Singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin’s recent memoir “Diamond in the Rough” contains many revelations — for example, she has struggled with anorexia, alcoholism, panic attacks, divorce and depression. And there is this detail: The first song she ever learned on guitar, in 1963, was the jingle to a Great Shakes commercial.
Colvin clarifies: “‘This Land Is Your Land’ is probably the first song I was taught on the guitar, but Great Shakes might have been the first one I figured out on my own,” she recalls in a phone interview.
Colvin, 56, whose Grammy awards include best contemporary folk album for 1989’s “Steady On” and song of the year for 1997’s “Sunny Came Home,” writes her book in much the way she writes songs. The first line of “Diamond in the Rough” is: “Who doesn’t have a bit of pyromania in them?” It’s funny and lighthearted while at the same time disturbing and bleak. Her most colorful lines come as she’s tearing off scabs. “While in relationships I love to jump out of cars,” she writes. “I suppose it’s for dramatic effect.”
Her big break came as a backup singer on Suzanne Vega’s hit “Luka.” With the help of a guitarist and writing partner, John Leventhal, who would later be her husband (for a while), she signed with Columbia Records and released her debut “Steady On.” What fans may not have known until “Diamond in the Rough” was that she had pot-induced panic attacks at age 19, then developed an eating disorder. That morphed into alcoholism, which she finally curtailed with AA meetings in 1983.
Colvin put out her eighth album, “All Fall Down,” at the same time as the book in early summer. It’s not far removed from her 23-year body of work: The songs are catchy, she has a high, smooth voice that’s like her heroine Joni Mitchell without the vocal quirks, and her lyrics are almost deceptively dark. “We had a love, and it all went wrong,” Colvin sings, in typically jaunty style, in “Knowing What I Know Now.” “I had a dream, and you let me down.” It’s not far from the sentiment in “Sunny Came Home,” in which narrator Colvin sings brightly about a woman who wants to set everything on fire.
“She has a gift for turning the gloomy into something you want to hear over and over again,” says Lin Brehmer, a morning disc jockey at Chicago rock station WXRT. “She’s got an amazingly expressive voice, a real gift for the craft of making songs, but there is a direction to a lot of her material, which, by her own admission, is emotionally heavy.”
Eventually, she writes, she checked into a psychiatric facility because “I was unable to do anything but cry.” Ultimately, she found a doctor who was able to stabilize her emotions with medication.
Being a touring musician may have had something to do with it, but not much, Colvin says: “It’s hard to know what comes first, the chicken or the egg. Do you fall into a depression because you’re tired, because you’re stressed? Yes, that can happen. It’s really hard to know when biology stops and lifestyle kicks in and vice versa.
“The road has beaten me down on occasion,” she acknowledges. “It’s awful to be on the road and depressed. The worst of it is to not be able to get up and do your job as well as you’d like to be doing it. There are certainly times where I’ve felt I had to fake it some.”
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When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: Prairie Center for the Arts, 201 Schaumburg Court, Schaumburg
Tickets: $40; 847-895-3600