06/06/08 The ever colorful and entertaining Tom D'Antoni, interviews Lauren.

Lauren Sheehan is an interpreter of songs and she is in no way defensive about that.

Q: Do you ever worry about being known as an "interpreter" of songs written by others?

A: Emmy Lou Harris talks about a widespread predisposition toward singer songwriters, and against interpreters. In a recent interview in Acoustic Guitar Magazine, she says something along the lines of how when she came up there was no stigma attached to singing a beautiful song and being a good interpreter. (pausing) It was a real pleasure for me to read that.

Q: But you're not doing a "cover," trying to recreate what you've heard note for note.

A: What I'm doing is reinterpreting the song with all the tools available to me as a musician in 2008. Chord substitutions, rhythmic changes or different phrasing, or singing in a different way. There are some people who I really like to imitate, they've touched me and there's a quality of the sound.

I try to give the audience a variety of styles and styles within the styles so a Piedmont Country Blues might be a classic sound that one of these old masters plays within their own style or might take it and jazz it up quite a bit or make it folkie or bring old-time mountain elements into it even though that's not how I heard the master play it, but I get an inclination. Little Maggie from my first CD is a good example. It's a classic bluegrass song and I had an old-time fiddler play on it as well as Phil Wiggins who played country blues harp and I skirted the zone between country blues and modal music and I didn't play the bluegrass chords either.

I use what I know about certain styles. Sometimes it's not calculated. I understand intuitively that it might be a very cool sound. I knew those two musicians would understand each other.

I'm trying to find a way to express being a human being through the sounds that I'm making. On the surface you can take a song and interpret the story, phrase it, give it musical qualities to help convey the emotions of the story, that's one way. Another way is about feel. What makes the song feel alive and living this experience right now and in performance? I want the audience to be able to feel like the music around them is about them or their neighbors. So somehow it's interpreting being a human or having a life or understanding society through music, but not necessarily in literal terms. It sounds kinda goofy but it's almost like interpreting humanity and the music's a vehicle.

Q: Give us an example of visiting with a musician and absorbing their heritage. How about your visit with Algia Mae Hinton in Zebulon, North Carolina.

A: I got to visit Algermae through my friend Lightnin' Wells http://www.lightninwells.com/ He's a musician who has helped her tour. He made me call her. I had no idea if she'd remember me, but she did. I went with him. We walked in and sat down. After a few minutes she pointed her finger at me and said, 'I want to hear you play.' I started playing 'Lonesome Day Blues' for her and she smiled and started calling her kids.

Q: How did you feel when you started playing for her?

A: I was terrified, nervous, self-conscious because I thought it was a rite of passage. I was well aware of where I was. I didn't grow up poor, Black or in the South and now I was playing music that accessed someone else's roots. It was uncomfortable, the enormity of the implications and then self-doubt and ego come in. I'd glance at her a little and I saw her grinning and moving her head, she was rocking in her chair. When I finished she got out her cell phone and called her kids one by one saying, 'You've got to come over and hear her play.'

One-by-one the kids arrived and they always seemed to arrive just when I finished playing the song. She'd say, 'Play that song again!'

Lightnin' said, 'That's how she is, that's your song now. She will never forget that. You're going to play that song every time you see her now.' I played it five times that day.

The "kids" were my age. Turns out they lived in trailers on the property. She started singing a song and then the whole family joined in. They played, 'I want Jesus To Walk with Me.' It was beautiful with full, rich harmonies. I hadn't known the song. I just listened. I just wanted to hear and feel as much of it as I could

I felt like I had made a passage. I sing that song now. It's always a pleasure to do it in a show and the memories come flooding back.

Later we went to the party hall in the garage in the back, had some beer, turned on the twinkle ball. They played Sam Cooke. It was quite obvious that there was mutual understanding going on. It was just a social time. It wasn't a lesson or anything formal.

Unfortunately, she's not playing too much anymore. I'm going back this year, she's getting frail.

Q: How did you come away from that experience?

A: Floating, man. Lightning, too. He said, 'They never did that for me. That was the real thing. I hope you know that.'

I said, 'Yeah, Lightning, I know!'

Q: What is the creative process after you've visited with one of the old-timers?

A: There are a couple of different processes and they're mostly organic in the sense that they're intuitive and more than conceptually driven. I don't usually learn something when I'm with them. I almost learn itâ I might tape it while I'm there. I might have asked a lot of questions about what they did on that phrase and there'll be a part of the piece that I understand to be quite representative of a nuance or a defining lick or a defining move.

When I leave them, I'm aware of which pieces have moved me. Sometimes it's the music itself, sometimes it was just such a wonderful social afternoon and such a lovely quality of hanging around making music that I'm aware, 'That's what I'm trying to capture.' Somehow I'm going to have to convey that in my performances.

