ArtStorming the City Different: Susan Anders

Join us for a conversation with singer-songwriter,Susan Anders,  including her songwriting process, the challenges of the music industry, and the evolution of her artistic expression. She discusses the differences between writing lyrics versus music, the impact of personal experiences on her work, and the challenges of performing emotionally-charged songs. The conversation also touches on the changing landscape of the music industry, the difficulties of making a living as a musician, and the enduring human drive to create music despite these challenges.

Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

Transcript

Introduction to ArtStorming

Speaker 1 0:01

Ever wonder what makes really creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, lili Pierpont, and this is ArtStorming, a podcast about how new ideas come to life and become paintings, sculptures, plays or poems, performances or collections. Each episode I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. So today I'll be art storming with singer-songwriter Susan Anders.

Speaker 1 0:45

Finally, a musician it's been weighing on me that musicians have been underrepresented in this series, and it's not like I haven't tried to get some, but the nature of their lifestyle as artists is that they're often traveling for shows, so they're not the easiest type of artist to nail down. Then recently I was having coffee with a friend and she asked me if I ever did talk to musicians and did I know Susan Anders. Well, what a boon from the universe, right? So naturally I jumped at the chance to meet her. And not only did I get to meet Susan, but the timing actually worked out that she was in Santa Fe and between gigs.

Meeting Susan Anders

Speaker 1 1:20

So I scheduled her immediately and we were all set to go and then she had to reschedule because she lost her voice. I mean, I can only imagine how unnerving it is for a musician to lose their voice, especially right before you're supposed to release a new album. Anyway, we persevered and her voice healed and we were able to capture this conversation just days before Susan's Nashville album release. All right, so I am here with Susan Anders and this is really fortunate because I've been wanting to get a musician on the show. And when I met Kim the other day and she suggested you, it's really thrilling and you were kind enough to send me one of your latest albums. Is that the latest one? Yeah, it's coming out at the end of.

Songwriting vs. Poetry

Speaker 1 2:03

May Great. So I got a little sneak peek and got to hear that I was filled with all kinds of questions, Because you're the first musician that I've spoken to. It occurs to me that it's a very different art form. So how do you distinguish between being a poet?

Speaker 2 2:20

or being a songwriter. Songwriters add music and, as near as I can tell, with poetry you can paint a whole picture with words. Sometimes you'll hear songs like that. I hear songs from people that to me the lyrics are more poetic than mine. I think my lyrics are a little more conversational, but when you add the music it alters it. To me that's the difference with songs. You can have maybe more plain spoken lyrics and you add music to it and it makes it more evocative.

Speaker 1 3:04

And which comes first, the music or the lyric, or do you?

Speaker 2 3:09

hear them together. It's easier for me to write music, so it can go both ways with me. I actually try and write lyrics first, or the beginning of lyrics, so I know what's going on before I add music, because I find it much harder to add lyrics to music.

Speaker 1 3:33

Say more about that. Why is it harder?

Speaker 2 3:36

The words don't come to me. Music comes to me much more easily. I'm sure you know about morning pages and people writing and I've done that off and on for years and I'll do that if I'm stuck in any way. At one point a friend when I was living in Nashville said well, you know, I heard about musical morning pages and you basically go to your instrument and play gobbledygook for 11 minutes and that gets the riffraff out of your brain and you get to the more interesting stuff. So I do that off and on and invariably around 11 minutes, like, oh, that's kind of cool, I like that. I, with morning pages, I will write, write shopping lists.

Speaker 1 4:43

Sometimes it's not, and that's just me it's just sort of brain-pen connection.

Speaker 2 4:50

It can work to get to the good stuff, but not always Interesting.

Speaker 1 4:56

And so if you were to do music morning pages, do you come to the piano or to your guitar?

Creative Process and Morning Pages

Speaker 2 5:00

Typically the piano yeah, even though I mostly perform with guitar.

Speaker 1 5:06

And so when you're writing your songs, are you writing them with the piano for the guitar Sometimes?

Speaker 2 5:13

Sometimes I start on guitar, sometimes I start on piano and switch it to guitar. Very rarely guitar to piano. The album that you just listened to is unusual because I think there are five piano songs in there. I don't do that much, I was being indulgent.

Speaker 1 5:34

Do you find that the deeper you get into your career, the more indulgent you are with yourself?

Speaker 2 5:41

Partly, or the less indulgent are with yourself. Partly less indulgent this time. I think it's an age thing of I'm just going to do what pleases me. But because this album came after we had moved across the country after 20 years in nashville, and then right after we unpacked my father died and so Newtown, dad gone, mourning all that, I think I just let myself do whatever. Plus, I think when you're in mourning you don't have the filters and the walls that you usually have, and so things were flowing a lot more for me that first year after he died than they had in years, because of all the emotion, the emotion and because of the filtering not happening. I am in my head a great deal and I was clearly much more, as you said, emotional, so things flowed more.

Speaker 1 7:02

So do you think, now that you've had that experience, that you can access the the field of emotion?

