Any Shawn Colvin fans here?

[Ivan May]

Not sure if any of you know about Shawn Colvin, but she was a very well known folk rock singer-songwriter in the Nineties.
Let me put it this way:
Shawn Colvin was the woman that wrote the song Sunny Came Home. (The song where a woman is tired of being abused by her husband, so she burns his house down as a revenge act.) Shawn Colvin has always been one of my favorite female acts. (Then again, I was born in 2001, so artists like Shawn Colvin, Shania Twain, Roseanne Cash, Aimee Mann, Jewel and Michelle Branch were the female artists I grew up listening to.) I saw a video of Shawn Colvin performing The Boxer with Allison Krauss in 2007 with Jerry Douglas on Dobro. It was a really great video, and I suggest you look it up just to mark my words.
I always loved her work with Suzanne Vega, and she has a very nice contralto voice. A friend of mine even mentioned to me that he discovered the music of Tom Waits through Shawn Colvin.
I think one reason why Shawn Colvin is underappreciated is partly because she was 33 when she put out her first album, Steady On, in 1989. Most of the acts that were part of the New Wave of Female Singer-Songwriters in the Nineties were all in their 20s. (I take that back, Bonnie Raitt was 40 when she put out Nick Of Time, and Sheryl Crow was 31 when her first record was made.)
I do love the song Sunny Came Home. Lyrically, it is a very dark song, but I love the mandolin melody that plays throughout. I found the CDs of Fat City, Steady On and A Few Small Repairs at a Value Village thrift store recently. Her voice is arguably as melodic as Joni Mitchell, with the country elements of The Band and a Grateful Dead reference here and there. She also was a backup singer for Suzanne Vega, Mary Chapin Carpenter and performed at the Lilith Fair.
I never really cared much for her cover of Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic by The Police. I understand why she put the male pronouns in, though.
She got a lot of airplay on college radio in the Nineties, but after Sunny Came Home came out, she fell off the map. She still continues to make music (her most recent album was in 2016,) and her Columbia back catalogue was recently remastered on compact disc and vinyl by Legacy Recordings.
The fact alone that she was during a time when vinyl was stopped being manufactured and CDs and cassettes were the only things being made at that time.

Bruce Springsteen was a huge fan of her music, claiming in 1995: "In the world of McMusic, Shawn Colvin is the only artist--either male or female--I listen to on a regular basis." Wise words from The Boss.

But Shawn Colvin has won some Grammys, and even a lot of my male friends listen to her music. (Like most everyone, I always thought Shawn Colvin was a guy.)

I also recommend the users on SH to look up her covers of "I Don't Want To Live On The Moon" from Sesame Street, and her acoustic cover of Lovers In A Dangerous Time by Bruce Cockburn. (I still prefer the Dan Fogelberg cover, however.)

I would like for Shawn Colvin to be looked at in a more favorable way. When I look at Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly come up with this "Greatest Pop Albums" list, and I see that none of her albums are mentioned on there, when I know how profoundly of an influence she has, it's a very painful struggle. Had she recieved better promotion from Columbia Records, she would have had more critical acclaim. Because at the time, many of the same writers were comparing her sound to Jagged Little Pill and Come On Over.
I also wonder if Michelle Branch and Taylor Swift were influenced by Shawn Colvin.
Do you have any Shawn Colvin albums in your collection? Have you ever listened to any of her albums in her entirety? Please let me know.

 

I do think it would be pretty cool if Shawn Colvin and Mark Knopfler collaborated. Given his success collaborating with Emmylou Harris, I think a collaboartion between Shawn Colvin and Mark Knopfler would sound cool.

 

 

[KuruPrionz]

I haven't delved deeply but I've always liked Sunny Came Home, it insinuates evil to a high degree.

A mandolin opens the song and may be playing along with the theme hook but the octaves reveal an acoustic 12 string as playing the primary melody, just FWIW. 

 

She'll be playing in Bellingham at the Mt Baker theater on Jan 31st, 2023, an early show on a tour. The nosebleed tickets are $79, a bit out of my range at this point. 

It's a good venue and I'm sure it will be sold out or close to it. A good friend works there part time as an usher so she gets paid to hear all the cool shows, not a bad way to go!

 

Most concerts are way too loud for my old, damaged ears and just don't sound as good with earplugs in. 

I guess I haven't adapted to the changes, streaming pays doodley squat so musicians now sell the music cheap and the concerts cost money. It used to be the other way around, tour on the album to make money selling records. I saw The Who on the Tommy tour for $3.50, just for an example. Times change, so it goes. 

 

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I've played 'Steady On' for years on acoustic, most recently at my own event in 2021.

'Sunny Came Home' is a catchy song but musically I'll take 'Another Round of Blues' any day,

it's deceptively simple sounding but in fact there's a lot going on in the arrangement, vocally and musically.

She sang on Suzanne Vega's song 'Book of Dreams', a lovely song with an eye-catching video that got 

good airplay on MTV.

There's one of her songs-can't think of it offhand but it's got a classic lyric-

'You're like a salmon

you've got one mission..'

I don't think it was just her age, she is stunningly talented but not 'pretty' in the conventional sense.

That can be a problem in video land.