I might make some notes. Afterwards I go home and start technically rehearsing, learning the words and phrases, the guitar or mandolin or banjo part. I learn it line for line, lick for lick and then when I feel like I'm quite underway I've gone back and fussed with the parts I didn't quite get, I understand them and I can play them, that's when I stop listening to the recording. This is the most common way I work.

That part takes me a couple of months, but it takes me a longer time to integrate something into a performance, over a year a couple of years, usually. Part of that has to do with just settling, it feels to me like it settles in my soul somehow and I just understand that piece of music on a level that I don't even understand how I understand but somehow it's become me. I can get inside of it and find it has multiple meanings.

Then‶.and this is where a lot of variation comes in‶I will go back and listen to the recording to see what I've forgotten what I've changed and then I make a conscious evaluation regarding whether I want to re-learn a part or re-integrate something I've forgotten over time or whether I feel like the direction I'm taking the song is where I wanted it to go. That's very intuitive. There are a couple of people who became very dear to me and they're music has really touched me. For those people I make sure that I have pieces in my repertoire that are accurate. I guess it's a personal tribute.

But I only choose pieces that are personally meaningful, or they're such weird representations of another time that they're interesting as historic pieces.

Q: What has to be in there for it to touch you?

A: Sometimes it's a melody, or poetic imagery or just a fun little rhythm, a groove that's pleasing and simple. A lot of times the poetic aspects tend to be much more complex, levels of human stuff going on if the poetry is grabbing me. Sometimes things will make me cry, they just touch me in a way that really moves me. Sometimes those masters will raise such feelings of admiration and inspiration and love and appreciation to be able to hear those sounds, that I'll notice this internal state has shifted in me and I'll take note that that song was really special for me. I'll work with it for a while to see if it continues to speak to me.

Lots of times there's nothing particular in the material that I can analyze, but it's really that I noticed that I had a strong internal shifting going on and I use that as a guide. It gets personally relevant. I might think, was it just because I was moved? Of course, it was just a human experience that we all have, slightly different colors, words, vernacular...

Q: What was it about the blues that got you?

A: The singing got to me right away. I came into blues by going to workshops and sitting around with different players and many bearers of the tradition. I was in the same room with them, it was very personal, and they would just sing in these beautiful voices. They just knocked me out. I used to be a classical guitar player so I love the blues styles that developed and I loved fiddle music for so long. The Southeastern blues music is melodically based, it has a relationship to string-band music, as well a country blues, you can hear a lot of influences and so it's a form that in itself is a melting pot.

Q: When did you first pick up a guitar?

A: When I was ten. I really wanted to play cello but my folks couldn't afford one. I really liked the guitar music I was hearing. I was a Joni Mitchell fan. I took lessons at the local music store‶learned how to read music. My mom kept me playing by responding to my desire. The music teacher said, 'She practices, she likes this instrument, you should get her one she can play, the one she has isn't really a good instrument at all.' My mom told me, 'If we get you one you have to promise to play it because we don't want to waste the money.' I signed up.

Later on I wanted an electric guitar and my parents said, 'Ok, but you'll need an amp. You'll have to sign up for two years of lessons.' The problem was that my parents' idea of an electric guitar was a jazz guitar. I had zero interest in that. I had never even heard of it. I wish I had that guitar now. We never listened to jazz at home. I had no reference. I didn't like the teacher, I didn't like the music‶zero, zip‶bad middle school‶total failure. My crowning glory was when I put my guitar teacher to sleep during my music lesson. I had a great middle-school attitude, 'I won!' I remember saying. 'See how much I hate this? It's so boring for everyone, I made YOU fall asleep.'

My mom was a waitress and you know how parents boast on their kids. She waited on a party from the music department of the University of Hartford. They said, 'She should take lessons at the college, bring her down for an audition.' I had a lovely classical teacher and she respected that I was interested in Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills and Nash and Joan Baez‶all the groovy acoustic stuff that was on the airwaves. She said, 'Let's do half and half, you'll be a much better player with classical training.' She mixed it up and I just loved her. I worked so hard for her.

That's how I teach my students now.

Sure enough, I needed a new guitar. We know how the cycle goes. Except then we moved and my parents couldn't afford lessons anymore and I carried on as best I could. By then I could read well. I just played for myself.

My first public show was in 1974 and my first song I ever played on the stage was 'Stairway to Heaven.' On an acoustic guitar! What a riot.

