“Shawn-y Came Home”: Shawn Colvin at Sweetwater Music Hall

“Please no more therapy, mother take care of me.”

This was the original plea that snapped my head around and had me scrambling to shuffle Shawn Colvin’s entire discography. From those first strains of the song “Polaroids”, off her 1992 album Fat City, I knew there was something special in the stripped down and yet lyrically complex melodies of Colvin’s music.

I am far from the first person to recognize the talent and depth of emotion that Shawn Colvin conveys in her effortless and yet deeply grounded tracks. The emotional vulnerability is almost disconcerting; the straightforward language reveals revelations that feel like she must have stolen your super-secret journal off your nightstand and brought it with her to the studio to read aloud. Her childhood soundtrack of American folk music shines through in her composition, and her soaring, glittering upper range pairs gorgeously with smoldering lower notes in nearly every tune.

This exact talent was on full display on November 14th, where Colvin took the stage at the Sweetwater Music Hall across the bay in Mill Valley. When I walked into the low-lit bar from the frigid November air, I immediately began giggling to myself, turning to whisper to my sister that we must’ve been the youngest people in the building by about 20 years at least. And yet the crowd was no sleepy bunch – they hooted and hollered as the stage lights dimmed and Colvin took the stage, set up minimally with only her microphone, a keyboard, and Colvin herself bearing her acoustic guitar. Never one to waste time, Colvin immediately strummed the beginning of her opener, a cover of “Killing the Blues” by Allison Kraus and Robert Plant. Two strums in, she stopped; “Oh, don’t tape – not until I’ve loosened up a little at least”, she implored someone in the front of the room, laughing at herself.

And loosen up she did – the night blazed onward with song after song of glorious vocal mastery and easy, bouncing guitar. In true Colvin fashion, she would lay the entire audience bare with piercing lyrics like “Just me and my well intentioned spite / Can’t afford to be right no more” and then proceed to make a quip about her youthful dalliances or the deviant antics she got up to in the 80s, where she lived and worked in NYC with an artist collective including the likes of Suzanne Vega and The Roches. This is a quintessential part of Colvin’s delightful appeal; though she churns out brutally searching work, she never takes herself too seriously, and isn’t afraid to laugh about the ridiculousness that is her life and the human experience. At one point, she introduced “Round of Blues”, by saying “Here’s a happy love song: BLEH!” Relatable, to say the least.

The crowd burst into approving claps and noises when Colvin bumped out the first lines of her folk-rock classic of “Sunny Came Home”, a song that won her Song of the Year at the 1998 Grammys. The song is inspired by a Julie Speed painting wherein a woman stares directly at the viewer with a lit match in her hands as licks of fire crest the hill behind her. The song beautifully translates this unsettling and yet empowering tone, with dark lyrics set to a free and catchy guitar backing. Colvin aches for freedom and ownership over her life, and the crowd couldn’t have felt her message more. Everyone swayed in their seats and sang along, the space overflowing with “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”.

The gorgeous arcing melodies and vulnerable confession weren’t the only things Colvin brought to the stage on Monday. Throughout the show, she provided the audience with wonderful snapshots of her writing process. It was a “musician’s savior” she said, when she completed the lyrics on “Polaroids” after she dreamt something deeply symbolic and was able to translate it into the finishing touch needed on the track. Another anecdote felt particularly special, as she recounted 1978 spent sitting on the roof of her tiny attic bedroom off Solano Avenue, sipping on a fifth and staring across the bay, wondering what was to become of her. How poignant of an image, especially for fellow Cal students: a young Colvin, slender, with an open face, yearning for certainty and turning to the only solace she knew – her guitar and words. The accompanying song declared, “I’ve been working hard / Looking at my punch card and / My mirror, my mirror”, a plaintive image of searching for meaning as a young person which so many know well. It was so easy to see that that was the same woman I was looking at now, truly herself and now seemingly comfortable with the not-knowing that remains at the core of life’s journey.

The night ended with a gorgeously endearing piano cover of the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place”, which perfectly completed the soul-rendering soundtrack of the small bar that night. Turning to her piano for the first and only time during the duration of the show, Colvin delivered a plain sweetness in her highly melodic rendering that genuinely brought tears to my eyes – and I was far from the only one. Colvin’s eye’s glinted in the stage lights as she scanned the crowd, and she seemed, like the audience, deeply content in her final farewell of the evening, easing us out with the sweet strains of “Say goodnight…. Say goodnight”.

Article by Roxanne Bostian

Photos by Amalia Bostian