Critical Mass

Colvin came home with a mission

Album cover for Shawn Colvin’s "A Few Small Repair"
Album cover for Shawn Colvin’s "A Few Small Repair"

Tastefulness is a dubious virtue for pop musicians. Maybe we ought to treat it with suspicion. For after all, we came to dance, not to consider. A rock star is an idealized being, an angel or alien fallen to earth. What do they know of grown-up things? Of half measures and heartbreak?

Yet, on the other hand, there are songs that crush you and songs that save your life. It depends on how they come to you, in what circumstances you find yourself, how receptive you are willing to be. I knew 1975's Blood on the Tracks before I had my first real girlfriend, but the wistfulness of "If You See Her Say Hello" informed the way I carried myself through the halls and gymnasiums of my youth.

It was about 21 years later that Shawn Colvin's A Few Small Repairs was released (in 1996) and by that time I'd been through a few break-ups. Columbia/Legacy is releasing a special anniversary edition of the record on Friday, in CD, vinyl and digital configurations, all featuring the original album remastered with seven bonus audio tracks. (This is the first time the album has ever been released as a vinyl record.)

When the record came out, I initially received it as a minor disappointment (I don't feel that way now, and we'll get to that in a bit). Colvin was an artist I'd followed since her debut album, 1989's Steady On, which probably remains her best work and would make my long list of the best debut albums ever recorded. A Few Small Repairs -- which gave her her first, biggest and, depending on how you look at it, maybe only hit in the lilting but melancholy "Sunny Came Home" -- didn't immediately catch my attention. I played it through a time or two and filed it away. I would have forgotten about it if the single hadn't become a radio staple.

Colvin often talked about how she came to write the song. It's directly inspired by the cover painting, by the Austin, Texas, artist Julie Speed, of a three-eyed woman holding a lit match. Apparently the album was almost finished -- Speed's painting had already been chosen as the cover -- when Colvin sat down and wrote lyrics for the track. It opens with a memorable mandolin riff, then the vocal:

Sunny came home to her favorite room

Sunny sat down in the kitchen

She opened a book and a box of tools

Sunny came home with a mission

She lays out a cryptic array of details. What is this book? What is in this box of tools? What is this mission?

As it turns out, and what I didn't immediately grasp in 1996, is that A Few Small Repairs is a concept album written after Colvin's divorce, about the fraying of a love affair. It's a song cycle about grief and loss and disappointment and carrying on. It was too tasteful and subtle and nuanced to catch my notice then. All I heard was the sweet melody, the glide of the chorus:

Days go by, I'm hypnotized

I'm walking on a wire

I close my eyes and fly out of my mind

Into the fire

I missed the darkness. Just another oblivious boy.

The world is burning down

She's out there on her own and she's alright

...

Maybe it's instructive to note that Colvin was something of a late bloomer. She didn't make her own record until she was in her early 30s. She started out singing with a Western Swing band in Austin, then moved to New York in the early 1980s, where she became part of the so-called fast folk movement that sprung up in Greenwich Village (for a time she played with Buddy Miller, who remains an occasional collaborator). Suzanne Vega hired her as a touring backup singer and brought her to the attention of Columbia Records. (Vega ended up contributing backing vocals on Steady On.)

Maybe that's why Steady On seems so assured and mature -- it earned Colvin comparisons to Joni Mitchell, which in a way were apt. Both are singular artists who are routinely described as folk simply because a lot of their music is acoustic guitar-based.

Anyway, one thing I probably didn't notice in 1989 was the presence of John Leventhal, who is credited with "guitar, bass, mandolin, keyboards, tambourine, background vocals, drum programming" and who also co-wrote, with Colvin, six of the album's 10 songs. He's also credited -- along with Steve Addabbo, known for his work with Vega -- as the album's co-producer.

Leventhal hasn't been a constant throughout Colvin's career. He shows up on her second album, Fat City (1992), but there's no trace of him on her third, 1994's Cover Girl (which, as the title suggests, is a collection of Colvin's versions of other people's songs). But he was the sole producer on A Few Small Repairs, and he co-wrote 10 of the 13 tracks on the original album. (He also played guitar on every track as well as some keyboards and that wonderful mandolin line. He also arranged the strings and horns that appear on the record.)

I'm inclined to credit Leventhal with the understated but absolutely finished feel of the songs. As a sonic product A Few Small Repairs has a lot in common with the records Leventhal has made with Rosanne Cash (whom he married in 1995) especially 2014's The River & the Thread. Leventhal's style is eclectic, seeming to exist in the shadowlands between the bright, broad styles that announce themselves as "country," "blues" or "folk." He's got a light, but definite touch that resonates more with me now than it did in 1996.

Still, the major attraction of A Few Small Repairs is the songs, which are a striking departure from the confessional singer-songwriter work of Colvin's early albums. They're mature and elliptical, open to interpretation (and misinterpretation) just like Dylan's work on Blood on the Tracks. The shimmering "Sunny Came Home" aside, there's nothing on the album that sounds like a wannabe hit single. Instead, we get assured, occasionally playful, occasionally stark music with adult themes -- depression, retrenchment, disillusion and carrying on.

"Sunny Came Home" won the Grammy, but the record's heart is in tracks like the rockin' "Get Out of this House," the ruminative "Wichita Skyline" and the sardonic duet with Lyle Lovett, "The Facts About Jimmy":

Jimmy is married and he lives down south

His wife lives somewhere colder

He sees another woman in a badlands town

And she cries upon his shoulder

photo

AP

Shawn Colvin performs at the Americana Music Awards in 2016.

I didn't exactly miss A Few Small Repairs when it was released. (Our digital archive reveals I mentioned it on my list of favorite albums of 1996.) But I don't think I really discovered it until a few years ago. It's never too late.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

Style on 09/10/2017

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