Speaker 2 7:10

on request it's a great question, but I don't think so. I don't think so. I, I, I tend to be pretty regimented about how I work. I will have a period of time where I'm just writing and in the ether, and then a period of recording, which ended a few months ago for this one, and that's a whole other creative process. In this case, and it's usually with my husband Tom, he's got the studio and we co-produce and so we're collaborating there. And then there's the whole chunk of promotion which I'm in the middle of now, which is a whole other animal, and I have been trying to write a little bit here and there during this time. It's really hard. I work much better if things are all in writing, all in recording, all in.

Speaker 1 8:18

It's so funny. It reminds me I didn't get to air this episode because there were complicated reasons. But I spoke to a potter and she said that her process. She builds the pots and then she fires the pots and then she glazes the pots and she collects a number of pieces and then it goes from one phase to another. So it's not surprising to me that there are sort of phases of it.

Speaker 2 8:42

For me. I think there are many, many musicians that, oh, I'm writing and I'm touring at the same time and I'm going to go in the studio next week, and I think I'm a little too much of a control freak for that.

Grief as Creative Catalyst

Speaker 1 8:57

Well, or just mindful of how you work at this point. I mean, it's one of the things you get to do when you're a mid-career artist is you get to say this is how, this is what I like, this is how I am Right, and so are you. Mostly you're performing your own songs, Do you? Do you have other people performed your songs?

Speaker 2 9:15

Yes, there have been various artists over the years who've recorded songs and when I moved to Nashville, as so many people do, I thought that I was sick of being a singer-songwriter and I was going to write songs specifically for other people to record. And I played that game for a while, which is what half of the people living in Nashville are doing and at some point I and this was country music and at some point I thought I'm not sure I like the values of country music. I don't listen to it since the Dixie Chicks got booted out. I love them and that's not to trash country music. There are some incredibly nuanced, beautiful songs in that realm, but there's also a lot of bro country lifestyle. That's not my lifestyle.

Speaker 1 10:21

So when you're writing a song, did it work out that somebody heard your music and said I want to do, I want to cover that song, or did you write specifically for other people and what's that process like compared to writing for yourself?

Speaker 2 10:35

I've done both. I've had people who did cover songs that I had released as an artist, and so they just heard my stuff or heard me live. And then I also, specifically, was writing for artists, and that could be kind of limiting because you're thinking of a certain market. I was pretending that I was 25 years old. What would a 25-year-old or 30-year-old do in this situation? So there was more play acting going on and then writing from that character. I've written from characters my entire life, off and on, so that wasn't wasn't difficult.

Speaker 1 11:26

Well, that's so interesting to me because I had a background a little bit of an as an interior designer, and so when you go in and you create a space for somebody else, you are, you're putting yourself in their shoes. I'm obviously not decorating for me, I'm decorating for them and their lifestyle and what their needs are. But when somebody does your song, what was that like to have a song that you wrote for yourself and then somebody else interpreted it? What's the experience of listening to somebody else do one of your pieces? I loved it.

Speaker 2 11:57

Did they change it significantly, sometimes, sometimes and sometimes they improved it, and I'd think, why didn't I use that word?

Speaker 1 12:07

That's great yeah. So changing lyrics, as well as the arrangements or as well as the instruments used, all of that.

Speaker 2 12:16

Yeah, and I think some artists care, but I didn't. It's just fun when someone else does your song and gets it out there.

Speaker 1 12:27

Yeah, well, I mean, it's just so interesting thinking about. So many of the people that I've talked to are painters or sculptors, and you know once somebody puts something down on paper nobody else can do it right, Exactly. It's like that wonderful line that Joni Mitchell said you know, can't paint a starry night again.

Speaker 2 12:42

Right, exactly, that's immediately where I went.

Speaker 1 12:49

When you said that, I thought that's like Joni Mitchell. Yeah, exactly, so it's. You know. It's kind of like it's really, it's really. I don't know it's yours, but it's kind of like once you let it go.

Speaker 2 13:02

It sort of belongs to the collective unconscious. Again, the baby's gone. The baby's gone. On the other hand, when someone goes to look at a painting, they're bringing their whole experience to it and they are having their own relationship with it. If somebody hears one of my songs and is moved by it, that's their experience. I was writing a friend of mine who's in China right now. She had heard a song I'd written about dad. That seems to be getting more of a response than anything from the album and she said it was so moving. And I said, yeah, but my dad had to die for me to write it and that sucks. And and she said you know, I think I wouldn't have had the profound experience of it had my father not died.

Speaker 1 14:01

So well, that's really beautiful in this in the sense that there are sort of two directions.

Speaker 1 14:08

I want to go with that. My next season is called art and legacy and death as muse. So you know, this whole experience that we have get access to when we touch that dimension, right is it? Just informs a whole other layer of our being right and and so I'm dedicating an entire season to it, and maybe we'll have to come back and and talk again when it comes to that, but I I think that, um, when somebody else hears a song that you've done and it touches them deeply speaking to, you know, having an audience, one of the things that's very unique for a singer-songwriter, especially performing singer-songwriter is that you know you get to perform that over and over again and witness the audience response to it, and sometimes I guess an audience is this big, blurry thing that you know you can't see somebody's personal reaction to it, but I imagine you get feedback from some of your audience members from time to time, absolutely and well, sometimes right after the show, talking to them.

