Composed Page 10

  I remained completely humbled by the dream, and it stayed with me through every waking hour of finishing King’s Record Shop. We were so far into the process that it was too late to add songs or change the ones that were there, but I vowed the next record would reflect my new commitment. Rodney was at the top of his game as a record producer, but I had come to feel curiously like a neophyte in the studio after the dream. Everything seemed new, frightening, and tremendously exciting. I had awakened from the morphine sleep of success into the life of an artist.

  The cover of the King’s album won a Grammy for best art direction. It was a photo of the actual King’s Record Shop in Louisville, Kentucky, hand tinted by Hank DeVito. I had seen the image at Hank’s house and begged him to retake the photograph with me standing in the doorway for my cover. He declined, as the hand tinting had been laborious, but he did agree to take my photo in a doorway and then digitally insert me into the original shot of King’s Record Shop. I didn’t actually visit the real store until the record was released, when we held a press conference there. Sadly, King’s Record Shop has gone the way of most mom-and-pop record stores and no longer exists.

  I ended up having four number one singles off King’s, a first for a woman in the industry. Although it was my sixth album, I felt like a beginner, and I was relieved and grateful for the chance to start over, to go deeper into sound and texture, language and poetry, and the direction of my own instincts.

  As I learned more about painting, I began to become obsessed with it. I was not a great visual artist by any stretch of the imagination, but I found a freedom in working with paint that I had never experienced as a musician. I grew curious to discover whether I could parlay the liberation I had felt on the canvas to the stage, from paint to my voice. I figured if I could experience it in one creative realm, I could find it in another. Painting so mesmerized me that I still remember going by myself one day to paint in one of the rooms in the warehouse where Sharon taught, working for hours and completely losing track of time. I became rattled when I discovered that it was nighttime and that I had been painting for five or six hours and was now alone in a warehouse in a dicey part of town. Attending a class with visual arts students was also a fresh way for me to cast off the trappings of fame, to unshackle myself from success and the expectations that went with it.

  Not that I didn’t take advantage of that success—I renegotiated my contract with Columbia, which by then was a part of Sony, after King’s Record Shop and brazenly demanded an almost outrageous sum, but it seemed justified, as I not only had a lot of currency in the industry at that point, but I was angry about the fact that they had dropped my dad. I wanted parity from them, and at some level I didn’t care if they renewed my contract or not—I simply wanted to paint. They gave me the amount I asked for. My longtime business manager, Gary Haber, had the good sense to put half of it in an IRA and pay some bills, and the rest of it saw me through the enormous difficulties that were to come. I never again achieved the kind of chart success I had with King’s, and it took me years to recoup the advance that I had gotten from Sony. (In fact, when I left Sony in 1994, it was still unrecouped, and my new label, Capitol, had to take on my debt.)

  As part of my attempt to unbind myself from language, I began listening obsessively to four records, all instrumentals: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain; the sound track for the movie Cal, written by Mark Knopfler; and Peter Gabriel’s sound track for Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ. When I needed a reprieve from the intensity of those four, I listened to Vaughan Williams. Slowly I began to write new songs, as an adjunct to my painting, and I started to get more involved in political and environmental issues. I also became pregnant again. I cherish one particular image of myself that sums up that period of my life: Seven and a half months’ pregnant, and huge, I walked into a new painting class with a stack of voter registration cards and made an announcement that if anyone needed to register to vote, to see me. I can remember the shock on the students’ faces. I eventually grew so enormous that Sharon, the teacher, got nervous that I was breathing in too much paint and might go into labor in class, and suggested that perhaps I should resume after giving birth.

  Carrie Kathleen (named for my dad’s mother, Carrie, and my sister Kathy) was born on December 12, 1988, almost two weeks overdue. She was a precious and welcome tonic in our lives at that moment, for we had moved from the log house into a big, featureless McMansion on Franklin Road in Nashville just a month before and were all feeling disoriented. Carrie was born only five months before Rodney’s dad died and eighteen months before my marriage to Rodney would end, and it seemed that she came into the family to bind us in love, steel us against loss, and connect all the disparate personalities, come what may. My mother had come from California to Nashville in late November to be present at her birth, but I was so overdue that she had to return home before I went into labor. When she finally did meet baby Carrie for the first time a few months later, she looked at her and said with awe, “Rosanne, she’s so special.” She was indeed, and has grown even more so. Carrie was my foxhole partner through divorce, moving to New York, remarriage, September 11—and any number of other traumatic and revolutionary experiences. She attended Barrow Street Nursery School in New York when she and I lived in our little apartment on Morton Street in the Village, then went to St. Luke’s on Hudson Street from pre-K through eighth grade, then to Rudolf Steiner High School on the Upper East Side for a year, and then she decided to finish her high school years with her dad in Nashville. Because she hates change and loves the safety of what she knows, that move represented a huge decision for her, one that required tremendous courage. I supported her in that decision, but God, I grieved when she left, fearing I would never have her in my house again. But true to her form, which is of deep family connection, community, and domesticity, after finishing high school and putting in one year of college in design school, she moved back home to New York and enrolled at the New School University and took a job at St. Luke’s, her old alma mater, teaching a cooking class to young children after school. She has never caused me a single problem. John, my husband, who took on the role of a father to her when she was three, loves her deeply. She has matured into an exotic beauty, with her grandmother Vivian’s Sicilian coloring and masses of black hair surrounding a heart-shaped face and feline eyes. She is quite heart-stopping, like a modern-day Claudia Cardinale, and remains dreamily unaware of the effect she has on men. John regularly gazes at her and sighs to me, “What do you think she’s going to do with all that beauty?” Usually he adds wryly, “Shouldn’t she marry a billionaire?” She is an odd little thing in many ways, highly sensitive to textures and colors and sounds, but she knows herself extraordinarily well, and she is proactive on her own behalf, always planning her life within the exact limits of her ability to navigate any given circumstance. She paints and draws, cooks and sews, and has dozens of skills and talents that I never dreamed of having. I thrill to her company, and just to the fact that she is in my life.

