Diamond in the Rough (22 page)

Lest you think I’m nothing but a retaliatory witch, let me assure you there have been acts of benevolence on my part where men are concerned. I’ve shown remarkable restraint at times by not calling them in the middle of the night, not calling their new girlfriends in the middle of the night, not calling their best friends in the middle of the night, and not calling their relatives in the middle of the night. Sometimes I have not gone through their wallets or important papers, nor checked their cell phones to see who they’ve called. I’ve done my best not to steal or maim their clothing. I think I may have mentioned some issues I have with abandonment and so forth. I am sometimes given to extreme reactions. But mostly in my head. I do know right from wrong; it’s just that at times I ignore what I know.

While in relationships I love to jump out of cars. I suppose it’s for dramatic effect. Most women can tell you a story about how they jumped out of a car at some point during a fight with their man, most usually while the car was stopped or at least slowing down. Simon and I had a fight while driving from L.A. to Austin when we moved there. I have no earthly idea what it was about, but I ended up stomping around a grassy meridian on I-35 near Waco.

While visiting New Zealand with my last boyfriend, I was involved in another car incident. Our relationship was unfortunate in that he was more of a girl than I was, and there really can’t be two divas in the house—it won’t work. The man was obsessed with product. He had better hair crème, soap, body lotion, shampoo, conditioner, and face scrub than anyone else I knew. After he broke up with me, he wanted back some lip balm he’d ordered and had had shipped to my house. So I put cat shit in his new trail shoes, which had also been sent to my house after the split, and naturally he was not too happy about that, although I can hardly blame him there. Every girl knows you don’t fuck with another girl’s shoes.

Anyway, when we arrived in Auckland, my bag didn’t show up. This is disastrous in and of itself, but especially when you’re meeting your boyfriend’s parents for the first time and you’ve just traveled a trillion miles to do it. We made our connection to Christchurch, got the rental car, and set off to see the folks. Okay, yes, yes, of course New Zealand is beautiful. But it’s cold down there. And windy. And all I had were my plane clothes. I was a plane-clothes defective. And I was jet-lagged. And nervous. And Mr. Nancyboy didn’t care—he had his bag with his Fresh Sake Hair Cream. I knew I was supposed to feel like Cate Blanchett in
Lord of the Rings,
but in fact I was just in a cold, windy, foreign country, in a car that was on the wrong side of the road. I began to cry, and we pulled over. Get the picture? I hope so, because if you don’t, this is what you will hear: “I’m cold! I’m bloody cold!!! Can you not see this??? I have no bag!! I’m wearing the same clothes I’ve been wearing for thirty-six hours!!!! I don’t know anyone!! And I’m
coooooooold
!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I’ll never forget the look of shock on his face—his eyes got very wide, and his Dudley Do-Right jaw dropped. “Fuck!” he said (a man of many words), as though I had just asked for a twelve-course meal (that he would have to pay for). I jumped out of the car and began to roam the streets of Christchurch. See, this is always a good trick. Men don’t want you roaming the streets; it sets off something primal in them, as if you may become mating prey for another beast. Besides, he was hell-bent on impressing me with his wonderful birthplace, since he felt it was akin to Bethlehem. He drove around and found me, I conceded to getting back in the car, my point was made, and we went to a store and bought a jacket. And you don’t even want to know how I felt about not having my jammies. Hold on a sec, I’m shivering.

Which leads me to mention some interesting facts about me. I can travel without anything at all
except:
a high-thread-count cotton sheet, a fan, my medication (don’t say it), and my pajamas. If I love you a lot, I’ll sleep naked. That’s it. Because anything else you can buy, but I need these things immediately; my peace of mind depends on them. When I went to the Tour de France, I didn’t have the proper adapter to make my fan work, and I practically slept with the guy at the hotel who rewired it. I love coconut cream pie. I’ve never broken a bone. And I’ve never written a book. Maybe you can tell.

18

Bring a Sweater

These Four Walls,
2006

(Photograph courtesy of Tracie Goudi)

Up on the rooftop I can remember

Borders I had to break.