Speaker 2 15:16

You can't always tell, because sometimes if everyone is moved, they're quiet. So there have been a couple of times when I've looked out and thought I am not connecting with these people. They look so grim and then afterwards people will say I was just so moved, I couldn't say anything and I was in it.

Speaker 1 15:44

So I was not reading them particularly well, Well, especially because your lyrics are not. You know, they're not light.

Speaker 2 15:55

Not this album. Well, they're never light.

Writing Songs for Different Audiences

Speaker 1 15:59

But I mean, what I loved about listening to your songs is that, like a lot of the other mid-career artists that I'm talking to, there's a maturity, there's a life experience that comes through them. So they're not just sort of bebop, you know, right well, coming of age songs. They're coming of age of a different, you know a different part of our life.

Speaker 2 16:17

I had a goal going in with this album. I had gone to see a couple of famous singer-songwriters who are a little older than I am and I thought these guys are going to give me a vision of what it's like getting older. And they didn't. It was a very disappointing show in that realm and I thought I am just going to write songs for people of my generation. Taylor Swift is writing great songs for her generation. They speak to everyone there and I know I like Taylor Swift and some of her songs move me. But I don't need to talk about themes of young love. I did that and that was for younger years.

Speaker 1 17:11

I want to talk about things that happened to us as we're older, like losing parents, aging, Well, obviously we all go through that trajectory in life, but somehow, even though I do listen to music, my musical tastes have changed. I'm not listening to both sides of the album, consistent, you know, continuously, and the fact that I even call it an album.

Speaker 2 17:34

Right, but what we did when we were young.

Speaker 1 17:35

But yeah, and I was very, very. I mean I can still hear a song and, and it takes me right back to the summer that I listened to that album on both sides, continuously, and so you know, I sort of define my life in these chapters, but my life has gotten so busy that I don't have musicians that I listen to. That would define this moment of my life, and I would imagine that the younger people coming through are listening to the lyrics and the music of the people that are of their age group, of the people that are of their age group. So who do you find is listening to your? How do people our age find a musician of our age who is speaking to issues of our age?

Speaker 2 18:14

You find one artist and I don't do Spotify much but Pandora I'll pop that artist in and Pandora will find some other artists and I get a lot of friends. Friends will just say I've been listening to so-and-so a lot. I was when I was filling out the form for you. I was thinking what do I listen to really? And I listen to artists doing something in the realm of what I do. So singer-songwriters at least I'm trying to have some substance with maybe some interesting production, non-traditional percussion, things that it's not rock and roll.

Speaker 2 19:07

But if I'm making dinner I'm listening to john batiste or tower of power or silk sonic I want. I want to hear funk, I want dance music. I want to hear some wailing singers. If the lyrics aren't deep, I don't care. So that it really is two realms for me and I don't do what you and I did when we were younger the listening. I could tell you, joni Mitchell Blue, which song was on which side of the record. Oh, me too. And in what order. Yeah, and that no more. That doesn't happen anymore. People listen to playlists.

Speaker 1 19:59

Well, and they're out of context, which was one of the questions I wanted to ask you is that how do you decide what order you're going? I mean, back in the day, when we listened to an album, it was like listening to chapters and it seemed to matter. Maybe it was arbitrary, but it which song comes next on the album, Absolutely, and so it was like part of the listening experience. And if it was on the radio, it was like wait a minute, you can't play. You know Eagles after Joni Mitchell, I mean you could. And now on Spotify, that's what these kids hear.

Speaker 2 20:38

That's exactly what happens and sometimes they are related and it can be fun. We're in this world where I'm putting out a CD. Every musician I know that is putting out a CD calls all their friends and say should I do this anymore? And it depends on the genre, because in singer-songwriter you can go and play shows and people. Our generation still buys CDs and I have a CD player in my car so I still listen to them there. It's a dying form, for whatever reason. We have a guy who's promoting the album to radio and he said I need 400 CDs. He's sending CDs to all of these DJs, really, so for some people they are still working, even though most of us the vast, vast majority of music now is listened to on spotify right.

Performing Vulnerable Songs

Speaker 1 21:54

Well, so it's almost like back to the way it was originally, with like a single. You know, you would just like release the 45, right that was right and most people some people listening won't even know what I mean by a 45. Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 22:06

So figuring out the order is it's sort of insane. It's sort of insane to even record a CD. Some artists just put out singles now. But I, since we were in the project and I had 12 or 13 songs, let's go for it. We, we enjoy, not the royal, we, my husband and I enjoy the process, so we wanted to do a bunch of them. When we put the order it was with the knowledge at least what I've heard that the vast majority of people, if they have an album, will listen to the first five or six songs two to three times more than the other songs. So we, instead of thinking what is the most artful order, we tried to have that. But we were much more pragmatic.