  In 1989, when Carrie was about a year old, I had composed enough songs for a new album. (I was again on suspension from Columbia for being overdue in delivering a record.) The songs I had written were about the coming dissolution of my marriage—“postcards from the future,” as I called them later—though I didn’t realize it at the time. I didn’t recognize the themes of heartbreak and disappointment and the obsession with hidden disillusionment running through every song, but it was definitely there, and everyone but me seemed to notice. Intuitively I knew Rodney shouldn’t produce the record. He agreed, and I made appointments to meet with a few different producers I respected. I played Malcolm Burn the demos I had made of the new songs, and after listening quietly to all of them without commenting, he asked very directly when the tape ended, “And why aren’t you producing this yourself?” I stuttered a couple of reasons that I realized made little sense, and then finally admitted, “I don’t know.” After he left, I p
aced the length of the room for about an hour, thinking about the possibility and eventually growing excited. I thought I could do it.

  The label agreed, and I called Steuart Smith to work on some arrangements for me. Because he lived near Washington, D.C., we mailed demos back and forth in preparation for recording. I had the idea of approaching the record as if it were a collection of Celtic songs and decided to make it nearly all acoustic. Also, I didn’t trust myself with drums—I was sick of the big snare sound of the eighties, and I didn’t want to spend hours sorting out drum sounds, as had been my habit in the previous fifteen years of recording. Even after that revelatory session with Glyn Johns in 1980, it had never really occurred to me that I could record drums differently, without the hyperfocus on the exact snare and tom and kick effects, but a more stripped-down, percussive rather than full-kit sound was just right for this particular group of songs. I hired Roger Nichols to record and mix the record, and I booked a studio at Masterfonics in Nashville because it had a great old Trident recording console and I wanted to record in analog. Every studio in Nashville, and in the entire country for that matter, was in the process of switching to digital, and the Neve board/Studer tape machine combination that I had grown to think of as the gold standard in recording was going the way of Betamax. There were few analog boards left in town, and that old Trident seemed like a great option for me. (After I finished the record, I was crushed to learn that the board was sold to a jingles studio.)

  I hung a sign above the door to the control room that read ABANDON THOUGHT, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. I was rebelling against overthinking, overproduction, and contrivances of any kind. I was determined to make this record as “organic” as possible—in concept, sonics, arrangement, choice of instruments, and recording technique. I didn’t want to do a lot of preproduction, beyond the basic arrangements that Steuart had helped write. I hired Michael Rhodes and Eddie Bayers to join Steuart and me on the basic tracks, and the five of us, along with Roger, began recording. From the outset it was an intensely satisfying experience. The gents did revolt at one point against my “no full drum kit” rule and insisted that I let Eddie play the full complement on a few songs. John Stewart, my dear friend and mentor, came in to record a guitar track on a song we had written together, “Dance with the Tiger,” and my heart melted at the poignancy of his part. Mark O’Connor, Edgar Meyer, and other world-class musicians came in to play on several tracks, and I was in my element; I loved making this record as I had no other. The entire process was the antithesis of the Rhythm and Romance experience—civilized, measured, easy, and so musical.

  When recording was complete, I went with Roger to Los Angeles to mix it, and my toddler Carrie and I settled into the Sunset Marquis. The mixing went especially well—Roger was such a strange and gifted person. I would begin to tell him something I wanted to try or something I wanted changed, and as soon as I opened my mouth, before I could say a word, his arm would be slowly reaching across the console to do the very thing I wanted. I remember that at one point during the recording, I had one request that couldn’t be done—some technical thing that just couldn’t be achieved on the Trident—and Roger spent a couple days inventing a device to override the limitations of the analog board to get me what I wanted.

  Steuart was, again, a gift, and I came to appreciate the full depth and breadth of his genius during Interiors. He and I started our own little autodidact club, making lists of books and talking about literature and philosophy over drinks. Even though Steuart and I parted musical ways many years ago (he has since become a member of the Eagles), to this day I have a very fond place in my heart for him and know that he fundamentally changed me as a musician, by inspiring me with the depth of his attention—to music, to books, and to life in general.

