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  During this period I did my best to keep my head down, refusing to respond to the accusations and rumors that had been circulating in the press or among my friends—that I had become a lesbian, that I was having an affair with Will Botwin, that I had bleached my hair blond and was taking drugs—or to the “interviews” that I had supposedly given, in which I deplored Rodney and my former life. None of it was true, but all of it was too tawdry to warrant a response, I thought. In the midst of all this, Interiors was receiving rapturous critical reception and was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Contemporary Folk Recording. I felt vindicated, and thrilled. I had toured fairly extensively in back of the record, with just Steuart and bassist Jim Hanson, and the experience had refined me as a musician in so many ways—I had to play a lot more guitar than I had been accustomed to, and I had to carry a show that was composed of rather dark material but make it seem elegiac. I did a pretty good job. John Leventhal even came to see me when I played Town Hall in New York, visiting backstage to say that he loved the show. (I know now what a rare occurrence it is to impress John.) John Prine wound up winning the Grammy for The Missing Years, and I was genuinely happy for him—John was an old friend, and certainly deserved the honor. I had gotten the validation I wanted for Interiors , and I was ready to move on.

  I decided to ask John Leventhal to produce my next record, describing to him the songs I was writing as “elemental.” I told him that my new song “The Wheel” would be the central piece of the record—he had heard me perform it live—and I also wanted it to be the title of the album. The recurring themes, I explained, were of fire and water, wind and moon, and I wanted the sonics to somehow reflect the references to the elements. I don’t think he really understood me, and it’s true that at the time I was deep in some foggy quasi-New Age mind-set in a weak attempt to detach from the tremendous pain I was actually in over the divorce and the effect it was having on my children. I was ungrounded and spinning from all the changes in my life. He agreed to produce the record but said he wouldn’t do it alone, arguing that since Interiors I should think of myself as a producer as well, so he would coproduce it with me, with equal billing.

  Before we started The Wheel, I asked him to produce a single track of my song “From the Ashes” for a charity compilation album, and we went into Electric Lady Studio on Eighth Street in New York to do it. I have a searing image from that session, one that marked a before-and-after moment in my life. I was sitting at the console, and John was standing next to me with his yellow Telecaster strapped across his body. He was about to do a guitar overdub while plugged directly into the board. When he started playing, everything fell away from him: self-consciousness, a desire to please, distraction, tension, fatigue, and even ideas about what he would play. He was absolutely, profoundly in the moment. I was seduced, heart, mind, and body.

  We fell in love while we were making The Wheel. When we started the record, we were crazy with longing for each other but remained reserved, as we were both still extricating ourselves from our previous relationships. By the end of the record, we were a couple.

  By then I had moved from Morton Street to a loft on Mercer Street in Soho, and John was spending most of his time there.

  Chelsea moved to New York, and I enrolled her at St. Luke’s with Carrie. The following year Caitlin moved up, and we moved to a bigger place, occupying the top three floors of a brownstone at 241 West Eleventh Street in the Village. We settled into a life together there, and all three girls went to St. Luke’s, just a few blocks away. By this time, Hannah was graduating from high school in Nashville. That was a good year for me, with all three girls in the same school, in the tight community and protection of St. Luke’s. I loved the school, and I loved the girls being there. And yet, with John and me in the second year of our relationship, it became a little rocky as John suddenly found himself a father to three girls, two of whom were adolescents and resentful of the fact that I had pulled their lives apart. Much of the time, our desire to make it work outweighed our skills in managing the difficulties, but desire can become commitment, and commitment can make the forces of the universe work to your advantage. That’s what happened for us.

