Another enticement came when Colvin taped “Austin City Limits” for the first time in 1991. A turning point, she says, was when her sister, who’d gone to college at UT, moved back here from Los Angeles in the early 1990s. So I just remember being on top of the world, basically.”Īt one point that night, she even told the crowd, “That’s it, I’m moving to Austin.” It took a little while, but a few years later she did just that.
It’s such a music town they don’t suffer fools. You feel like they know what they’re talking about. There’s just nothing like a supportive Austin audience. “I remember saying it was the best gig of the tour. “I’d come back to this place that I love I was kind of scuffling along when I was here, and this great thing happened. “It was sort of a ‘local girl makes good,’ I think was my feeling,” she said. At the Cactus last week, she remembered touring Europe as a member of Vega’s band later that year: “We played Wembley (stadium), I met the king and queen of Sweden, and I met Twisted Sister.”Ĭolvin doesn’t remember much about the 1988 Cactus gig, but a subsequent show there in December 1989 on the “Steady On” tour stands out. It followed stints with North Carolina roots band the Red Clay Ramblers and studio work that included singing background vocals on her friend Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” a top-5 pop hit in the summer of 1987. LISTEN - Shawn Colvin on the new solo acoustic edition of 'Steady On':ĪROUND THE TIME she was working on the original album, Colvin returned to Austin to play the Cactus in April 1988. Those who buy a copy of the record at Waterloo will receive a wristband for guaranteed admission. as part of HAAM Day, the annual citywide fundraiser benefiting Health Alliance for Austin Musicians. It seemed to harken back to the way it started and the roots of it.”Ĭolvin will perform songs from the album at Waterloo Records on Sept. “So when the idea came up to re-record ‘Steady On’ as just me and my guitar, I’d been doing it that way for years. "The requirement from then on, at least for the writing of ‘Steady On,’ was that I be able to do these songs by myself. “It was a little scary, which is a good thing, I think,” she continued. “I felt I had to take that music that was fully produced and deconstruct it down to a guitar part." The result was “Diamond in the Rough,” which jump-started the string of songs that became “Steady On.” She decided that “the next time John gave me a piece of music, it was kind of do or die,” Colvin said in a mid-August interview at her Austin home. She’d been working for years with John Leventhal (who’s now married to Rosanne Cash), a gifted musical composer who frequently gave her in-progress material that didn’t yet have lyrics. Getting sober in 1983 was a big turning point for Colvin, but she quit playing music for about a year in the mid-1980s before finally resolving to become a songwriter. RELATED: Uncle Walt's Band gets its due with new reissue, tribute shows
It’s a song she still frequently plays onstage, including at the Cactus last week. One night they made a three-part-harmony recording on cassette of “Don’t You Think I Feel It Too” by Uncle Walt’s Band, a trio Colvin had fond memories of seeing in Austin clubs in the ’70s. Among the musicians she met here was the now revered guitarist/producer Buddy Miller, who later ended up in New York and, in 1980, asked Colvin to join his band there.Īustin mandolin ace Paul Glasse, who befriended Colvin during her years here, remembers visiting her in New York in the early 1980s with his friend Gary Hartman, who’s now the director of the Center for Texas Music at Texas State University.
When she came to Austin in October 1976 - her first night here, she saw Ry Cooder at Armadillo World Headquarters - it was as a member of Dixie Diesels, a band from Carbondale, Illinois, that moved en masse to Texas. Colvin already was an accomplished musician. “Steady On” was the result of a personal vow to change that. LISTEN - Shawn Colvin on how she realized she should be a songwriter: But, she added, there was one major difference between her heroes such as Joni Mitchell and James Taylor: “They write, and I don’t.” “I realized at some point, THIS is what I do: I play guitar and sing,” she recalled to the Cactus crowd last week. After a peripatetic stretch from the mid-1970s through the early ’80s that included a couple of years in Austin before she moved back home to Illinois, then to San Francisco and finally New York City, Colvin had a revelation that seems obvious in retrospect: She was, at heart, a singer-songwriter. IN A WAY, this new take on “Steady On” brings Colvin full-circle to the reckoning point that set her career as a singer-songwriter in motion.
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