant on some level to be good at the one thing you can do the best, then I'm certainly in the right job. I don't have a lot of skills, it's true, but my songwriting is natural, and that's good enough for me."
Shawn Colvin plays Dublin's Olympia Theatre on Wed, Nov 22. These Four Walls is released through Nonesuch/Warners