Onstage since the 1970s, singer/songwriter and Grammy Award winner Shawn Colvin has been a wandering troubadour for most of her life and will be performing at The Rio on Saturday, August 8.
Colvin lived a hardscrabble musician life, but when she found fame, it was already well deserved.
“I moved to New York in 1980 and kind of evolved from cover bands to—I would do anything,” says Colvin from her home in Austin, Texas.
Trying to work and play every night, the young folk singer would take any gig she could find in 1980s NYC. “I had to have five gigs a week. I’d do a couple of solo ones. One with my own band and one with a country band. We just took work wherever we could. We were all struggling,” Colvin recalls.
Her timing was immaculate, as she found herself among Fast Folk, a collective that fostered community through a label and magazine and often released the first recordings of singer-songwriters such as Colvin, Lyle Lovett and Tracy Chapman.
It was a heady time to be young and emerging as a talented artist.
“I wasn’t necessarily super adventurous. Like I didn’t go to CBGBs very often, except when I knew the person that was playing or I was a really huge fan, but it wasn’t my hang. I was more in the folk clubs like at Kenny’s Castaways,” Colvin remembers.
Initially, Colvin had found a country scene in Austin. An “amazing talent” named Buddy Miller put together a country band and moved to NYC. The film Urban Cowboy was really popular at the time and country music was back in style.
Colvin joined the band and made the move up North.
“There were a lot of us in that scene and we kind of rotated within each other’s bands, you know? Soozie Tyrell, who you might know from Springsteen’s band, she had a band that played all the time and I was a backup singer for her. Just different configurations. We’d all mess around. We had a trio with Soozie and a woman named Lisa Lowell. We’d do a trio at the Upper East Side in a tiny little club. We paired up and did whatever we could to make a dollar. Wherever I could sing, I would go.”
Through Fast Folk and constant gigging around, Colvin began touring with Suzanne Vega in 1988. This brought her the attention of a label and the recording contract that followed.
That is when everything changed. Colvin’s debut album, Steady On (1989), won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. That ensured steady paychecks.
But it was in 1996, on Colvin’s fourth album, A Few Small Repairs, and the viral moment of the single “Sunny Came Home” that Colvin became a nationally known artist and the Academy agreed. That year Colvin won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year and Record of the Year.
Nothing prepares an artist for mass acclaim and all the vices that come with it.
The septuagenarian is not lost in nostalgia at all. But Colvin can’t help but laugh at her journey from an anonymous songwriter hustling around the mean streets of NYC, to an everybody-knows-your-name rock star and then, ultimately back to figuring out what life is all about. And sometimes laughing about the earlier years.
“I remember the first time I played the Philly Folk Fest. I was peddling a cassette to whoever would buy it and whatever record company might listen to it. I sold them at the Philly Folk Fest. That was my first foray into selling a product. Yeah, merch. So it still works to an extent, but it’s a different world,” Colvin laughs.
Shawn Colvin appears on Saturday, August 8 at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Avenue. Showtime is 8pm and tickets are $40. More information at riotheatre.com