  The Wheel was a satisfying and truthful record, and conveyed—for me anyway—the crazy longing and lust of new love. (Years later I met John Hockenberry and his wife, Alison, at a party, and they told me how they had fallen in love listening to The Wheel while working as journalists in Afghanistan, interviewing people who later became al-Qaeda. That was one of the most strange and gratifying stories I heard about how the record affected other people.) I still have a lot of affection for it. It wasn’t commercially successful, however, and I had to start thinking seriously about what I wanted to do with my life and how I could reinvent a forum for my work that was outside Top 40 radio, since that avenue was closing for artists like me. Will Botwin, who had been my manager for a decade by this time, had left management for a job at Columbia. He introduced me to Danny Kahn, who has been my manager since. I had heard around that time that Columbia was going to focus more energy and put more marketing dollars behind two of my contemporaries and labelmates, Shawn Colvin (with whom John had worked for many years and had been romantically involved) and Mary Chapin Carpenter. We had appeared together as a trio at “Bobfest,” the huge extravaganza held at Madison Square Garden to celebrate Bob Dylan’s thirtieth anniversary in music. I became nervous; I had been on the label a long time, longer than either of them, and felt I might be taken for granted at this point. I knew I had to do something proactive on behalf of my own future interests.

  I went in, alone again, to see Don Ienner, the head of Columbia.

  “I’m about to turn forty,” I told him, “and I have to make some changes in my life. I know my contract isn’t up, but I’m asking you to release me from it so I can find out what I want to do.

  “This is about a life change,” I explained, “not a label change. Please.”

  He looked surprised and then became pensive. “This is painful,” he finally said. “I respect your decision, but I will genuinely miss you.”

  “Thank you, Donnie,” I said, and I knew his sentiments were sincere. “I’ll never say a bad word about you.”

  He smiled. “I didn’t think you would.”

  The Wheel might have been over from a marketing standpoint, but it did find its audience. Even today, if I do a show and don’t sing “The Wheel,” it is guaranteed that someone will find me, write me, or send a note backstage expressing disappointment and indignation that I neglected to perform the “most important song” in my repertoire. And repertoire is destiny. I’m still crazy in love with John Leventhal.

  John and I were married on April 30, 1995, in a sculpture garden on Elizabeth Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Actually, it was more a sculpture lot than a garden, as the statues, which were scattered around on an area of gravel surrounded by a chain-link fence, were all for sale. Still, it made for a beautiful setting, and embellished with a tent, huge floral arrangements, and a faux bridge leading from the street, it wound up looking like a comfortably shabby urban version of the Borghese Gardens. At around four fifteen in the afternoon I stepped out of a town car with my mom at the rear entrance to the garden and immediately saw John standing twenty feet from me, his back turned, his black hair spilling over the back of his collar. His shoulders filled out his dark suit tensely as he stood looking toward the tent where we would shortly take our vows. He was holding a blue umbrella, as it had started to drizzle and was quite chilly. My dad came up to my mother and me and began to tell us something, but I was mesmerized by John’s back, by his silhouette against the gray mist, and by the blue umbrella, so I didn’t hear what he was saying. Dad looked at me questioningly and softly called my name, and I startled. “I just realized that he’s my husband,” I explained, dazed. “It’s something about the umbrella.”

  My parents were both Southerners, but their respective Souths were worlds apart.

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sp; My father was from the Mississippi Delta, the bottomland, where families struggled for their lives and livelihoods, and were constantly at the mercy of storms and floods and droughts—which had a profound impact on their view of the world and their place in it. My mother grew up middle class, in San Antonio, Texas. She was the daughter of Tom and Irene Liberto, staunch, devout Catholics and second-generation Italian Americans. (In the immigrant exhibit at the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, there hangs an enormous portrait of my great-grandparents, Angelina and Frank Liberto, who came from Sicily in the late nineteenth century.) Tom Liberto, my grandfather, was a bespectacled insurance salesman who was also an amateur magician, champion gin rummy player, and rose gardener and breeder so renowned that he was asked to create a special rose for Lady Bird Johnson on her visit to San Antonio in the early 1960s. The Lady Bird Johnson rose was never produced commercially, but my grandfather was enormously proud of having been chosen for the assignment. My grandmother Irene Liberto came from a long line of elegant, feisty women who stayed home, but also stayed fully themselves.

