![]() ![]() Leventhal's fingerprints are visible on most of Colvin's nine albums and it was with him she achieved her most commercial success with Sunny Came Home, which won song of the year and record of the year at the 1998 Grammys. ![]() Given her tendency and talent for writing personal songs, it's ironic that Colvin is best known for a song that isn't about her at all. A feisty murder ballad, Sunny Came Home, is about a woman, betrayed and belittled by her husband, who returns home and sets fire to her house. "For the record, I've never set fire to my house or murdered anyone," she says, impishly. If Colvin had a breakthrough, A Few Small Repairs, the album containing Sunny Came Home, was it. Another song from the album became the theme tune of the short-lived Brooke Shields sitcom, Suddenly Susan, and she recorded songs for film soundtracks, among them Julia Roberts' Runaway Bride. She's appeared in The Simpsons, in which she voiced Rachel Jordan, the Christian rock star who dated Ned Flanders after Maude's death. Listen to the entire conversation with Shawn Colvin on "Everything Fab Four" and subscribe via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google, or wherever you're listening.And yet, she never fully crossed into the mainstream, remaining more of a cult favourite, a hidden gem, a diamond in the rough. ![]() What they produced is once in a lifetime … and maybe even rarer than that." "The four of them coming together is religion to me. Having memorably covered "I'll Be Back" - which she wrote about for the "Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs" collection - and, with Steve Earle, "Baby's in Black," and having made the "Magical Mystery Tour" trek to Liverpool, Colvin continues to be amazed by the Beatles. As for her biggest hit, the "revenge" song "Sunny Came Home," she says it was a departure from her usual songwriting in that it was a fictional story inspired by a piece of art - a process the Beatles also sometimes employed in their writing. In addition to the Beatles, Colvin is also heavily influenced by the late '60s folk music scene and artists. Subscribe today through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, GooglePodcasts, Stitcher, RadioPublic, Breaker, Player.FM, Pocket Casts or wherever you're listening. And just keep playing until you get good." She says if there's any advice she can give to aspiring musicians, it's this: "Get out there and play. The energy and confidence and playfulness and musicianship they had – it was just beyond anything I'd ever seen."Ĭolvin channeled that energy into her own music, learning to play everything she could on guitar as a teen, and spending years "paying her dues" in clubs and dive bars to make it ("like the Beatles did in Hamburg"), never wanting to do anything else for a career. "Of course they were adorable, but I'd seen adorable bands before and since," Colvin says, but the Beatles were "so tight, so special, so soulful, so full of joie de vivre. But the first record she bought with her own money was "Meet the Beatles" when she was just eight years old, after having seen the band on "The Ed Sullivan Show" (" I'm sure no one's ever mentioned that before," she jokes to Womack), and she was hooked. Grammy award-winner Shawn Colvin joined host Kenneth Womack to talk about falling in love with the Beatles and breaking into the music business on the latest episode of " Everything Fab Four," a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.Ĭolvin, the singer-songwriter most widely known for her number-one '90s hit "Sunny Came Home," says she grew up on "church music" and the artists her father listened to, such as the Kingston Trio and Pete Seeger. ![]()
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