Music Review

I’m married to a man who likes things to be in order. For Brent, that means our wills, medical directives, and all that legal business, are up to date. One item of mine that’s tricky to assign to an heir is my music. It’s not tangible, of course, but it does have value. And who knows, maybe someday will have more value. My friend John Alan, also a songwriter, reminded me last week that you just never know. It made me think of a story I heard on NPR a few years ago: A 70-year-old songwriter who’d had a career like mine in her 30s and 40s, had been rediscovered. A fan of hers had become a filmmaker and decided to use one of her songs in a film, and bingo, cash started coming in. Cash she hadn’t expected, nor had her heirs.

With that in mind, I’ve spent the last couple of months getting my musical affairs in order. Doing so opened a pandora’s box of tasks for me to do including a spreadsheet listing every song I’ve recorded including who produced, engineered, played on, mixed, or mastered it. Then the codes that track a song’s airplay and/or sales had to be found and entered along with the song’s publisher (which used to be me but was recently taken over by a publisher in London, very exciting, another story, and another reason all of this had to be put together properly). While I was at it, I updated my website with working links to YouTube, Amazon, iTunes, Substack, Spotify, etc, etc. All these sites that make my head spin. The most tedious task was uploading my songs to a website called MusixMatch where songwriters synchronize their lyrics to their songs for platforms like Spotify and Pandora. To get it right, I had to listen to every word I’ve sung in the last thirty years then map the lyrics so they’d line up with the music when it played on whatever platform a listener was using. I decided to do six songs a day, newest to oldest, to be sure I didn’t miss anything.

Listening to myself and to all of my songs was humbling, but it made me feel proud too. I could see my progress. I found myself reliving all the recording sessions. Who played. How it felt. What I learned. Each album representing a stage I was in at the time. Silence is Broken (1992) was released just as DIY albums on CD were possible. There weren’t many of us making our own albums back then. I was discovering Woodstock. Trying to find myself. Doing therapy to help with that. I was 32 years old, late for starting out in the music business. Just learning the guitar, unfamiliar with the piano. Then Confession (1995). I’d asked my friend Francesca Tanksley to play piano on a song called “One Small Cage”. When I showed her the part I wanted her to play, she said “why don’t you just play it yourself?” It was a life-changing moment. I didn’t think I could. Not because it was too hard, but because I didn’t think I was good enough, or pianist enough, or professional enough. She gave me permission. This world-class pianist said I could do it and opened-up a world I’d been secretly dreaming about since elementary school. By Grapes and Seeds (2000) I was playing the piano publicly, unevenly but happily, which was all I needed. But Grapes and Seeds also brings up Forrest and Peter, my son and first husband. I recorded that album at home while Forrest was taking naps, mixed it a year later at a nearby studio with him nursing on my lap and Chris Andersen engineering. A few weeks after it was finished, Forrest was diagnosed with liver cancer. Eighteen months later he was gone. The dedication on the album says, Peter & Forrest, I cannot imagine life without either of you. Now I’ve learned I can.

Four months after Forrest died, I recorded Sweets for the Soul (2002) a live album. Putting that concert together with all the tech that surrounded it (a mobile recording truck, video cameras, lights and hoists, and players, and ticket sales) kept me distracted, hopeful, and sane as life went on without Forrest. But I wish I’d waited. It was an expensive project that I wasn’t musically ready for. I love remembering the audience that packed the house, sang with me, cried with me, continued to support me, and saved my emotional life. If you were among those people, I thank you still.  

Four years later, I recorded Parachute (2006) whose title track is, I think, my favorite Bar Scott song. Every now and then it sneaks up on me in a random shuffle on my earbuds and I’m slain by it. It’s hard to believe it’s me singing or that it was me who experienced losing Forrest. With all my songs I feel a certain detachment when I listen years later, but that song undoes me.

Finally, in 2014, I recorded Journey, an album of songs about starting over. I like the songs a lot. Not too many people have heard them because I never got out and played them publicly. I was 56 by then, living far from where the people who knew my music were, and just didn’t have the umph I needed to find a new audience in Colorado. Now, in Oregon, I’m starting over again, and finally new songs are coming. It reminds me to be patient, but also, that this is how it’s always been for me: Clusters of songs come after long intervals of living.

Here’s a link to Parachute

…and here’s a link to a song from Journey called “Roll Over Me” that I hope will make you smile. When I was writing the song, I posted the music (without lyrics) on Facebook asking my friends what images came to mind when they heard it. Lyrics always come after the music for me, but I didn’t know what to write about with this song. Their contributions became the basis for the lyrics. A very satisfying and fun collaboration.

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Enticement: Paid Subscribers, I’ll be sending you a new song later this week. If you’d like to hear it and you’re a free subscriber, hang tight. It’ll be available on iTunes soon enough. Or, if you want to hear songs as they evolve, join us with a $5/month subscription that you can cancel anytime. Thank you all. Your being there does me a world of good.

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