Speaker 1 22:59

We wanted to put what we thought were the strongest songs we wanted to top load and, uh, we sent the album out to a dozen friends and we had them vote interesting because as I listened to it and it's my first time through hearing one of your, any of your music, but starting with float, that the the next, maybe because my ear had a tune to your style and your rhythm, but you know, the all of the songs that came after that sort of really resonated for me. So I kind of had the mirror or the flip side effect I had side.

Speaker 1 23:36

B.

Speaker 2 23:37

Well, it's also like a performance. You're not going to walk on stage, or most people are not going to walk on stage and sit at the piano and play their slowest, saddest song. Unless all of their songs are like that and that's what everyone loves them for they're going to come out and probably do a mid-to-up-tempo song that's not lyrically quite so dense and that's maybe a little lighter. Quite so dense and that's maybe a little lighter. It's a welcoming people in to until you get into the heavier stuff. And so that's with this one, the. The first couple of songs I don't think were the deep songs, and then we things got a little deeper than that. I. It makes me wonder about here we are in Santa Fe. It's Gallery Central when you walk in, when people are thinking about it beyond the political. If it's a group show, you know I want my right by the front door, but how do you set that up so that you're invited in? And then, whoa, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 24:50

It's that I've curated shows and so I know what is in my mind as I'm hanging things, but usually it's not as sequential as something like. I mean, you really don't have the opportunity to walk across the. I mean, I suppose, with technology being what it is, you can skip from song to song, right, but you can't tell what that song is, the same way that when you walk into a gallery you are drawn to a particular block of color or something or something figure, whatever it is in that piece, whether it's the frame or whatever it is where it's situated in the gallery.

Speaker 1 25:24

But your eye will be drawn. So, because I come from a more of an interior design background, what informs me when I have hung a show is really more how things relate to each other, and I've never been given an order or layers of significance by the artist. Usually it's at the discretion of the person hanging the show. But so that does make it. It is so different. You know that how you have to kind of curate for the listener. You know the order in which you will build toward the final piece.

Speaker 2 25:57

I'm still thinking about the gallery With albums and a whole bunch of songs a lot of people including me. I will look at the key the song is in and try not to have the same key in a row Because of sameness. I'll try to not have the same tempo in a row and it was trickier with this album, but I try not to have the same theme in it. And I do the same thing if I'm building a set for a live show and building the order of songs.

Speaker 1 26:34

Yeah, yeah, well, you know, it occurs to me too that it's a different thing if you, if somebody's showing a body of work, that is, a particular collection, it's different than if you're hanging a retrospective. And if you're doing a retrospective of somebody's work, obviously you're going to kind of go a little bit more chronologically.

Speaker 2 26:49

That would be the logic of a show.

Speaker 1 26:52

But I do think it's interesting because, as I was listening to your album again first time through I was, and I didn't read anything. My preference is to listen first or to look at a painting first before I read the plaque or listen to anything written and you know, I was struck by like I was trying to decide, okay, which genre would I put her in? And then I thought, well, wait a minute, that's not fair. Just listen, don't genre-fy and don't who does she remind you of, and don't do anything. Just listen completely openly. But there was an opening I don't remember which song it was that sounded a little bit like traffic at the very beginning, with that little piano thing and I was like oh okay, low Spark of High Heel Boys, that's funny.

Speaker 1 27:33

So I mean like, but I think maybe I don't know if it's my brain or it's pretty common to want to make an association between this work and that work. I mean, certainly people do it visually. This work reminds me of it Absolutely. And in the art critic world, you know, when we say somebody's work is derivative of it, it sounds like it's not the most complimentary thing. But you know, the truth is is that we're influenced by life. There's nothing new?

Speaker 2 28:01

There's nothing new in music. It's just how are we weaving these elements together and are we doing it in an interesting way that might move people?

Speaker 1 28:13

So this last body of work, something kite, what was it called?

Speaker 2 28:17

Now I'm a kite.

Speaker 1 28:17

Now I'm a kite and I love that song that opens it. I was a table and now I'm a kite. Oh yes, and that one kind of had some significance for me, because my mother died in a skydiving accident and so the references to being kind of in flight and I know that they were different, they were about your dad's death, but I heard that song and I was like woo, that's just and chills in a way. But because this work is the collection is organized around the emotion that you had around your father's death. Did you know that you had a full genre, I mean a full oeuvre of work? That, or, you know, are there things that didn't make it onto this album? I guess would be another way to ask that question.

Speaker 2 29:00

The ones that didn't make it on, I just became disenchanted with. They just didn't make the cut for me. And one that got on. Let me interrupt myself. Early on I thought, okay, this is just going to be a morning album. And then, as I went along, I thought, no, this is going to be about themes that hit older people, because I didn't feel like having 12 or 13 songs about mourning. I needed other things in there and I had other things going on, but the song about Ruth Asawa.

Speaker 1 29:42

I like that song too. I like that a lot.

Speaker 2 29:44

I tossed that at one point, not because of the theme, it just wasn't working for me, and then I brought it back into the fold and I like it, and so it doesn't really fit thematically with anything going on in the album.

