SHAWN COLVIN
The first song Shawn Colvin completed for These Four Walls, her Nonesuch debut, was the wistful “Summer Dress,” which opens with Colvin singing over the austere strum of a lone acoustic guitar, then builds into a lilting folk-rock arrangement. Colvin maintains a delicate balance between confidence and vulnerability as she describes a dream-like venture out to “face a wilderness.” Like much of this deeply felt album, “Summer Dress” is about looking ahead, moving on, performed from the vantage point of someone who’s had a chance to glance back somewhat ruefully at where she’s been.
“Summer Dress” could be a veiled recounting of the picaresque route Colvin herself took to hard-earned solo stardom, from her South Dakota birthplace to the Southern Illinois college town where she was raised, to the bars and clubs of Boston and New York City, where she first attracted a following. Then again, it might be an artfully composed fiction about escaping a small town or running after love, a postcard from a youthful time when freedom seemed like a mere bus ticket or car ride away. Whatever its origins, the emotional and musical pull of “Summer Dress”—along with the rest of These Four Walls—is powerful. Somehow we’ve all been there, too.
“I don’t go into writing a song thinking I’m going to speak for anyone other than myself,” Colvin once told the Los Angeles Times. “[But] I do try to impart some wisdom without that touchy-feely kind of thing. People have told me how much they can relate to what’s happening in these songs, so I think some experiences are shared ones.”
These Four Walls is very much an album of shared experiences, common epiphanies. Colvin is one of those rare performers, like Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, or her youthful idol Joni Mitchell, who has been able to grow up alongside her audience and mature into her role as singer and songwriter. Although she was rewarded with a Best Contemporary Folk Grammy for her 1989 debut disc, Steady On, Colvin didn’t reach a broad mainstream audience until eight years later, when her story of a housewife’s fiery revenge, “Sunny Came Home,” became an unlikely top ten pop single fifteen months after the album it was taken from, A Few Small Repairs, was released. “I’m lucky,” Colvin admits, “in that I built my career really slowly, started small, very intimately. I just toured a lot—the whole grassroots thing. I didn’t have a hit until I was well into my recording career.”
On These Four Walls, she does an affecting version of kindred spirit Paul Westerberg’s “Even Here We Are,” a lo-fi gem hidden on his first solo outing, 14 Songs, about the beauty to be found in the darkest, loneliest places. She concludes the album with an intimate, one-take rendition of the Bee-Gee’s “Words.” This classic pop ballad might as well have been composed especially for Colvin since it serves as an eloquent description of the lyrical gifts she displays on These Four Walls: “It’s only words/But words are all I have/ To take your heart away….”
“I’m very proud of this record,” Colvin decides. “ You put your head down and do the work and, when all is said and done, you see what you’ve come up with. I remember when I finally had a CD with twelve of these tracks, when I could just listen to them all together, and I realized, this is better than I thought it could be. I’ve been doing this a long time and it’s great to feel like I’m doing my best work now.”
– Michael Hill
“These Four Walls”