  Irene and Tom had a solid marriage and three children: my uncle Ray (the aforementioned honky-tonk piano player), my mother, Vivian, and my aunt Sylvia, who would talk to me about sex and any number of adult topics that my mother, somewhat of a prude, was too shy or mortified to address. Grandma Irene was a funny, lovely woman who was also an alcoholic. Many times my mother would come home from school and find my grandmother passed out on the sofa. My mother would frantically clean the house and get the dinner going before my grandfather got home so he would not be aware of his wife’s condition. My grandfather—who was probably also an alcoholic but not the “designated patient,” like my grandmother—was a taskmaster and had very rigid ideas about family life and gender roles, and operated from a narrow moral certitude. This had a profound effect on my mother, who lived with a lot of shame and a sense of heavy secrecy. She did, however, keep an impeccably clean house, as she had an absolute terror of dirt and untidiness.

  Irene’s sister, Mamie, was gorgeous in her youth, with a figure that made young men swoon. She retained her full breasts, long, shapely legs, and trim waist well into her seventies. She was also so deeply attached to her mother, whom we always called Nanny, that when she grew up and married, she moved across the street from Nanny so they could “visit” every day over coffee. (Nanny, who lived to be over a hundred, had extraordinary skin, remaining virtually unwrinkled into her nineties. In fact, all the Liberto women, most especially my mother, had gorgeous, flawless skin and aged beautifully.) Aunt Mamie was married to Uncle Bud, and they appeared to me to have a much more fluid, fun relationship than my grandparents. They were deeply, extravagantly in love for over sixty years. They called each other “sweetheart” and “precious” and “angel” throughout their lives, and I remember Aunt Mamie stroking Uncle Bud’s hair as she stood in back of his easy chair, asking, “Can I get anything for you, darling?” When she died, Uncle Bud was inconsolable. He cried and visited her grave every day, until he just surrendered to his grief and died a few years later.

  Their grand love story was matched only by that of Aunt Louise and Uncle Joe, relatives on my dad’s side. Louise, Dad’s oldest sister, and Joe lived across the road from each other in Dyess, Arkansas, and fell in love in their youth. Although they planned to marry, Uncle Joe first decided to see the world, joining the navy in 1940 and shipping off to the South Pacific. Uncle Joe’s ship, the USS Houston, was sunk on March 1, 1942, which happened to be Aunt Louise’s birthday. Uncle Joe was taken prisoner by the Japanese, and after a few years he was presumed dead. Aunt Louise grieved deeply, but recovered, married, and had a son, Damon. After nearly four and a half years of unspeakable torture, deprivation, illness, and loneliness, Uncle Joe, to the utter shock of everyone, returned home, malnourished and sick but alive. Aunt Louise extricated herself from her marriage, and she and Joe married in 1946. They had three children and lived together in marital bliss for fifty-seven years, until Aunt Louise died in April 2003.

  Uncle Joe was the gentlest and kindest person I’ve ever met. He never uttered a bad word about a single soul, not even to condemn his captors—he rarely spoke about his suffering in the POW camp. He always had a smile on his face and never complained. Aunt Louise died shortly after Uncle Joe received the Purple Heart, sixty-one years after the USS Houston was sunk. He was presented with the award by my cousin Roy Cash, Jr., who at the time was a commander in the navy, inspired to military service by Uncle Joe, and who had most famously cowritten my dad’s 1958 classic “I Still Miss Someone.”

  Uncle Joe and Aunt Louise, Aunt Mamie and Uncle Bud—those were the marriages I held up as a template for my own. “Can I get anything for you, darling?” is a mandate for me in the civilized conduct of an active marriage of minds and hearts—not servility, but charming, even effusive solicitude.

  My parents might have achieved that kind of love story, and in the early days of their relationship, they did. There was no recovering their dreams of everlasting love once the endless touring and the amphetamines took hold of my dad’s life, and the anguish and bitterness took hold of my mom’s—even if their marriage might have recovered from it somewhat, they had probably shared too much acrimony during that period for it to be ultimately possible. The emotional debris field between them after thirteen years was enormous, too immense for them to cross toward each other, and by then June was there on Dad’s side, waiting to be his wife, something they both felt was destined, given how, my father’s story went, he told her he was going to marry her upon their first meeting backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, when he was still very much married to my mother.