  I took the finished record back to Nashville, totally proud of what I had accomplished, and played it for Rodney. “It’s great,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s finished.” I was shocked. I remember lying on the floor next to the boom box that I had just used to play Rodney the tape, staring at the ceiling and wondering if he was right. He argued that the record was too interior, too quiet, with too much of the same monochromatic emotional and sonic palette, and suggested adding a few songs to balance it and give it more energy. I started to cry, but after thinking about it for a day, I reluctantly agreed that he should produce a few more songs for the record.

  When Rodney hired Richard Bennett to play on my song “On the Inside,” I started to feel that it might have been the right decision. I loved how Richard played and how “On the Inside” came out, and even thought it should open the record. There was another song, a ditty I had started and Rodney finished called “Real Woman,” in which I had never had any faith, as I thought it was too self-conscious and not even a real song—I had begun writing it with tongue firmly in cheek, but Rodney took it seriously and finished the lyrics and suggested we record that as well. Even though I had reservations, I agreed. I was still so disconnected from “Real Woman” that I left the studio after we got the basic track and let Rodney and Steuart work on the guitar parts. I came back at the end of the day to hear what they had done, and as I sat at the console a feeling of dread flooded through me. “What do you think?” Rodney asked. “I think it sounds like a fucking Pepsi commercial,” I said, and left the studio, almost distraught. I thought that song had ruined the record. Rodney and Steuart were shocked. Although Rodney rethought it a bit so that it didn’t turn out too badly, I still have not listened to that track in nearly twenty years.

  “Real Woman” is probably my greatest musical regret—even more than the giant snare/synthesizer sounds of the mid-eighties, or some of the more sophomoric, navel-gazing songs I wrote for Rhythm and Romance. To my mind, it completely diluted the artistry of the record, and the only thing that could salvage it even today would be a great R&B singer like Anita Baker taking it to a whole other level of empowerment.

  I delivered Interiors to the label, and they sent the head of A&R to the studio to listen to a few key tracks with me. After listening to four songs, he laughed coldly and said, “We can’t do anything with that.” He looked at me with bemusement. He was clearly flabbergasted that I thought this was music the label would consider commercially viable. I was stunned, and felt as if I had been slapped in the face. He explained further: “Radio won’t play this.” When he left the studio, I started to get angry. To my mind this was the most “country” record I had given them—almost entirely acoustic, very folk based, a real singer-songwriter project. I said to the assistant engineer, who was with me in the control room, “He’s wrong. I can’t wait to prove him wrong.” He was, as it happened, right. The first single, “What We Really Want,” made it only to number 39, my weakest showing on the country charts in well over a decade. My heart sank, and I started to become nervous about the album’s prospects. After that, nothing happened; the label abandoned the project. About three months after Interiors came out, I was on a plane staring out the window and thinking about what I should do. I knew the life of that record was effectively over—Columbia would not put any money or effort into another single, and yet . . . it was the most heartfelt, most artful thing I had ever done in my life.

  I suddenly realized that I could no longer work with Columbia Nashville, and after talking to Rodney, my dad, and my manager at the time, Will Botwin, I decided to ask the label to transfer me to the New York division. (Dad had given me the best, and most succinct, advice, born of years of arguing, wrangling, convincing, and coaxing music industry executives to understand or support him: “Screw ’em,” were his exact words. “You belong in New York.”) Will offered to go into the meeting with me, but I told him I wanted to do it alone. I met with Roy Wunsch, then the head of the label in Nashville, and a few other key people. I told them that I was well aware that the record hadn’t performed for them, and warned them, kindly, that this situation was going to get worse, because this was what I was going to do from now on. I said that we would likely
both be unhappy in the future, so I felt it was in their best interests to transfer me. The gentlemen seemed relieved. Roy shook my hand and said, “We’ll miss you,” and that was it. I walked out into the hall, the door closed behind me, and I actually had to lean against the wall, I was so dizzy. Twelve years on this division of the label, and it was over in twenty minutes. That transfer on paper to New York in 1990 was the beginning of my transfer of body and soul to New York completely. I had just met John Leventhal, and I knew my life was going to change, although I couldn’t foresee how profound and how permanent the change would be.

  With my transfer at the label, the end of my marriage, and my departure from Nashville, I entered a storm of a magnitude I could scarcely have imagined. With the press—and many of my friends—excoriating me for all those decisions, I moved with all the girls to Westport, Connecticut, for the summer of 1991, even though I was touring during almost that entire period, and then to Manhattan in the first week of September 1991. The older girls returned to Nashville and their schools there, and only Carrie remained with me when I rented my first apartment in the Village, paying for an entire year in advance. At 13 Morton Street we soon befriended Velvet Abashian, who had a tiny real estate office on the ground floor of our building. Actually, Velvet befriended us, for every time she saw me coming up the stoop with Carrie in the stroller, she came out and lifted both in through the front door. Her kindness made her a dependable ally as I negotiated living in New York with a toddler on my own. I enrolled Carrie at Barrow Street Nursery School and did a lot of traveling back and forth to Nashville to see her sisters while I tried to figure out how to uproot their lives and bring them to live with me.