David Crosby on the “best lady songwriter alive”
Any musician who has been in the game long enough knows to never stop listening to the next generation. It’s one thing for people to think that the best songs have already been written, but it’s usually only a matter of time before someone comes to the forefront to knock everyone on their ass with just the right combination of chords and a voice that could rip someone’s heart out. David Crosby had claimed to have stumbled on that kind of songwriter several times, but he knew that he was dealing with something special when he heard Shawn Colvin performing.
However, Crosby never shied away from thinking outside the box regarding new music. He could speak eloquently about the likes of Miles Davis until the sun burned out of the sky, but if it wasn’t for Joni Mitchell setting his world on fire, he probably wouldn’t have been daring enough to stretch as far as he did on his own albums.
Outside of his experimentation with genres like jazz, the sound that he always came back to was pure Americana. Even when he went off the rails in a few spots of If I Could Only Remember My Name, Croz took every piece of his roots and channelled them into each song, still abiding by the rule of testing a song’s quality by just playing it on an acoustic guitar.
Some of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s material may have sounded a bit retro compared to the more adventurous albums of the 1960s like Abbey Road or Led Zeppelin II, but by those standards, Colvin was never looking for chart success in the slightest. Her music was all about creating the perfect soundtrack to an America that had long gone by on albums like Steady On.
Even when she interpolated other people’s music on records like Cover Girl, she wasn’t just looking to pay homage. Going through her version of ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’, she makes every section of the song feel lived-in, almost rewriting pieces of the tune to make them more suitable to her style.
Although there are traces of Mitchell and a touch of Bonnie Raitt in the way that she sings, Crosby thought Colvin was one of the best songwriters to have come out in some time, telling Stereogum, “There’s a lot of people out there that I think are pretty terrific. I think Shawn Colvin is probably — now that Joni’s out of play — the best lady singer-songwriter alive.”
The best part is that she has never truly stopped making music. While she hasn’t released anything since her children’s album The Starlighter, her various collaborations with Steve Earle and her more rustic material on All Fall Down see her rising to the same levels that people like Emmylou Harris had done before her.
While Crosby will forever be on the Mount Rushmore folk-rockers, though, Colvin was never looking to be the pop star that everyone else was destined to be. She may have received her accolades as a pioneer in the field, but that’s not what music is about to her. It’s just about writing that next great song, and that’s not something that fits into the pop star formula.