In college I was learning classical music. By then I was into different kinds of folk music. I had gone to some Folk festivals and started perusing that. I morphed over from classical training into playing by ear with talented people who played for fun and weren't professionals. It took me about a year to be able to play by ear and not by eye.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: When you learn to read music your fingers get connected to what you see and your neurological patterns all get set up in your brain from your eyes. But you are mostly responding and you respond to what you hear but also what you are seeing and when you play by ear you have nothing to look at so your fingers aren't connected to your ears in the same way at all neurologically. You have to learn to listen differently and have your fingers respond to what you hear when the eye connection is severed. And that has been really helpful for me as a music teacher because I understand and know some short cuts now to help people move from one to the other.

Q: Did you play in College?

A: I performed a couple of times at Reed College. I played one night with a band called the Esquires in 1980. I just sang. I succeeded in pulling off the incredibly challenging task of being so drunk that I didn't realize that I was a half-a-beat off for the whole song. They still tease me. 'How did you do that? How did you do it?'

I 'd go back and forth, taking lessons and not. I was in a chick band for a while. We would get together and have some fun playing bars. Our name was 'Casaba.' It was three women until we needed a bass player. We played hippie Americanaâ (Eaglesâ Crosby, Stills and Nashâ Kate Wolfâ Neil Young.

Later I played contra-dance music. I played guitar, the fiddles do the singing in contra-dance bands. I went back to school and got and M ED, got married, had my kids. Lived in the country and started my teaching career. I wasn't in bands anymore. That's when I started going to the country blues festivals.

Q: What did you teach?

A: I taught modern dance to children. I was a dance accompanist for ten years for modern dancer Joan Gunness. I taught college level music classes and some children's music classes and then I started Swallow Tail School http://www.swallowtailschool.org/ in 1994 a little private school. I was a classroom music teacher and administrator, you know, chief cook, bottle washer, toilet cleaner and lesson planner. I started it so that my kids could have the kind of school that I would be excited about for them. The school was successful and I became a full-time administrator-teacher. I still played, but just to chill. Since I was a child I had always gone into a room at night and played guitar and I didn't stop.

That's when discovered the country blues workshop in Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington http://www.centrum.org/. I had already been going up there for fiddle tunes. I was around all sorts of traditional players of different string band and fiddle styles, Cajun to Midwest, old-time to New England, French-Canadian, Cape Breton, Irish fiddlers. When they started the country blues workshop I started going to that because I was a solo musician who could sing and play guitar and fingerpick. It sounded right for me. I just fell in love with the music.

By then I knew perfectly well how to study. It's not that I wouldn't have benefited from a teacher except that they live all over the country. I was very good at using recording materials, asking certain questions, knowing what kind of notes to take so I could go away and have my lessons to work on for the year.

Q: What kind of questions?

A: What string are you on when you play that lick? It happened so fast. What fret are you on when you're bending that? I didn't know the idiom back then so certain classic sounds weren't part of my vernacular. Are you varying the form every time you play that or do you play it exactly the same way every time? Is there actually a chord change or are we just moving through this? Little things that had to with the details of the sound.

Q: Things that musicians say to each other.

A: Well, ones who want to be able to play the song or get the idea, yeah. The better teachers tell you those things. They know what you need to know.

A lot of the folks at Centrum are purveyors of oral tradition. If you're a good student and you know how to learn you know what questions to ask you can learn a lot. You don't interrupt them very much. What string is your thumb on? Are you catching two strings or just one? But you time that.

So for the last 15 years I've been my own teacher in that I direct my own learning. I'd love to have vocal and guitar teachers right now. I'm ready to have someone kick my butt to another level or give me new ways to think about things or new things to explore. I want new tricks to play with.

Q: What led to the big decision to leave the school and play music full-time?

A: Two major things. The school had grown and was so big that my responsibilities were feeling overwhelming. I needed to figure out how to deal with that. And then I made my first album 'Some Old Lonesome Day.' My husband Ed really wanted me to make a recording more than I wanted to. He was really driven to have me do it.

I was blown away by the depth of music that happened in the studio. It was a whole other level than I had ever experienced before and I stated getting the idea that I'd like to have that experience more often. I thought, 'That's pretty easy to figure out. You brought in great musicians who are fabulous ensemble players and you've all bought into this thing and taken making music together to a new level. You're probably going to have to have musicians like that if you're going to want to re-produce this music.'

I realized that I have to get my chops together and I have to perform at a level that I can offer people work or be good enough that they offer me work. I would have to dedicate myself to becoming a professional musician to be able to have the caliber of players like that regularly.

That seemed like a pretty big commitment. But then the album got so much national and international airplayâ it was shocking, surprising to me that people wanted to listen to it. It was #14 for the year on the folk DJ charts. It just came out of nowhere, I didn't tour or anything. Actually, I have to thank my husband for doing a great job promoting the album to the right stations, that made a huge difference in getting airplay.

