Sunny came home mandolin12/8/2022 Other standout covers included Emmylou Harris’ “Raise the Dead” and the oft-recorded “Tobacco Road.” A laidback, almost effortless cover of “Wake Up Little Suzy” opened the night.īefore “Someday,” Earle told a long story, recapping his days as a Nashville songwriter trying to get a record deal, then fighting to get another when his debut single disappointed everyone. The spare arrangement brought Mick Jagger’s haunting lyrics to the forefront, particularly lines like “catch your dreams before they slip away.” #SUNNY CAME HOME MANDOLIN HOW TO#Over the course of 100 minutes, the pair performed ever song from their new collaboration, “Colvin and Earle” and scattered a couple of their own hits for good measure.ĭespite nearly two dozen albums to their names, cover songs dominiated the setlist.Įarle introduced the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” by saying he learned how to play tennis racket to that song in front of a mirror. The concept was as straightforward as the setup. The two artists stood on an all-black stage adorned with four monitors, one table, four guitars and two mandolins. With all the smiles, stories and strumming, Steve Earle and Shawn Colvin’s performance Wednesday night at the Kauffman Center seemed like very upscale busking. We were like, ‘What the hell, we have nothing to lose.(Above: Shawn Colvin, left, and Steve Earle emplore listeners to “Tell Moses.”) “We’d kind of written off the idea of having radio-friendly songs. “There was a sense of freedom when we made that record,” she says. Leventhal used his low-bass tuning on the track “You and the Mona Lisa,” for instance, but in the live version of that song on the anniversary release, Colvin plays it in standard.įrom a songwriting perspective, A Few Small Repairs marks a time when Colvin began to delve more into character-based songs. At the time, Leventhal had recently discovered the tuning C G D G B E, which, he writes in the liner notes, “opened up a world of new and elusive chord voicings, and they immediately seemed like a perfect match for Shawn’s unresolved narratives.” Colvin herself didn’t use that tuning (though it is very close to what became a common tuning for her: C G D G B D, or open-G with C in the bass), and she reworked some of Leventhal’s parts to play the songs live. He co-wrote all but two of the songs, and layered guitars, mandolin, keyboards, and more in the album’s deft pop-folk arrangements. The release includes seven bonus tracks-live recordings from the late ’90s, including strong solo versions of “Sunny” and “Get Out of This House.”Ĭolvin’s long-running collaboration with Leventhal, who also produced her Grammy-winning debut, Steady On, is at the core of A Few Small Repairs. “Sunny Came Home” and A Few Small Repairs are back in the spotlight with the recent 20th anniversary edition from Sony/Legacy. “I looked at this and thought, ‘You need to write a story about this woman who’s got a lit match and a big fire in the background.’” And that led Colvin to imagine Sunny, with her mysterious mission to “light the sky and hold on tight.” “In fact, I think I had it as ‘Jimmy Came Home’ at one point before I’d written the lyric to ‘The Facts about Jimmy.’” Then Colvin thought of the cover art she’d already chosen for the album-a painting by Texas artist Julie Speed. #SUNNY CAME HOME MANDOLIN CRACK#“I tried many things, and I didn’t crack it easily,” Colvin recalls. At the 11th hour of making the album that ultimately became A Few Small Repairs, Colvin was trying to complete a song based on a demo by John Leventhal, the album’s producer, and she struggled to find a lyrical angle. “S unny Came Home,” Shawn Colvin’s bright-sounding but lyrically dark song that scored Grammys in 1998 for both Song of the Year and Record of the Year, has a highly unlikely origin story. From the January 2018 issue of Acoustic Guitar | BY JEFFREY PEPPER RODGERS
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