Composed (8 page)

In the first few days of January, three weeks before my due date, my old friend Randy Scruggs called to ask Rodney and me to participate in a project he was doing with his dad, Earl, and Tom T. Hall. They were making a record called
The Storyteller and the Banjo Man
, and he invited us to come to his studio and sing on a couple of songs. It was around Earl’s birthday, and a lot of people planned to be there. At this penultimate phase of gestation, I was past the point of maternal glow, long past being cooed at and patted, and had lately been inspiring only expressions of shock and nervous retreat. But Randy was my dear friend, the record would be finished before I delivered my baby, and I really wanted to sing on it, so I decided to go. I didn’t have a coat big enough to close around my belly, and that night turned out to be the coldest one yet of the relentless winter. The air was actually blue when we stepped outside. The thermometer in the carport registered eleven below zero, and sharp little ice crystals rose in gusts from the hard-packed snow in the driveway. I sulked as we started the long drive to the studio. Rodney, experienced with the ramifications of unintentionally provoking a woman near the end of her third trimester, gave me a lot of room. It was a very quiet trip.

Despite my misgivings, the evening turned out to be wonderful. We sang on three songs: “Shackles and Chains,” “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” and “Song of the South.” Instead of being treated as a sideshow freak, I was cherished as a ripe little goddess. It brought out the best in me. The company of friends and the balm of playing music was liberating, and I was fatigued, but content, when we left. The silence on our return had a decidedly different texture.

We drove through the snowy landscape as if in a dream—past the empty country roads at the borders of wide fields enclosed by Civil War-era stone fences, past big, dark, and looming old estates and grand, columned mansions that lonesomely adjoined lazy suburban tracts.

We had not seen another car for several miles when we made the turn onto the pike that began the final leg to our hidden house in its miniature valley surrounded by thick oaks and maples. Rodney drove very carefully, as this road was used less than others in the area and was still swathed in ice. I was drowsily contemplating a few oranges by the fire before bed. Suddenly, flashing red lights appeared on the shoulder of the opposite side of the road about a hundred feet ahead. We slowed to a crawl, and as we came upon the scene we saw an ambulance, a car behind it, and in between the two, a man stretched out on his back on the frozen ground. The few people standing over him seemed in no hurry to get him into the ambulance.

“Oh, my God,” we both said softly when we realized the man was dead. Rodney quickly glanced at me. I turned away, profoundly conscious of the baby inside me, reacting to a fierce, primal impulse to protect it from unexpected surges of my adrenaline—the heady, dangerous mix of the hormones of hysteria and fear.

There was clearly no way we could help, so we drove on. A mile or so farther on, we were astonished to see, striding toward us up the road, a sturdy-looking middle-aged woman with a tall walking stick. Her gait was so determined, and the stick planted so authoritatively with each step, I could practically hear the drumbeat behind her march. More astonishing still, she was dressed only in a skirt and sweater—no coat, scarf, or gloves—and was bare legged. On her feet were awful brown oxford-type discount-store shoes, shaped carelessly from thin, fake leather. Only sandals would have been more inappropriate in this weather.

Rodney stopped and rolled down his window. “Ma’am? Can we give you a ride somewhere?”

In a tight, high-pitched voice she asked, “Are you sure you don’t mind?” and then got into the backseat. She was pale and fair, and though her demeanor was reserved, even stiff, her eyes were darting about and she spoke quickly. “Oh, thank you so much! I’m just going back up the road a little bit. My neighbor there called and said someone had been hit by a car, and my husband was out takin’ a walk, and now I’m a little worried about him.”

I didn’t dare look at Rodney, but I could feel that we had both stopped breathing. My heart began to pound, and a queasy feeling rose in my abdomen. Rodney eased the car forward to a little cross street where he could turn around. Fortunately, we didn’t have to say anything, because the woman was chattering nervously.

“I told him it was too cold to go out walking, but he’s stubborn. Said he had to have his evening constitutional no matter how cold it was. Now, are y’all sure you don’t mind takin’ me back up there?”

“No, ma’am, not at all,” I said. “We saw some kind of disturbance back there, but I’m not sure what it was.”

“Oh, my Lord,” she trilled, pleading and panicked. “Now, I don’t want y’all to get hurt, too!”

I was struck by that sentence as if by a two-by-four. It still reverberates now, so many years later: the pitch of her voice, her self-effacing Southern politeness, the tears building behind the contained panic, the uncontrolled sense that danger newly pervaded the entire world. My heart broke for her. In about thirty seconds her entire life was going to detonate, and two strangers were sharing her last moments of peace. But it was not my place to tell her.