So I thought, maybe I could do this. People seemed to like the music.

I also started realizing that I could start passing this on. I loved the music so much, it was such a deep personal thing in my little practice room maybe I can pass this on and help keep it alive. Maybe I can get enough work to start playing with other musicians.

I didn't want to be a school administrator the rest of my life. Since I had founded that school I either had to be in charge or get out of there, there really isn't a gray zone. I decided to work at music for five years and see what it was. I realized I didn't know what the profession would be like not having done it. One had very romantic ideas on the front side.

Q: Do you still have those romantic ideas?

A: The one romantic idea I have is that making music and art is a hugely important thing for a culture and we should have more of itâ and that I can do it. I have helped pass on some important parts of our culture and that is romantic. Maybe our country as a culture might appreciate it more - now there's a Pollyanna thought. It seems romantic in a country where the arts aren't given much value, to want to work in it. And yes, it's still romantic to just want to it just for the aesthetic experience. In the end, there's nothing like having a great session and a great night of making music.

Q: Was there anything that surprised you about learning the business and going through this period.

A: What I've come to understand, not really a surprise because surprise seems to have a sudden quality to it, and this happened over time, but I didn't understand how the business of selling the music was going to change as it has, that CD sales were going to fall away. I didn't understand that people go and hear live music less than they did thirty years ago. I didn't know that audiences were shrinking and that CD sales were going to be a shrinking phenomenon. I didn't realize how much regular touring is involved with CD sales and the opportunity to have better work and bigger audiences. I didn't realize how much you had to be gone from home to make the thing work. It's great to have airplay but it's a teeny population that's listening to independent radio stations and there are darn few of them and you're not reaching very many people. It's hard to get publicity when you're emerging. It's just surprising how much being on the road is required for an emerging artist to get better known.

I'm not going to focus on that in the next period of time. I still have a child at home. I have a chance to play with great musicians in Portland. I don't want to be gone so much.

My style is still evolving. I've found my voice though. There have been many times when I have felt, wow what just happened? That song was beyond me, that performance whether anyone else heard it or notâ it was outside of me. That's what finding your voice sounds like to me, when the material is so eloquently expressed that the human inside of it is also present. That's when I love playing with other musicians.

Q: Have you always had the urge to communicate with an audience?

A: I had rarely had the urge to communicate with the audience until very recently but I didn't know that. I wasn't even conscious that that urge really existed. I certainly noticed that some performers were much more natural and charismatic and inclusive, radiant on the stage.

When I decided to perform five years ago, I just launched into it. It was surprising for me to understand how shy I really was. I had played music as a child but I always did it at home as a hobby or an avocation. As a music teacher it was about helping others make music. At parties with friends, it's more about sharing a social time rather than giving people music.

Q: When you're out there and it's you, just you, do you feel like you're able to express more about yourself than you ordinarily would?

A: That's just starting to happen for me. At this point, four and a half years in, I said I would evaluate this thing, work for five years and evaluate so that I'd know what I was about because I had never been a performer. It's just in the last year that I feel like I've gotten enough understanding of stagecraft to rely on that. Through stagecraft and being a well-prepared performer, I'm really getting more comfortable and having a lot more faith in the efforts, that I'm safe and that the people who are out there are there because they want to hear music and that this moment is worth it. I guess it is getting easier to focus on the music.

I am starting to enjoy it a lot more. I find it interesting and mysterious and just do that in front of people and not feel like I'm supposed to be something on stage other than deeply connecting with the music as much as possibleâ connecting with them and giving them the music as clearly as possible.

Q: What do you hope the audience is seeing and hearing?

A: I hope they see a breadth, energy, curiosity, a willingness to be lost in the art, not so lost that I can't give it to them, but a willingness to surrender to the art, to give them the best music I can. I hope they hear the music, feel the music, get a sense of the breadth of sounds and feels in some of our American music. I hope they see humor and a range of humanityâ love, despair, hope, rejection, curiosity, frustration (laughing). I hope they see themselves, their family, their culture, but I hope they also see someone who is taking the music so seriously. I hope they see a well-rounded person who is willing to put out for them a wide range of emotions and human experience through songs. I hope they have images and emotions themselves that help them go away feeling as if they're a little bit more reminded of the breadth of their humanity and of the fundamental qualities of being human. That's my goal now, giving them that because now I understand that's what I find in the music. My job is to find it for them, give it up for them, to make it relevant and in the moment.

For the longest time I didn't want them to get with me, but I didn't know that. That's what shyness is about, you're protecting yourself. It's been an interesting process realizing that I do want them to get with me, I don't want to be private, I want to connect. It's been baby steps. I look back and say, 'Wow, look how far I've come!'