Now I can see I had this life

To make.

My former manager told me once while I was out doing press and radio promotion all day and a show every night, “The show is the least important part of the day.” I was shocked and offended to the core. He was implying that the promo push was the most crucial thing, but it isn’t so. The most important thing, every day and every night, is what to wear. And that’s how I began to write for my next record,
These Four Walls.
With an ode to a dress.

As usual I was low on material—I hadn’t written anything since
Whole New You
bombed. While I was on tour during the summer of 2003, I was booked at Red Butte Garden in Salt Lake City. Things were finally coming back into balance after divorce número dos and the change-up in labels and managers. My new manager, Ken Levitan, got me off Columbia and onto Nonesuch, a small label under the umbrella of Warner Brothers. Emmylou Harris told me one time that she loved her record label. I’d never, ever heard anyone say that. She was on Nonesuch, and that’s where I wanted to go. Ken managed a lot of my friends and colleagues and mentors: Emmylou, John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, Patty Griffin, Buddy and Julie Miller. I was in good company.

My dressing room at the garden in Salt Lake that afternoon was an amazing greenhouse on a hill overlooking the basin, and I noticed that I was content. It was time to get ready for my show, so I put on a light, sheer, airy dress that I loved, by a company called Dosa. I felt satisfied, happy. It occurred to me to jot something down.

I put on my finest summer dress,

So light and thin, it was my best.

I brushed my hair, I held my breath,

I went out to face the wilderness,

I went out to face the wilderness.

I liked it. That was the first thing I’d written in a really long time. You know, one of the major pleasures in my life is buying clothes. I get visceral, tactile, visual satisfaction out of clothing—the sculpture, the textures, the colors. It’s an art form. It makes a big difference to me, the clothes I choose to put on my body. Which doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be expensive or fancy, although that often helps. “Summer Dress” gives a more hopeful version of the character that I tend to write about, who feels oppressed by her surroundings. This time she gets free, but not without the proper wardrobe.

All the songs on
These Four Walls
were written primarily in a two- or three-week period during which I went to a studio in Austin called Cedar Creek. Technology being what it is, I had MP3s of tracks with the music John had written, which were downloaded to a software program called Nuendo. I could sit by myself at a computer, with a good microphone, press a button, and record melodies, nonsense, as many ideas as I could come up with, over these tracks. Bit by bit, they began to take shape.

Writing is like a sport. You have to show up, and you have to practice. Yes, there are times that are more or less convenient, and there are times when you are more or less motivated. But it’s about showing up. Some days the lyrics just start to come out from an unconscious part of you. Other times you’re so conscious of them not coming out that you want to scream. And sometimes you do. Scream. But as long as you keep making yourself available to the music and to the emotions you will fill it with, good things can happen. As I started the process this time, I was having some trouble making any good things happen. I was, as they say in the writing biz, totally blocked.

If writing is a sport, I was in desperate need of a coach. Stokes came to Austin to help, and he did this exercise with me where he would take little phrases out of the newspaper and make me write them down. Then he’d give me a certain amount of time to use them in a song. It’s a great exercise, because it makes you realize that whatever you write, it’s going to take you somewhere. “Fill Me Up” was one of the phrases he gave me, and that became the title for a great, uplifting piece of music I had from John. To me it’s always been a song to my audience, and to Callie.

I wrote a line when I was at my sister’s one day: “I’m gonna die in these four walls.” I meant it from a humorous standpoint at that time. Kay lives in the suburbs of Austin. It was Sunday, and the kids were playing in the pool. The adults were outside, too, drinking beer and grilling burgers. There were sports inside on the TV. It was just the way I had grown up. And there we were again. I thought,
Whoa, I am really dug in.

When I moved back to Austin in 1994, I always felt as if (and it sounds so morbid) this was a good place to die. There was just something about it for me. There always has been. So I took that one step further in “These Four Walls” and adopted the point of view of somebody who’s nearing the end of her life, looking back—not with regret, just with appreciation and wistful sentiment, at peace. The guitar music by John is very simple to play, and it moved me immediately, so much so that I was hesitant to go after it, but I found the heart of it, I think.