  To counter the enormous strain of their breakup on us children, I developed a philosophical perspective on my parents’ marriage. I remember sitting in my grandmother Carrie’s house soon after my mother had filed for divorce. After showing me a newspaper article that reported my mother had filed on grounds of “extreme cruelty” on the part of my father, my grandmother remarked, with so much sadness in her voice, “Honey, your daddy is not cruel.” I knew that. I knew all his impulses of violence and destruction were self-directed. Oddly, my mother was the one who was much more demonstrative with her pain and anger, and the detritus of that fell on me and my sisters. Their marriage couldn’t have lasted, and that did indeed break my mother’s heart, a heartbreak that was complicated by her Catholicism, which in the mid-sixties was inflexible and unforgiving toward divorce. Understandably, she was unable to see the bigger picture, which is that Dad was meant to end up with June. My parents had a classic youngsters’ marriage, one in which each party is blind to his or her own deep character flaws and can see them only in the reflection of the spouse. When too much childhood damage is there—and both of my parents were deeply damaged—then the flaws take on enormous weight and proportion. They could not escape themselves in the eyes—or the heart—of the other.

  Dad and June by no means had a perfect marriage, but they understood each other and they shared music and fame together, as well as a deep love and fundamental respect. There were a lot of drug addicts in the extended family who caused tremendous strain in their marriage—not to mention Dad’s almost constant struggle with his own addiction to painkillers and psychotropic drugs and June’s later use of narcotics. They endured through their devotion in a kind of shared foxhole mentality. If notoriety was like an empire they were compelled to tend, they were also each other’s refuge.

  Within a few days after the divorce was final, my mother remarried, to Dick Distin, a former police officer in Ventura County, and she settled into a life that was really perfect for her—one filled with friends, parties, clubs, lessons, gardening, and church. She did needlework and she danced and bowled and painted and cultivated a wide circle of close relationships. She was active in her church and her community and became somewhat of a star in her little town. My dad, of course, belonged to the world and had for quite some time. It was excruciating for her to tu
rn on the television and see my dad and June together, talking about their great love and their musical connections. To her credit, however, she never said an ill word about Dad to us children. She restrained herself admirably in commenting about June as well, considering the depth of her resentment, but there were times she tossed off a venomous indictment and I could see the vast well of pain and bitterness she carried. She carried it for the rest of her life.

  My dad did not just happily move on. He became much quieter and more reflective during the dissolution of their marriage, particularly once he was off the amphetamines and barbiturates and was thinking clearly. Many years later, when I was in my thirties, he told me that, after the formal split from my mother, when he’d first left Southern California and taken occupancy of his house on the lake in Tennessee, he’d walked the ground floor of the vast house, still nearly empty of furniture, late into the night. One time, he said, he’d walked from one end to the other, from the round room that overlooked the lake to the round room at the other end that was fitted into the side of the hill, feeling he was searching for something. What’s missing? Where is it? he kept thinking. Suddenly he stopped in the middle room of the long floor and cried out my name at the top of his lungs. That was a powerful image for me, because at the time of his departure, in my twelve-year-old mind, I thought it had been easy for him to leave, and that he had not looked back.

  Over thirty-five years later, a few weeks after his death in 2003, when the house had been emptied of decades of collected furniture and dishes and paintings and instruments, some sent off to each of us children and the rest dispatched to Sotheby’s for sale, I walked alone on the ground floor, from round room to round room, and when I was sure that the lawyers and my siblings were busy on the upper floors and could not hear me, I stood in the middle room of the long floor and called out his name. It felt good to answer him, the echo of his voice reaching me so many years later, the echo of mine going back to the past and ending in that moment. It seemed that he heard me, and we both acknowledged the losses.