A Belated Birthday Note to Shawn Colvin

Shawn Colvin turned 51 on January 10th. That makes her a Capricorn like me - I turned 25 on January 17th, after all. Perhaps it is the state of my time availability that it takes me three weeks to write this, but the day that NPR told me that tidbit - January 10th was that day, it turns out - I felt compelled to wander to a bus listening, for the hundredth time, to Colvin's "Polaroids."

I want to write out a verse of "Polaroids."
"I was so weary then
the ugly American
thinner than oxygen
tough as a whore

I said you could lie to me
I own what's inside of me
and nothing surprises me
anymore"

The verse, and I suppose the song, is a type of autobiography - a time in New York as an artist and a type of life spent on the edge, poised for a purpose of making art, of "speaking truth" and all those wonderfully appealing and embarrasing-to-say Bohemian lifestyle choices. It's interesting that I was listening to the song 13 or 14 years ago, from her album Fat City on a tape deck in my mom's Toyota Previa as she drove everywhere, humming along to its tune. It's interesting that anyone can write a song whose relevance would not be clear to a listener over a decade later. It required context, though - tough thoughts on life's choices, and some education and thought on great verse. She composes great verses - they're lines that carry you from one glorious, profound idea to another.

Yet Shawn Colvin is not the sort of person who one would think of writing essays about, or birthday notes to. Shawn Colvin is a sort of Lillith-era fluke of a success, winning her 1997 Grammy for Record of the Year for "Sunny Came Home" and going platinum with its album A Few Small Repairs. The year that "Sunny Came Home" was a hit, in fact, I remember friends laughing at the line "Sunny came home with a vengeance" - asking, I suppose reasonably, "how do you come home with a vengeance?!"

Setting aside that I personally enjoy that play on words and phrases, and think "Sunny Came Home" a fairly moving and intricate song, it wouldn't surprise me much if she'd been utterly forgotten. She is, after all, the type of person a young person might hear in his mother's car on her tape deck. Her music is sonorous and pleasant, melodically not risky. She, in a move her managers later described as "ill-advised," made an album of covers in 1994 called Cover Girl - it was bland and poorly timed for her career.

She simply is not the type of artist that takes the type of risks that get a female artist noticed. She is not as meticulous as Lucinda Williams, not iconoclastic like Liz Phair or PJ Harvey, not even ambiguous like Neko Case. She is, simply, a professional. I left her album this past year, These Four Walls, off of my list of the albums of the year simply because it was not, in fact, all that memorable. Yet for the life of me, I can't pick out a bad song on its set.

A couple of years ago, I pulled up an Entertainment Weekly archive of the review of Fat City - a review that gave the album a D+. The writer, Billy Altman, clearly had a bone or two to pick with a certain brand of folk singers. "Things that make you squirm: songwriters who seem to think it's not a song until the page is filled with words; songwriters who seem to think music and lyrics need not be wedded or even living together."

I might not have found that conclusion so far off base the first two times I heard the Colvin song "The Facts About Jimmy." I might have wondered, as I do often about many conventional aritsts, what the appeal of a square, verse-bridge-chorus type female-led song is after a while. Recently I drove home on a Friday night from the U District in Seattle - it was hopping, and people were everywhere, and I, on the way to a friend's house with Korean take-out, did not quite have that type of energy. I heard the song. Colvin's voice in it is thinner than usual, frailer. She sings, at one point, "I used to get drunk to get my spark/ And it used to work just fine/ It made me wretched but it gave me heart/ I miss Jimmy like I miss my wine." She sings of Jimmy as the type of person who says, in the line that concludes each chorus, "There's somebody for everyone." The guitar was safe and soothing. The song has, I think, a loneliness that cannot be described in words. It is a feeling one gets driving home from the U District on a busy Friday night. It is a thinness in a voice that misses Jimmy like it misses wine.