Speaker 1 30:02

So what I'm wondering is when I talk to a lot of painters, they'll say you know they'll have, they'll wrestle with certain pieces, right, and they'll come into their studio. They'll leave it the night before and come back the next day and it's like, no, it's all wrong. They'll scrape the whole thing off or they'll wrestle it to the ground.

Voice Coaching and Vocal Mechanics

Speaker 2 30:18

Do you have the same kind of problem with certain songs, or do they kind of just appear and then it's in the context, like the Ruth Osawa song, whether it fits into the album. As soon as I put it in there I thought, well, whatever she said those words when she was older, she lived to be an old woman. I'm gonna say that it works to have it in an album about being older. I just got arbitrary that particular song. I had written an entirely different Ruth Azzawa song a few years before that I didn't like and then I started writing this one and I spent a long time. Some songs I will write a bit set aside, come back to it. I can see it and hear it with fresh eyes and ears. Work on it some more. I don't push them as much as I used to. Also, I keep thinking about visual art here as I'm writing. I will take it to my writing group like someone writing a book. My writing group has been going for 35 years.

Speaker 1 31:36

Wow.

Speaker 2 31:38

We're spread everywhere. We meet on Zoom now. When we first met, we were all living in Los Angeles, and so these are people I trust I know they're just want to help me write a good song, so I will get a song to a certain place and then I'll take it to them. Get feedback and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

Speaker 1 32:06

So that really has me curious about whether, when you've been with a particular group as long as you have, do you see influences in each other's work. I mean, it's like a community, it's like a commune in a way.

Speaker 2 32:21

Not so much. I have written some melodies where I thought that's a Christina Olsen melody, but not so much. Our writing is pretty different and there are how many of you? Four of us, oh, just four of you, just four. So four of you for a long period of time.

Speaker 1 32:37

Yes, it was bigger it shrank, and you've seen each other evolve through all that time.

Speaker 2 32:42

Right.

Speaker 1 32:42

How interesting, and is everybody else writing lyrics that reflect their life experience as well?

Speaker 2 32:52

Yes, addressing their life experience as a mid-career or older artist yes, I would say that's true, because everyone is somewhere in the folk, americana pop realm of things.

Speaker 1 33:07

Jazz One woman is writing jazz, so yes, yeah, and you know that actually, since it is a storytelling genre, it makes sense that you would be telling stories that are relevant to the life you're leading. How long have you been in this genre? Have you been writing? I mean, I know you've been doing this since your early 20s and I did read something. I usually don't read people's websites but, I saw the thing about the singing telegram and I just thought that was hilarious so you're going to have to tell that story.

Speaker 2 33:39

Okay, so well, I'll say it right now. My best friend in college and I needed a job, so we formed a singing telegram company, and I was pretending that I wasn't an introvert and I made a fully set table that I could wear around my waist and our claim to fame was we would write a song for the person they would tell us it's, you know, grandma Mamie's birthday and she was born then, and so we'd write a song. One of us would show up. I realized it's a job for extroverts, not good for me.

Speaker 1 34:30

But if you could have just been the person writing the song and somebody else performing it, do you think you would have been more comfortable with that?

Speaker 1 34:35

Absolutely, because it seems like in order to that kind of creativity on demand, I mean other than I mean. At a younger age. I remember when we were all getting married we all used to write, you know, the songs for the rehearsal dinner that we would sing and they would all be rhyming and catchy and silly. There was a time where that came more freely. If I had to do that now, I think it would not happen.

Speaker 2 34:59

Writing on demand can be really fun and I've done that and it's fun. Performing on demand not so much. There are people that just come alive when they're on stage and then there are introverts like me that takes a little bit more effort to do something marginally well on stage.

Speaker 1 35:25

So say a little bit more about your stage experience versus your creative experience. Not that they're not both creative, but they're a different type of creative, so speak to that a little bit.

Speaker 2 35:35

When you and I were young, musicians went off into their cubbyhole. They did not have to post on Instagram, they didn't have to be public and they didn't have to post on instagram. They didn't have to be public and they didn't have to engage with their fans in a constant way. They could go off and get their visions and do their, their work. And, coming from that generation, I continue to do that a bit. I'm on social media, but I'm not posting every two hours and it's a different realm now, a different relationship with fans and, as a result, I don't have as big an audience, and I'm okay with that. I just thought I'm just going to do what I want to do and please myself and hopefully some people will like it.

Speaker 1 36:37

Well, I mean, your subject matter is very intimate. So I mean it would make sense that you would prefer a smaller audience that's actually paying attention and listening. It's not just a foot tapping right right ear swelling moment, right right. So it means to connect with a real audience and to have that, that exchange. Are you as comfortable, though, when you're, when you're writing a song and and composing the music for it? Do you imagine yourself performing it? Or are those two very different silos, for lack of a better word, that's a good question sometimes.

Speaker 2 37:16

And sometimes I will write something and think this is going to be a good song to put in the set. In between all the heavier ones, this one's more up tempo. Here's a. Here's an icebreaker song. I will be manipulative that way. And then there will be other songs uh, like shoes on the new album, the one about my dad, where I wrote that for me I didn't think it would go on the album, it was just a self-comfort song, and then my husband, tom, said nope, you're putting it on the album and it's the song that I'm getting the most response to.

