From This Moment On (42 page)

Kim came on in 1996, and for the next fifteen years, I felt I couldn’t live without her! We developed a sisterly bond and loyalty over all the years of working together. I think that if I was ever in a room with other celebrities and we got talking about our PAs, I’d be very immature and make sure everyone knew that
my
assistant was better than their assistant.

Working out of the office at Loon Echo as part of the team was Stacy Smith. She’d been around from when Sheri began working with me in 1992 when I first moved to Nashville and started out doing some basic accounting for me. Her role grew to becoming full business manager. She has now been with me eighteen years and is another one of my most trusted friends who really has my back.

Patty Lou Andrews was also a gem of a friend on the team during the period of
The Woman in Me
’s success. She did the most traveling with me during the promotion of that CD. Patty Lou was dedicated to the project, and with Mary no longer there, she took on quite a load. She was handling the marketing and publicity in coordination with the record company, and it was a demanding post, being that I worked so heavily in the area of promotion and marketing.

Patty Lou had a husband and family at home in Ontario and managed to be a traveling professional, a loving mother of two preteen sons, and a dedicated wife to her beloved husband, Rob. She was a shining example of how to do everything well. She spoke of her family constantly and it was great to hear all about them, as it was a welcome escape from the reality of promotional road life.

Kim, Patty Lou, and Stacy essentially fulfilled the role of professional management for more than two years. I couldn’t have gotten through the intense promotional period for
The Woman in Me
without them.

While working on
Come On Over
in 1997, I was introduced to Jon Landau and Barbara Carr, longtime managers of Bruce Springsteen. Jon started out in music as a well-respected rock critic; in fact, in 1974, shortly before Bruce’s career erupted with his third album,
Born to Run,
Jon saw him perform in Boston and was moved
to write the prophetic words “I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” A few years later, he was rock ’n’ roll’s future’s manager. As my comanager, Jon was extremely attentive and lent moral support when I needed his ear and encouragement, especially when it came to stage fright. He knew how to talk me through to the other side of the panic.

Barbara, a steady, no-nonsense lady with loads of management experience (Hall & Oates, among others) and a heart of gold, spent a lot of time with me on the road. Consequently, she saw me at my best and my worst, but she always handled either extreme well. Jan Stabile, another management partner at Landau Management, completed the trio with Barbara and myself. Both women possessed strength, brains, compassion, common sense, and know-how. They made my life easier, and even though we would part ways professionally after five years, I still feel a bond with them today.

The three of us spent loads of time traveling internationally, promoting
Come On Over
together. At the time my music was already well on its way to breaking many music industry records, but I was still an unknown in many parts of the world other than North America. I was starting from scratch in the overseas international market, and Jan and Barbara did the miles with me. They dug the trenches and dredged the ditches over and over again until finally I would have success abroad.

By the time I’d gotten through the rigorous period of
The Woman in Me
CD, I was already half burned out on promotion, but
Come On Over
would become an even bigger success and more demanding. I remember being in Scotland during the promotional tour for
Come On Over.
I was suffering sleep deprivation and getting desperate. The schedule was grueling, and jet lag didn’t help. I needed to sleep but couldn’t. I was waking up in the middle of the night in this insomniac state, having to be in hair and makeup in only a few hours. I could not continue this crazy workload with three to four hours’ sleep for days on end. I was exhausted but wired with a crawling-out-of-my-skin-type energy. I asked Jan if she could organize for a treadmill to
be in my hotel rooms, as the only way I could think of physically ridding myself of this excess energy and get back to sleep was to run it off. Barbara and Jan got me through it still sane and alive. I thank them for their patience, as there were times I was close to the breaking point, and although I was very good at controlling myself in front of anyone else, once the three of us were alone, my release would flow and it wasn’t always pretty. Lots of good ole Northern Ontario, small-town girl came out in my language, let’s put it that way.

