I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats.
For the first time in 23 years I’m enjoying the process of supporting it, of going out and doing shows, and doing the interviews, and doing everything.
Well, the first year I lost my voice I didn’t mind so much because I was going to have a baby and I was distracted with him anyway, I didn’t even think about it that much, well, OK, this is what’s happening.
Once your kids get older and get out of the house, it’s not like it stops. They’re on the phone with me every day; I’m intimately involved in their problems.
More and more, I see myself as a folk musician, and someone who values context.
As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.
If you’re playing in a tradition and you have no reference point to it, no understanding and have not studied it, I can’t respect that.
I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children.
I was angry at my parents when I had to have brain surgery, that they weren’t still around, because no matter how old you are you want you parents when you’re going through something like that.
I was a songwriter; that was the torch I carried. This is an honorable profession. This is what I do.
I think that my sensitivity to music has actually deepened and expanded as I’ve gotten older. You add more life experience.
I’m a songwriter. My voice just serves what I’m writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating, really fun.
Southern gentility is evocative to me.
Isn’t that the goal, as you grow older? That you start reclaiming those parts of yourself you didn’t recognize or didn’t think were there all along? That’s what happened when I made The River and the Thread record.
While visiting places in the South with my heart really open, I realized how important people in certain geographical spots were to me, what they symbolize, how I’m still connected to them and how much they are a part of my ancestry, both musical and real.
I was sensitive to music and poetry, and it was around me growing up.
There’s always that moment when you realize what it’s going to be. You might have an overarching theme and you need to fill in the blanks – and then there’s this “Aha” moment when you see where it’s going. That’s the most satisfying part of writing.
I’m not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music – and children.
I don’t do comparisons because I always lose.
Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It’s part of a living treasure. It doesn’t just belong to a museum.
You stand in front of a great painting and your heart just opens and your mind expands about what’s possible. That, to me, is a connection to what God is.