Speaker 2 38:00

Because it was so personal, I think so and so when it works that way, that's great. But I didn't know that that would happen and I certainly didn't imagine that I would be performing it, as I am about to do, in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 1 38:18

And so how does it feel when you perform that very, you know, intimate and vulnerable song over and over again? Does it help process the grief and does it re-traumatize you?

Speaker 2 38:33

It does not re-traumatize. The real issue is tapping back into the emotion of it. So it's an authentic performance. It's very easy with the practice that musicians do. They're just practicing and practicing constantly. It's not like you can practice okay, I'm good to go a year from now. You have to practice all the time, and in that practicing, distance happens, and so even when I was recording the song, I had to have a little talk with myself and just say stop thinking about the tone, stop thinking about your pitch, get back into the moment of what was going on when you wrote it. And I think that's what performing artists are doing all the time. They're trying to. They don't want to do things by rote. They need to re-inhabit it with feeling, but not so much that they collapse on the stage and start crying.

Speaker 1 39:41

Right. Well, and it's also probably a little bit different when you're the singer, songwriter, performer, mostly a solo act as opposed to a group where you've got somebody or co-writers or whatever and so it's sort of a group effort. So you have it diffused over. You know a number of people and the interpretations are different and people are bringing their different moods and whatever to it. So when you're on stage, are you largely performing solo or do you? Because I know your album I noticed you had other people working, doing, playing harmony, other instruments, et cetera. Do you have them on stage with you typically?

Speaker 2 40:16

I will for the shows I'm about to do in Nashville and Santa Fe. We have several people who played on the album in Nashville and we have several other people who played on the album who in Nashville and we have several other people who played on the album in Santa Fe, so we're creating two different bands. That's not something that's that I do. It's not financially viable. So when I perform, it's just me, or me and Tom, my husband, backing me up. He's a much better guitarist than I and he sings backup.

Speaker 1 40:51

So when you're performing anything with another person or people and they're bringing their own thing to it, how do you kind of modulate, you know, like you're in a particular mood, you're in a particular headspace and you're singing, wanting to sing the song a particular way, or it's like moving you in a particular way, and then you get on stage and you've got other. You know you've got to sort of freeform it a little bit right.

Speaker 2 41:19

Yes, and when I have put bands together in recent years, I have made a. My plan for the longest time is to surround myself with musicians who are much better than I am and they also know to. They're not going to bring their drama on to the stage. I'm probably not going to change the tempo or throw some extra bars into the middle of the song. I'm going to play by the rules, but they're all such good musicians and so sensitive that they would follow me as I have. I've sung backup for people off and on for years and if they're doing their song, I'm usually not looking at the audience. I'm directing energy towards them.

Speaker 2 42:15

I feel like our job is to send all the energy to the lead person and they send that out to the audience.

Speaker 1 42:24

Oh, it's interesting. So now I'm going to have a different experience when I observe a band on stage. I mean, you sort of get a sense of that when you're watching people that are especially jazz, where you know the attunement to each other is part of the experience and part of the audience experience, even to just be noticing that Right. So another question I don't know, it seems like out of left field, but, um, so when you write a song, say you, you you said that often, I know I can't even remember what you said you write the music first. I try and write the lyrics first, try to write the lyrics first, so you've have some lyrics that you, and then you start to hear the sounds or the tempo or the whatever, and then you decide which instrument you're going to start with piano. Have you ever switched gears Like you thought it was a song for piano and now all of a sudden it?

Speaker 2 43:15

becomes a song.

Speaker 1 43:17

And how does that happen? I mean, does the song tell you itself Like people talk about their paintings, basically telling them, informing them as to what needs?

Speaker 2 43:27

to happen. There's a lot of just kind of mushing around. I'm going to try this and I can be manipulative. I haven't written anything in three, four in years. I'm going to try that and then I can have disasters. And then I can have disasters. I also can be very much. There's my mother's patchwork quilt over there and I realized she influenced me. I will patchwork songs together where I. There's a piano riff that was on my work tape for years and I really liked it. I couldn't think of anything to do with it and finally had some lyrics and I'm just going to patchwork these together and see if they work. So sometimes you have happy accidents.

Speaker 1 44:20

Yeah, so it's more like working in multimedia, if you were to compare it to a pointer.

Speaker 2 44:24

Yeah, so sometimes it's not that organic media, if you were to compare it to a pointer yeah, so sometimes it's not that organic.

Speaker 1 44:32

So say a little bit more now about you're also a voice coach and you work with other singer-songwriters, or mostly people who are just using their voice as an instrument.

Music Industry Challenges

Speaker 2 44:37

The full gamut. I've pulled way back from teaching. It was how I made my living for years and I had famous people on the record labels would send to me I'm saying, record labels, what would they call them? Now I don't know, what would they? Labels, labels. And I would teach people who could barely sing and just loved singing For the pure joy of singing. And so I, for the pure joy of singing, yeah, the pure joy of it. And all genres except for classical, so just a huge variety of singers and we would work on completely different things, sometimes very technical. How do you sing in tune? How do you? The irony here is that I've got the vocal fatigue now, post-bronchitis. But how do you hold on to your voice If you're on tour? So it could be a million different things.