Now that I formally had management again, Patty Lou Andrews retired and returned to her husband and two preteen sons, Michael and Matthew. Sadly, two years later Patty Lou died suddenly of a severe brain aneurysm. I cried like a baby when I received the news. She was truly a special person, one who kept me laughing when I was grumpy from too little sleep and too many commitments. Her ability to remain calm and gracious under pressure was an inspiration.

Not long after Patty Lou’s passing, I received a package containing a beautiful pearl necklace that had belonged to her late mother. She’d left it to me in her will. With my mouth open in disbelief, I clung to the pearls as if they were the tips of Patty Lou’s very own fingers reaching out to touch me. She did touch me that day, and deeply. I could not help but wonder when she had made out a will, not knowing, of course, that she would soon face death so prematurely. And why would she have left these to me? I literally fell to my knees, humbled by her thoughtfulness—but not surprised. I miss Patty Lou.

Come On Over
was written in bits and pieces over the course of the two years since
The Woman in Me
had been released. Mutt and I connected periodically when he’d join me on the promotional touring. We wrote while dining out, driving, even at a soccer game, where the bulk of “From This Moment On” was written. I was a bit bored with the pace of soccer compared to the lively games of ice hockey that I was more accustomed to, and it started flowing out. This is one of my favorite original songs. The writing sessions between Mutt and
me were scattered, and no one specific place or time alone represents that songwriting period.

Mutt and I spent a lot of time apart as I was promoting and touring, and he was in studios working on tracks and arrangements as we wrote. It’s surprising that we were able to write all this stuff with so little time together. We wrote independently and merged ideas when we joined up. I remember feeling very excited about the counter line sung by Mutt as backing vocals in “You’re Still the One.” As I sang the chorus melody repeatedly while working out the lyrics, he kicked in with the counter line “You’re still the one,” and it gave me chills. All of a sudden we had a hit chorus. It was a magic moment.

That song crossed over to pop and international success. I passed Elton John while I was coming and he was going from a radio station visit, and as we approached each other in the corridor, he started singing “You’re Still the One.” I was so flattered that this legendary songwriter extraordinaire, who I was seeing for the first time in the flesh, honored me with such an incredible compliment as to address me by singing my own chorus. “You’re Still the One” brought us nominations for four Grammy Awards, two of which I took home.

“That Don’t Impress Me Much” was the seventh single released from the CD, and it kept the momentum going. It’s extremely difficult for the average album to sustain itself even after the third single, never mind a seventh. This was rare in the music industry and still is. “You’re Still the One” had opened the world of international and crossover success to my career, and “That Don’t Impress Me Much” kept it going. It won several pop, country, and international songwriting awards.

“Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” was the eighth release, and it ensured even more longevity to the life of
Come On Over.
Phew, I was exhausted, and although I was thrilled by the success, I feared it would never end: the work, the travel, the loneliness. I am so proud of that record, the songs themselves and all that was achieved from scratch to finish. I feel a huge sense of accomplishment now, but at the time, I was too tired to appreciate it. Every time I’d get news
that it just kept selling, and the demand for more singles continued, I wanted to collapse at the thought that normalcy, rest, recharging my batteries were all yet another single away. It was an incredibly bittersweet experience to be enjoying the success and feeling a pang of almost resentment toward it. I considered myself selfish, feeling this contradiction of emotions, but I was confused about what to feel. I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad. I was losing touch with what I wanted. There was no peace. “More pain, more gain” thankfully applies to the experience of
Come On Over
for me, and today, I am able to look back on it with great pleasure and satisfaction. I saw my day-to-day reality then as a struggle with no end in sight, though of course I now appreciate that this was a rare blessing that very few recording artists are ever gifted with experiencing. I saw it then as well, but it was a blur, as I was standing too close to see it clearly.