Several years later a friend gave me a tape of Irish keening, which is the sound of women wailing at the graves of their loved ones—long, sustained, unbearably plaintive cries elevated by the deepest sorrow to an art form: the most human sound of the genesis of music. It sent chills down my back and brought tears to my eyes when I heard it, and the first thing I thought of was that woman, unknowing, in her brown plastic shoes.

When we arrived back at her neighbor’s house, where the cars and ambulance were still parked, she hurried out of the car. A woman came up to her and put her arm around her shoulder and began to talk softly. We waited for a moment, then drove slowly away. Through the closed car windows I could hear her screams: long, deep, circular cries rising from the roots of her body, like a train whistle disappearing into an endless series of tunnels, like the wrenching Gaelic echoes that hang in the graveyard, like the hiss that escapes from the permanently shattered heart.

I had to borrow from my future that night in protection of my unborn baby. I drew from an unknown reserve of circumspection.
I will feel this later,
I thought. And I was unyielding, my hands over my ears, my head bent to my chest.

On January 25 of that year, I gave birth, after only six hours of labor, to a gorgeous, nearly nine-pound baby girl with enormous bright blue eyes. She was healthy and strong, and I felt proud that I had done my job so well. We named her Chelsea Jane, and I swaddled her warmly and took her home to the big log house. The girls welcomed their little sister and the temperature gradually eased back up into the thirties, where it belonged. My natural indifference to oranges returned abruptly, and the last few left in the bag shriveled and gathered mold before I finally threw them away. I kept the newspaper clipping—“Man Killed by Car on Icy Road”—for a week or so longer, and then that, too, I threw away.

A
fter Chelsea’s birth, I was still having things shipped from California, so Rodney and I decided to share a rental apartment in Malibu with Albert Lee and his wife, Karen. Every time I went back to the West Coast, which was fairly regularly, I felt as if I could breathe again. I had not realized how important the ocean was to me, and how suffocating it would feel to live so far from it.

A sweet and placid baby, Chelsea fit in easily with her sisters, who doted on her. The girls were so adorable and funny that I began to take it for granted that they would remain little. I had always pictured myself as the mother of small children, and in my own myopia and self-absorption I couldn’t imagine that they would actually grow up and become women. If I had thought more about their development—as well as my own—rather than just reveling at being in the moment with them, I would have been stricter. I would have been diligent about imparting life lessons and establishing regulations and tasks. I would have consciously modeled behavior for them and taught them to cook. They just got me as I was—and that’s what they learned about being a woman. In retrospect, I seem to have insisted on a single hard-and-fast rule: no juice after five p.m., as I was convinced that the sugar in the juice would make it difficult to put them to bed. The girls called it “juice cut-off time,” and today they tease me mercilessly about it—my one rule.

When I look at my older daughters now, I realize that the women they are today have very little to do with Rodney and me anyway—they became who they were born to be, though their father and I probably contributed a bit to their quirky senses of humor and to their seeing the world in uniquely odd ways. Hannah grew up and moved to Chicago, then San Francisco, then Austin, then briefly came to New York, and then went to Los Angeles. She worked for a time as a nanny, and as a cocktail waitress at the House of Blues. She and I were separated emotionally for a few years, during which time I stayed in touch but not consistently, and I think the space we took from each other helped dissipate the rancor and resentment that had developed in the fraught step-relationship. She was a much better stepdaughter than I was a stepmother. She had equanimity in her native personality, and tremendous inner strength, and acceptance of her situation. I had taken on the job of mothering her at the age of twenty-two, long before I outgrew a need for mothering in myself. I was unprepared and unequipped. She was patient, and long-suffering with my in-elegance and sometimes petty attitudes as a stepmother. Hannah has turned out to be a wondrous and humbling gift in my life. She matured into a real beauty—fair and blue eyed like her biological mother, who died when Hannah was twenty-two. She got married in 2004 to a solid young man named Russ Brue, who lived in San Diego and worked in finance. They eventually moved back to Nashville, and Hannah now has two baby girls of her own, as well as a young stepdaughter. She confides in me her difficulties in navigating the stepmother-daughter relationship, and we find a new understanding of each other through that wide circle of relationships. She is a phenomenal mother. She knows things about the domestic arts that I never dreamed of. I feel like a neophyte housewife next to her. She is also preternaturally calm and organized, a woman of grace. I feel safe around her.

Caitlin is much more a type-A personality and for many years led an untamed kind of life. After graduating high school from St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, she moved back to Los Angeles, where she worked in the music business, doing song licensing and independent public relations. She is tiny, only five foot three, and very small boned, with big green eyes and a smattering of freckles. (The year after her step-grandmother June died, she did a photo spread for
Elle Girl
magazine, wearing some of June’s vintage clothes, and she looked stunning.) I worried about her a lot—she seemed to always live on the edge, taking many physical and emotional risks. She surfed and got heavily tattooed and seemed to relish finding the extremes in everything. (I should have been clued in to her dare-devil nature when, at the age of five, she climbed up on a thirty-foot platform at a country club pool and calmly dove off the end.) Then she met a young man, and everything coalesced; the center suddenly began to hold. In 2009, after nine months of courtship, she married Sam Rayner, a young British photographer who is Morrissey’s nephew, and moved to Manchester, England. (My friend Elvis Costello said, “In all the connections and interlocking branches of musical family trees, one would never have predicted that one.”) She and Sam laugh at each other constantly and are crazy in love, and with marriage Caitlin has become a fuller, yet more grounded version of who she has always been—a tattooed surfer who is rambunctious and unpredictable, but one who has big, expansive experiences and doesn’t play by anyone else’s rulebook.

Chelsea is my most unusual child. The tallest of my girls at a not very tall five foot six, Chelsea also developed into a beauty, fair and blue eyed, both elegant and delicate. She has always had an inner life of which I could only catch glimpses, but when she did allow me some knowledge of or access to it, I was introduced to a way of living and of perceiving reality that I had not previously imagined. Once, when she was eleven years old, she tried to explain her understanding of the world to me, and the only thing I could equate it to was some principles of quantum physics, which, fortunately, I had studied a bit on my own during my painting, astronomy, and Carl Jung obsessions. She was a bit lonely in school, and when she moved to New York, I took her up to Claremont Riding Academy on the Upper West Side every week because the horses made sense to her, and for her. She moved back and forth between her dad’s house in Nashville and mine in New York, and spent one year at a boarding school in Maryland where she could ride horses as part of the curriculum. She returned to New York to finish high school and graduated from Elizabeth Irwin, an old New York institution.

By tenth grade it was becoming apparent that Chelsea was a writer, but she decided to attend Memphis College of Art, where she studied photography and visual arts, and then settled permanently in the South again. She ultimately did become a writer, a cinematic songwriter who envisions and creates original soundscapes, and has a hint of her grandfather’s sense of rhythm, and a wildly creative prose writer, more so than I dreamed of being at her age. She released her first record in 2009, and has had to negotiate the rocky path of being an artist in her own way. When she finished writing the songs for her record, she called and asked the familiar question, “How do I have a successful career as a musician without having a public life? I don’t
want
a public life.” After thirty years of wrestling with that very conundrum, I still have no answer.

Chelsea has an independence of spirit that I recognize from my own life and my own impulses, but she has taken it a generational step further. I look up to Chelsea. She seems to have easily synthesized creative ideals that I spent my life struggling to even articulate. And beyond the artistic, she and I are of like mind in many ways—the traditionally girlish topics of conversation and pursuits never interested either of us (or Caitlin, for that matter), and we each had to come to terms with being feminine women who lacked classically feminine interests, in absolute contrast to Hannah and Carrie, who are domestic goddesses to their very cores. That has changed somewhat for me as I’ve gotten older—I find all aspects of homemaking to be deeply relaxing and restorative, and they probably will become so for Caitlin and Chelsea. (Even as I write this, Caitlin e-mails me from England to ask for recipes!)

I made my third album for Columbia,
Somewhere in the Stars
, late in 1981, when I was hugely pregnant with Chelsea, and we took a break before mixing it for me to give birth. When Chelsea was a few weeks old, I began taking her along with a load of baby gear into the studio to finish the record. I sat in the control room and put her in her baby chair on the other side of the glass in the studio, so I could sit at the console and watch her as she slept.

That album was not my best work. When we played it for the label heads of marketing and A&R, I could see that they were anxious and awkwardly trying to find something to say about the record, and ultimately trying to figure out what to do with it. Apart from not featuring any obvious country hits, it sounded disjointed and unfocused. I haven’t listened to it in years, but my recollection is that I was distracted and self-conscious at the time, both in my life and in my work, and the music is an all too accurate reflection of that state of mind. I did go to Carmel to make a video with Michael Nesmith for one song, “I Wonder,” which I performed on his television show,
Elephant Parts
. As everyone feared,
Somewhere in the Stars
didn’t generate any big hits, and as a result I spent a good deal of time rethinking my whole approach to recording, and my career as a Nashville hitmaker, now without a hit, in general.

My next record did not, however, benefit from any of this reflection. After writing an entire album, I decided to try another producer, David Malloy, who had made a lot of hit records in Nashville. David and I got along very well and together made a big, flashy, in-your-face, somewhat edgy album. We hired Waddy Wachtel, Bob Glaub, and Vince Melamed, among others, to come from Los Angeles, and used the “Bette Davis Eyes” synthesizers and huge snare drum sounds that were so trendy in the mid-eighties. Columbia had assigned a new A&R guy to me, Eli Ball, and after listening to the record, he decided that it was not finished and insisted that I go back into the studio. (I shudder to think of how much money was spent on this project.) Eli and I did not make a good match; I found him abrasive and pushy, and I am certain that he found me intractable and reactionary. I decamped to New York, where Rodney came back into the picture. We hired drummer Anton Fig, bassist Willie Weeks, and Larry Crane, guitarist from John Mellencamp’s band, to play on more sessions and started basic tracks again. Eventually we brought in a third producer, David Thoener.

Earlier in the recording process, I had received a call from Tom Petty’s management asking me to come to Los Angeles and sing for a potential sound track, on a song called “Never Be You,” which Tom had written with my friend Benmont Tench. The sessions were a little tough. Jimmy Iovine was producing, and I did not find him to be the most gracious person in the world. However, Hal Blaine was playing drums on the tracks, and again I was awestruck by him. Tom and Benmont were lovely, and I did my best, but I didn’t feel I could deliver what Iovine wanted. Months later it became clear that “Never Be You” was not going to appear on the intended sound track, so I asked Tom and Benmont if I could record it myself, and they agreed. It was one of the new tracks we did in New York, along with a John Hiatt song, “Pink Bedroom.” John was a favorite songwriter of mine, one to whom I felt genuinely connected and one of the few whose work I felt supremely confident in interpreting. The day we cut “Pink Bedroom” in New York was emblematic of the entire process of making the album: Larry Crane had an extremely aggressive acoustic guitar part to play on the song, and although he didn’t complain about it, after a few hours of trying to get a basic track, he calmly pointed out that his fingers were bleeding. I was shocked and thoroughly unsettled by the literal blood on the tracks, but he and Rodney seemed to take it in stride, and we kept going. I can still see Larry wrapping his fingers between takes to stanch the blood, then taking a deep breath for the next take.

We did more recording in Los Angeles, and by January I was exhausted by the project. We had begun
Rhythm and Romance
on April 16, 1984, and we mastered it on April 15, 1985. At the end of that torturous year of recording, rerecording, mixing, and remixing in three cities, with three producers, one executive producer, and a lot of fighting, I found that I was suffering from a bizarre kind of trauma. I was absolutely determined that I would never set foot in a recording studio again. I hated the process, I hated the record, I hated Eli Ball, and I did not even want to think about promotion and touring for the record, which for me had become nothing but a painful memory.

The trauma continued even into the photography for the album cover. After a long day of shooting at a studio in Soho, I left at about ten that night with my arms full of clothes and got into a taxi with the stylist and the makeup artist. The taxi driver crossed himself when we got in, floored the gas pedal, got up some speed, and slammed right into a parked car, injuring the stylist, who had been sitting in the front. We all fell out onto the street, shaking, and got into another taxi, but that image of the driver crossing himself before he crashed, along with Larry’s bleeding fingers, metaphorically summed up what that record meant in my life. I still cannot stand to listen to
Rhythm and Romance
, even though I think that some of its songs—“Second to No One” and “Halfway House” especially—are among my best to date. Perversely, the album quickly reached number one on the country charts, generating two number one and two top five singles. “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me,” which I had written with Rodney, won a Grammy, my first, for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. (My mother, upon first hearing the song, had said that no country radio station would ever play it, as it was “too pop.” I called her from the car as soon as I left the awards ceremony, Grammy in hand, and she made some quick revisionist, but apparently heartfelt, congratulations.) I also received the only award that has really meant anything to me, in retrospect, for that record: the prestigious Robert J. Burton songwriting award from BMI, my performing rights organization, for most-performed song of the year for “Hold On.” At the time, however, I was still so unsettled and fragile from the months of work on
Rhythm and Romance
that I went home the night I won the Burton award and pulled apart the lyrics of the song, going over them line by line with a deeply critical eye until I determined that it did not deserve the award in the least. Even though in my heart I could not really accept the accolade, it was encouraging, and gave me more confidence as a writer.