Speaker 1 45:46

And what do you find that will block people from having their voice? Because I think this is where your particular art form is so interesting, because, in terms of what I'm trying to offer in this podcast series, which is giving people access to their voice, even though I haven't put it specifically around music, but finding your voice as an artist or as a human being, you would be amazed how many singers I worked with who, at one point or another, said I had a teacher who told me I sucked, my mother told me to stop singing.

Speaker 2 46:27

Who in their childhood were completely slammed for singing, and so when they finally got back to lessons, there was that realm of just being allowed to let their voice do its thing. And then there was the mechanical hey, you've got a voice, let's work on how to bring it out. Let's talk about breathing. Let's talk about resonance, where you're feeling the sound. Let's talk about how you're opening or not opening your mouth, these mechanical things that can improve one's singing. And then, when that happens, people feel like oh, here's my voice.

Speaker 1 47:13

But here's my voice, beyond just the sound that it makes what I have. Here's what's within me that's now allowed to express itself right. So are you really conscious of other people's speaking voices? I would imagine that would be like anybody who has sensitivity to color or flavors Do you kind of know what part of their body they're using to amplify or not?

Speaker 2 47:36

Yes, I do notice voices and I hear. Well in Santa Fe I hear the dryness here in many voices, and so when someone has a, and you and I, we both have a little bit of that going on right now. And you and I, we both have a little bit of that going on right now.

Speaker 1 48:07

If someone appears with the big, booming voice, I think, wow, how'd they escape that Santa Fe air? I'm definitely dealing with allergies, but it's so interesting that you could hear that because we've never spoken before. So it's not like you're hearing something that's different from my normal voice. Never spoken before. So it's not like you're hearing something that's different from my normal voice. You're just so attuned to just the mechanics of voice that you can hear that.

Speaker 2 48:22

I can't tell the difference between someone who is dry aired out and someone dealing with allergies.

Speaker 1 48:29

Right, so yeah, but still, that's. That's like if you were. If you and I were having this conversation on the East coast, where it's good and humid, you would probably hear my voice slightly. I'm not sure that I would be able to hear the qualitative differences, but you probably are that attuned that you could.

Speaker 2 48:46

I notice things like that fairly quickly.

Speaker 1 48:48

yes, and so when you I'm fascinated with this because you know, there's all this whole idea of like resonance, because I'm very drawn to very resonant voices, in part because for many, many years I didn't realize I was hearing impaired and a resonant voice I was able to hear better than in that middle register, right, right. So I'm very drawn to deep, low, big voices, right. But, um, I'm wondering if you can tell, like, what's going on psychologically with somebody based on how they use the instrument of their voice.

Speaker 2 49:20

Fairly quickly. When I start working with somebody, I can tell there are many of us that our brains must be severed from the rest of our bodies. And where does that happen? Well, our necks. And so how do we sever that? I worked with someone years ago who had been abused as a child and his voice was just like that. He was just gripping in his throat. I am pinching the sound out, so I that is pretty. It's easy to figure out when that's going on with somebody. It's not always easy to fix, but there are things you can do right away that make right so you mean first, it sounds like you locate, like where is the interference?

Speaker 2 50:19

Right.

Speaker 1 50:19

And then like what has to happen, to release it.

Speaker 2 50:22

Yes, and this is the big one. The throat is the muscles around the vocal cords we're all trying to manipulate and they shouldn't be that involved, and yet they are, and it messes things up. There's that, and then there's the breath, because most of us there's that book that came out a few years ago called yes, and he's saying most of us are walking around holding our breath. And it's true, I love that book. I had it for at least a year before I read it, because I'm not going to learn anything from this. And then I started reading and thought whoa, nellie, this is great. Yeah, what a great book.

Speaker 1 51:09

Yeah Well, and I just think that it's breath and song and dance and these things that are so native to our human experience that, as we live in this sort of mechanized world that has become very left brain and very not integrated, and so I think having access to breath is so primordial.

Speaker 2 51:32

Yes.

Speaker 1 51:33

And to be able to have that be your instrument must be such a cold he would plunge into a depression and everyone in his workforce.

Speaker 2 52:03

They'd all get depressed too, because work would stop until he had his voice back. But I think a lot of singers, we're so identified with our ability to vocalize that when it's impaired, well sure we are. Yeah, things are jumbled.

Speaker 1 52:25

Do you notice the difference? This might be an odd question, but do you notice the difference between you mentioned earlier introverts and extroverts? Do introverts and extroverts have a different way of using their voice?

Speaker 2 52:36

do introverts and extroverts have a different way of using their voice? I don't think so. No, I don't think so.

Speaker 1 52:44

I think that plays out more in the performance realm, but when they're performing- can you tell the difference between an introvert and an extrovert on stage Usually?

Speaker 2 52:54

But there are many, many, many artists out there who would say they're introverts and they have figured out what to do on stage so they have their stage persona. It's like when I go into—I was at a book reading a couple days ago and I went into sociable Susan mode and that's what you do. I figured out how to do that at some point. That's your professionalism, right yeah.

