If these walls…

Shawn Colvin is on a sort of double dynamite tour with Mary-Chapin Carpenter, but she settles in for three nights at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant performing solo in downtown Minneapolis this Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. She is a brilliant singer/songwriter/interpreter who achieved stardom with the Grammy-winning pop hit “Sunny Came Home” on A Few Small Repairs in 1997. I don’t think anything eclipses her first three recordings beginning with the Grammy-winning Steady On in 1989, followed by Fat City (1992) and Cover Girl (1994), each one of which is full of four-alarm songs.

In June last year Shawn returned with All Fall Down and the memoir Diamond in the Rough. “It’s a double opportunity to fail,” Shawn told the New York Times.

In her memoir Colvin documents how she has overcome alcoholism, depression, and misadventures with unworthy men (my description, not hers) in the course of an accomplished career. You can hear a lot of her struggles in the music as well as her love of the Beatles, with which she opens the book. Her music is confessional in the traditional singer/songwriter mode, but I think her lyricism, her bite and her travails also hark back to Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.

She is a gifted performer and interpreter. On Cover Girl she explores songs written by others and it is full of gems. One such is “If These Walls Could Speak,” by Jimmy Webb. You can’t help but feel the personal connection she finds in Webb’s lyrics:

They would tell you that I’m sorry
For being cold and blind and weak,
They would tell you that it’s only
That I have a stubborn streak
If these old walls could speak.

YouTube is full of fantastic videos deriving from Colvin in performance on television and in concert. I don’t think any clip captures her artistry better than what appears to be the amateur video below of Colvin performing Webb’s song as an encore before an appreciative audience at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano in December 2011. Her eyes well up with tears as she sings that touching chorus.

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