Not only that, but you never seem to have time because there’s always something more pressing that needs to be done yesterday, and it typically involves other people. So if it’s a toss-up between my wanting to iron but having to lay down a vocal overdub in the studio, or else I will be holding up Mutt, the recording engineer, and who knows who else, the simple chore at home is going to take a backseat. I cannot very well delegate lead vocals on my own record to someone else while I get the ironing done. You don’t even have to say it: “So what’s so bad about that? I’d
love
to have someone do those things for me.” Well, whether we’re aware of it or not, we all derive a measure of satisfaction just from being self-sufficient and feeling competent in the world. I was starting to feel as if I’d lost my chops
at life’s fundamentals—and I’d been someone who could survive on my own in a cabin in the woods with no running water or electricity in subzero temperatures and snow up to my butt. Now, with a skilled full-time staff at home to handle every domestic and personal chore for me, I felt … useless and inept.

I used to come home after being away and feel like a houseguest. For one thing, I could never find anything!
Where are my rubber boots?
For that, I would have to ask the cleaning lady.
Damn! I forgot how to program the oven!
For that, ask Kim. It seemed like my being there disrupted the graceful efficiency of my own household. When I’d want to do things for myself, it would throw everybody off.

Cooking in your own kitchen, for example, where your cupboards have been arranged by someone else in your absence, can be discouraging. A cook has to know her way around her own kitchen, otherwise a lot of the fun is taken out of it, just in trying to find everything. “Why don’t you relax? What do you want to
cook
for?” I heard that all the time. Why? Because I wanted to feel normal again! I didn’t want to be waited on hand and foot like spoiled royalty; I wanted to do the things that kept me real and gave me some sense of control over my life, like folding my own towels, making my own bed, and putting my socks away where I wanted
so I always knew where to find them.

Here is how much I began to crave normalcy: One Friday afternoon, not long after Kim began working for me, I asked her about her plans for the weekend. “Oh, nothing special,” she replied. “Tomorrow I’m off to the Walmart to pick out some paint.”

I perked right up. “Can I come with you?!” You’d have thought she’d said, “I’m taking the Concorde to Paris to go shopping on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and all the stores there are having a hundred-percent-off sale.” We had not gotten to know each other well yet; she probably found my enthusiastic request off, if not just plain sad. But she came around the next afternoon in her beat-up truck. “Excuse my rattletrap,” she said apologetically. Are you kidding? I grew up riding around in rattletraps. I had a great time hanging
out with Kim that Saturday doing something that I am sure most people would file under “drudgery.”

There was one activity around Loon Echo that I could call my own: tending the horses. I had wanted to own horses ever since I was twelve years old and caring for my friend Sue’s palomino, Angel, when we lived in Hanmer. Now that I finally had the money and a little time between albums, I rewarded myself by purchasing five of these noble and proud creatures. I love everything about horses: their power and grace, the balance and weightless motion of their massive, athletic frame, their elegant silhouette, the energy and fiery passion that flows through their veins, the way they carry themselves with breathtaking beauty. I am in awe of them. How could such a powerful animal possess so generous a temperament as to carry man obediently and thoughtfully through the ages?

I visited several farms in the Nashville area looking for my equestrian friends. Once they finally arrived at Loon Echo, I spent every chance I could with them. The barn became a refuge where I could mentally escape show business. The smells of the sweet hay and the animals’ musty coats, the
clip-clop
of their hooves on the wood floors, their snorting sighs of contentment—I loved it all. Every now and then, I would have what I called “salon day.” One at a time, I would pamper them with a deep clean while grooving to the radio. Suds and conditioners, finely combed manes and tails, sleek ’n’ shiny coats, dressed hooves, lots of hugs and kisses, and they were ready to roll out in the paddock. Horses never stay clean if you let them have any fun outside, just being horses. The point of the salon days was more the hands-on contact and communication that keeps their manners and patience in line while standing tied and being handled. It was a chance to check closely for cuts and bruises and just give them a good once-over from head to toe.