Speaker 2 53:20

And so you figure out these things, even though, at the end of the day, introverts might want to go to a noisy bar and have a bunch of people around them, and someone like me would like to go home and read a good book.

Speaker 1 53:35

Yeah, yeah. So switching gears just a little bit. What do you think is happening with the music industry going forward? I mean, I just saw an interesting article speaking again of fine art, that the blue chip art market is really changing. The new generation coming through is less interested in spending a gajillion dollars on a piece of artwork. They want something more intimate, they want something more immediately identifiable. How do you find that that's affecting the music industry or your particular corner of the music industry At?

Speaker 2 54:06

some point and this is, I think, a very rarefied air At some point I thought I'm just going to teach and that's how I'm going to make my living and what I do musically. I'm not going to worry about making money, I just am going to try and get the music out to as many people as possible. That is not the case for a 30-year-old singer-songwriter who's paying rent, who is working a job that is not paying all of her bills and maybe gets a bunch of airplay on Spotify and then gets a check for I mean, I constantly have friends posting their checks on Facebook. Here I just got three cents from Spotify, or you know, $12. So the music industry is rough, rough, rough now and the people I know who are making a go of it are touring all the time and they are just in their car driving to gigs and they're not home much. And this is why I thought I'm going to teach, so I can stay home a little bit more. It's a rough, rough industry.

Speaker 1 55:34

Well, and especially when you consider that there's such a difference between I don't know why I want to call it sort of the acoustic the singer-songwriter who's actually writing every word, writing every note, and these people who are doing I know it's a popular sort of I don't know what you'd even call it a genre, but these sort of mashups where they just take bits and pieces of electronically collaging songs pieces of, you know, electronically collaging songs and, um, you know you've got these kids who have these, these keyboards that make all the different instruments and all the different sounds and some of them are really quite.

Speaker 2 56:06

There's some great, amazing, absolutely.

Episode Closing

Speaker 1 56:09

But it's such a different thing and it seems, you know, like that I really feel for you sort of analog people out there.

Speaker 2 56:18

Absolutely. It's a tough way to make a living anymore. And even in Nashville, when I moved there in 2002, well, I had friends who would write a hit song that someone famous would record and they'd buy a house. That doesn't happen anymore. That's not going to happen anymore If you get a cut with an artist, you don't have the pendulum.

Speaker 1 56:45

Swing back.

Speaker 2 56:46

No.

Speaker 1 56:47

It's gone.

Speaker 2 56:49

Well, people don't buy CDs anymore, they listen to Spotify, and Spotify pays next to nothing for airing a song, so it's just for artists. It's a terrible state of the industry and artists now are constantly looking at other ways to make a living. The irony when we were living in Nashville we were having a backyard party at one point and I was looking around and thinking that guy had wrote two number one hits. That one is pretty well known touring singer, songwriter everywhere. I was just seeing all these people. We're all around a picnic table and what was anyone talking about? They were talking about real estate. Because when we moved to Nashville in 2002, you could buy a house for cheap and so and you could live for cheap and be a musician. And so people move there. They'd buy cheap houses, they'd fix them up, they'd rent them out and that is how they funded their musical life.

Speaker 1 58:00

Well, it's such a bizarre thing to think about when you think how, again, native music I mean making music is so primal to us as humans and yet it's no longer a viable way necessarily to make a living from what it sounds like. And yet people are still born with this drive to make music, and making music is sort of a metaphor for, you know, like living a joyous life. So it'll be really interesting to see what happens to whether it's the music industry or just what happens to music and how we as human beings continue along this trajectory of being musical beings. Music and dance and all these things that are so integral to being human.

Speaker 2 58:46

I like to think that the drive is so strong that even if someone has to work a couple of jobs, they will squeeze in that 20 minutes at night and it still brings them joy, and what they're working on may bring someone else joy. But I have for many years thought about the pragmatic part of being an artist, and I was thinking of Tina Mayan when I was driving across the country and we stopped at the hotel in Winslow, arizona, where all of her stuff is there and I thought this is brilliant. She got out of LA, she has a place where she can do all of her work and the kicker of it was she had one piece that I just wow, this isn't. This wasn't available so I don't have it now, but she was doing very moving work and she had a vehicle for displaying it.

Speaker 2 59:49

And they were making a living because they owned a hotel.

Speaker 1 59:52

So I guess we'll just see those creative iterations hopefully coming up and hard to predict where it's going to hotel. So I guess we'll just see those creative iterations hopefully coming up and hard to predict where it's going to go.

Speaker 2 59:59

I think that's the optimist in me is hoping for that.

Speaker 1 1:00:04

Great. Well, I think that's the perfect place to leave it, and thank you so much. I loved this conversation.

Speaker 2 1:00:11

Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 1:00:15

Well, thanks for joining us today. Please like and follow us on artstormingorg, where you'll find a list of our shows, a transcript of this episode with links to the guest page, as well as our other projects. Art Storming is brought to you and supported by ArtBridge and listeners like you. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms.