Diamond in the Rough (19 page)

The tension between us was gone. We could actually be friends. I was less self-conscious around him, having realized I could work without him and having finally moved on past the wreckage of our romance. John and I no longer felt obligated to consider Top 40 radio in our efforts. I’d compromised before, remixing and re-producing songs like “I Don’t Know Why” on
Fat City
and “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” on
Cover Girl
against my better judgment for the sole purpose of getting radio play. It had never worked. In fact, when John and I reunited, all we were hoping for was a little inspiration and spark musically, like in the good old days. I remember both of us feeling as though we had nothing to prove. To anybody, not even each other, or perhaps least of all each other. As near as I can tell, that made all the difference.

It was as though the stars had aligned. Anything went, we weren’t precious about it. We pushed each other without trying—I went after melodies and lyrics in unusual ways, and John was coming up with amazing pieces and fleshing out wonderful production ideas. I didn’t care about singing perfectly, and he didn’t care about pristine production. On
Steady On
, you’d have thought we were curing cancer. I guess we had both grown up a little—after all, it wasn’t rocket science. It was
fun.

The writing was magically easy. He had a piece that I called “Get Out of This House,” a rocker, and I basically just threw words at it. I adopted a pissed-off attitude and improvised on tape, filling in lines on paper as I went. I wanted to sound like I didn’t care about the singing, only the attitude. This was new.

John suggested we try to write something similar to a Crowded House song that I played live, called “Private Universe.” When in doubt, steal, we always say, and steal from the best. As we messed around with chord changes, I was looking through my notebook and had the idea to take lyrics I’d written in 1993 with Tom Littlefield (who wrote “Window to the World” on
Cover Girl
) and insert them into the song. I tried them with this new melody, new chord changes, and a different time signature. After a few weeks, it all came together, and we had “Trouble.” That’s what I call our mash-up method.

I used my speaking-in-tongues technique on “You and the Mona Lisa.” I took John’s music and sang nonsense syllables, and the phrase “you and the Mona Lisa” came out of my mouth. I had no idea what it meant at that point, but I just decided to follow the words. At the beginning of the song, I sang “Hoist a pint, to the lads” for a good long time before I finally found the right words—“nothing in particular.” In fact, I sang the whole song as a drunk British sailor for a bit, but in the end it wasn’t what we were after. Thankfully. Words can let you know what the song is about before you even consciously realize it.

The lyrics turned out to be based on my little niece Grace. These days when I play the song, I’ll give the audience an update on Grace, who at this writing is fifteen and recently shaved her head.

“Wichita Skyline” was a total combo of stealing, speaking in tongues, mashing, and cheating. The music John wrote had a low, twangy guitar break, an obvious ode to “Wichita Lineman,” one of the best songs in the whole world. And I knew I wanted the lyrical imagery to evoke the Great Plains of South Dakota, where I grew up. I thought, what would Bob Dylan do? And suddenly I thought of
Nashville Skyline.
So I had my title, “Wichita Skyline,” although I meant to change it to be more specific to South Dakota. The word “Wichita” sings so nicely, though, and honestly, the only other town name I could come up with that scanned as well as “Wichita” was “Tokyo,” and that obviously wouldn’t do. I cheated by getting out a map and borrowing the towns of Independence, Missouri, and Salina, Kansas, which I pronounce incorrectly in the song, but there was a good reason! A storm blows in on the last verse, and the singer looks up at the sky to find “a patch of blue.” There was a movie called
A Patch of Blue
with Sydney Poitier and Shelley Winters—a wretchedly heartbreaking movie; I loved it—with a character named Selina, played by Elizabeth Hartman, an abused blind girl in the South who falls in love with Sydney Poitier. I stupidly borrowed her name to represent the town of Salina, which is actually pronounced “sal-EYE-na,” only I say “sa-LEE-na.”

I’d written the lyrics to “The Facts About Jimmy.” John just threw a guitar piece at me later. It was a mash-up. “I Want It Back” was something I started on a National steel guitar in G tuning. It was a slight steal from “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire” guitarwise and took its inspiration lyrically from how lost I felt, alone in that Scenic Drive house, trying to write but reading
People
magazine instead and balking at celebrity worship.

“If I Were Brave” started on an airplane ride to New Orleans for a gig at Tipitina’s. It was one of those great instances where I kind of heard the chord progression and the melody in my head before I even had a chance to put it down, and I knew as well that it would be on piano. Very simple piano, which is all I’m capable of. It was one of those gifts where the essence of the song, at least musically, was apparent to me. “If I Were Brave” was about my failed marriage to Simon and all the questions I was asking myself about what I could have done to make it work, including having a child. I wrote most of it on that plane ride.

The album closer, “Nothin’ on Me,” was the one song that survived out of all the things John and I had written back in the horn-rimmed-pop days. It ended up on the record partially because of the record company’s hope that it could become a hit. I was glad to do the song; it was fun, it had swagger, I enjoyed the lyrics, but it did not become a hit. It did, however, become the opening theme song for the TV sitcom
Suddenly Susan,
starring Brooke Shields, that ran in the late nineties.

“Sunny Came Home” didn’t start as the story of a tortured housewife’s revenge. John had given me a fully produced piece of music to write melody and lyrics to. Originally I called it “40 Red Men,” a clever way, I thought, to talk about my loathsome daily habit of smoking two packs of red-box Marlboro cigarettes. Needless to say, the words “forty red men” didn’t sing very well, and, as my A&R man said, “I don’t think anyone is going to care about forty red men. Besides, it sounds like you’re referring to Native Americans, and then you’ll be in a world of shit.”

So at the last minute I had to back up and rewrite the song to complete the record. I had already chosen the cover art, a painting by my friend Julie Speed. Her subjects were often women on the verge. I could relate. For example, there was a portrait of a rather sweet, peaceful woman with little flames on top of her head, like a crown, and the title was
Please Help Me, My Brain Is Burning.
I chose for the cover a classic Julie-scape with a woman in the foreground of a vast, flat prairie, holding a lit match. Wasn’t that me, really, a girl setting the prairie on fire? Far, far in the distance, on the horizon, there was a very large fire. Although the title,
A Few Small Repairs,
belonged to an entirely different piece, a collage of a woman sewn and safety-pinned together, Julie was all for mixing and matching titles, and when we applied
A Few Small Repairs
to the fiery landscape painting, the effect was, to us, a riot. Whatever repairs that woman was making were neither few nor small.

In an actual moment of marketing wisdom, of which I generally possess very little, I decided to finish that last song by making it about the woman in the painting. I called her Sunny, wove in the line “it’s time for a few small repairs,” and the record was done. I called it—what else?—
A Few Small Repairs.

The timing couldn’t have been better. It was 1996, and Lilith Fair was about to take off. Columbia decided it was time to really pull the trigger on me and threw all their weight into the marketing of
A Few Small Repairs.
First they released “Get Out of This House” as a single, and it achieved modest success. Then they released “Sunny.” I don’t remember what radio station played it first, or even how far up the charts it went. I’d already made and promoted three records without any singles catching on, and I really wasn’t paying attention. I do remember the head of radio at Columbia, Charlie Walk, calling once as the song gained more and more airplay and crowing, “Sunny’s comin’ home, baby!” I just laughed. But then things started to happen that made me aware that something exciting was going on with “Sunny Came Home.”

Larry and Steuart and I were touring with Lilith during the summer of 1997 when “Sunny” was released. Our slot was in the late afternoon, and while we were certainly featuring songs from
A Few Small Repairs,
we weren’t being dogged about it. We’d play “Sunny” somewhere in the middle of the set. But after a few weeks, we noticed that whenever we played that particular song, we were seeing the quintessence of a true rock-and-roll audience in top form, with lighters ablaze and arms waving. And right at the end of the song, during the instrumental outro, the roar would start. I’d seen enough concerts to know I had to make the song the last one in the set and milk that response for all it was worth. As we took our bow one evening, Steuart, a purist who eschewed any form of idolatry, turned to me while we were upside down and said, “I like this.” Yes. I’d made a video for “Sunny Came Home” as well, and in the food court of a mall in Indianapolis, a high-school basketball player looked at me and said to his friends, “Hey, there’s Sunny!” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what I call fame. I think the song made it to number one, but I knew it was big when the audiences at Lilith Fair waved their lighters, and because of that kid in Indy.

Receiving my gold record, 1996

And I did my own tour with a band including Steuart, Doug Petty on keyboards, Alison Prestwood on bass, Kate Markowitz on vocals, and Chris Searles on drums. Then the Grammy nominations were announced. Yes, “Sunny” had been a hit, but I was floored—John and I were up for two of the biggest awards, Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

The nominations represented to me a measure of success that was very special. There was never any question about wanting my mother and father to be part of it, and I flew them to New York for the show. They’d witnessed enough scenes with me that hadn’t gone so well. This was different, to say the least. Mom and I got our makeup and hair done in the hotel. And then we all drove to the ceremony in a white limo. The mood was upbeat and giddy. It was enough just to be going, win or lose. It really was. Nothing could have dampened our spirits.

At the Grammys, Radio City Music Hall, January 1998, John and I were backstage, having just performed “Sunny Came Home.” And then we heard our names being called: we’d won Song of the Year. We only made it a few steps onstage, though, when our moment of glory was hijacked. Ol’ Dirty Bastard from Wu-Tang Clan chose this particular moment to storm the stage and rant about not having won an award earlier that night. He was shaking his fists and yelling—about what, we had no idea, because we couldn’t understand a word, being behind him. The only thing I could decipher was, “Wu-Tang is for the children!” John’s and my disparate reactions to this event perfectly describe the difference in our general attitudes. I thought,
Oh, God, what did I do wrong?
whereas John was thinking,
Boy, this guy really loves our stuff!

The next day I received the biggest bouquet of flowers from Ol’ Dirty Bastard with a note that read,
“Sorry for messing up your night, Love, Ol’ Dirty Bastard.”
That’s something not just anyone can lay claim to.

Other crazy things happened during the ceremony: A fellow with the words
SOY BOMB
written on his torso managed to get onstage while Bob Dylan was performing. We all thought he was promoting alternative energy until someone pointed out that perhaps he was trying to say, “I am the bomb,” in Spanish. And then a hydraulically lifted stage set piece began to rise from the floor as Vanessa Williams was walking out, nearly cutting her in half.

Later that evening there were all sorts of festivities, naturally, but what stands out in my mind is meeting Bob Dylan. I was led to a VIP room—I had come by it honestly that night—and there he was, sitting at a table between Cyndi Lauper and Diana Ross. We were introduced, and he took my hand, bent over, and meant to kiss it, I guess, but it really was more like he wiped his nose on it. I’ll never care, though. Put any kind of Dylan DNA on me, I’m good.

What I’ve always said about winning a Grammy Award is that there isn’t one bad thing about it. It looks great on the résumé and is super helpful in convincing your parents and your past teachers, especially fifth-grade English ones who once deemed your poetry “trite and sugary,” that you aren’t a lost cause after all. Did I think we would win? Given the competition—which included Hanson, R. Kelly, Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Diane Warren, and Gwen Stefani—I sure didn’t think we were a shoo-in. “Sunny Came Home” had done well but I was hardly a superstar. Still, ever since Bonnie Raitt swept the awards in 1990 for
Nick of Time
at age forty-one, it seemed as if anything was possible.