Many years prior I had written the lines “Hey everybody in the old schoolyard, / We took it all the way and we took it hard,” to an old musical idea of John’s that I’d always liked. The phrase “tough kid” came to me, and the song, titled “Tuff Kid,” followed pretty quickly. It’s basically about me in junior high and high school, a kid having a hell of a time of it at home but armed, in this case, with her guitar, which was fast becoming her identity.

“Cinnamon Road” to me is mainly just imagery. John unknowingly inspired it. He told me one day about the place where he kept all the painful memories in his life; he said it was like they were in a box somewhere. It’s about regret, it’s about longing, it’s about the past. It’s the idea that no matter what you do, the things that anchor you and even the things that weigh you down are always going to be the same, your whole life. The events that devastate you, the lovers and friends and family you lose—the things that by all accounts you’re supposed to get over, I guess, but I don’t think you do. I don’t think you ever do. I don’t think it ever goes away.

“The Bird” was started from a scrap of paper that I had, scribbled with the words “What I like about the bird …” I call it my low-self-esteem song, and it’s similar in theme to “Another Long One” from my first record. I did have a dream about an old boyfriend, which starts the song. I dreamed that we were young again, that I wasn’t a needy, dysfunctional alcoholic and I knew how to be empathetic and giving.

I was going through a phase that’s never really ended, I guess, where I was decorating my house. I want color, and I want clutter. Sparse does not work for me. It needs to be a little crazy. I really appreciate houses that have white walls and beautiful artwork and negative space, but I can’t do it. For at least two years, maybe longer, I was putting samples of color on my wall—and that appears in “Fill Me Up” when I mention “French blue” and “the right shade of tangerine.” I wouldn’t doubt that I had a hundred quarts of paint in my garage and totally patchworked walls of this color, that color. It was insane.

One of the colors was named Venetian Blue. I thought it had a romantic ring to it, but I couldn’t really get anywhere with it until I saw
Brokeback Mountain
. Something about the Heath Ledger character stayed with me for a long time. Just walking down the street, sitting at a desk, anything—I’d have that moment where I’d stop and say, “Who is it that I’m thinking about? It’s someone I know.” And it was Ennis Del Mar. I wrote “Venetian Blue” from Ennis’s point of view, about being apart from the one you love and the anticipation of a time when you’ll see that person again, and set it to this very languid piece of music John had written. I was able to use the melting of ice and snow as a metaphor for the melting of your heart that you’ve had to keep hard in order to survive until you’re reunited.

Meanwhile, I had met someone new, and when I meet someone and I begin to fall in love, there’s an essential discomfort for me, because I tend to lose myself. I have impulses and needs that I have to ignore, or quell, because they’re not appropriate, such as wanting to pick out the wedding china after the first introduction.

Several months into our courtship I wrote “I’m Gone” while I was at a hotel in Philadelphia and couldn’t fall asleep. I found myself obsessing over this new man in my life. Surprise! As I lay in bed, my anxieties were swirling around, and I began to worry that I was in over my head. I really liked this guy, and I wanted it to work. And this desperation set in—which I hate. I was pretty pissed off to be going through that; I was sick of it, like I was always going to be on the same treadmill when it came to falling in love. It’s a typical chain reaction for me: fall in love, feel absolute terror, which manifests itself as massive insecurity, which spells doom. I wrote the line “Over and over and over and over.” I wanted to be relaxed and sleepy and simply pleased about the process of getting to know someone, but all I was was tormented about wanting love from a man, from an audience, from the record company, from critics. In moments like that, because your pride and attempts at control and civility break down, you just let yourself go. You don’t care about being seen as desperate for approval. I wrote, “There are things I will do for a hatchet job, too,” and it felt good. I was so angry. How far would I go, how deeply would I betray myself to be loved? At the end of each chorus is the wish to be able to just walk away.
I’m gone.
I get a lot of satisfaction out of singing that song. It’s a bitter song, and I enjoy the bitterness of it. The music is a pretty simple chord progression that I put down in Garage Band one day.