Shawn Colvin

“As a kid, I was depressed and riddled with anxiety. The bottom dropped out when I was 19.”

“It was a beauty contest in the '80s. If they played two women back to back on the radio, it was almost a scandal.”

“Change doesn't happen often, but to a certain extent in some way, I think when you get into recovery and you stay there, you change.”

“I was a cover artist for years. I didn't start writing songs until I was in my mid-twenties. I wrote them with John Leventhal, and they were pretty bad. I was in my late twenties when I wrote the first song with him that made any sense to me about what I was rooted in and what spoke for me as an artist. That was 'Diamond in the Rough.'”

“Cynicism is tough. A cynic's point of view is really pitiful. I derive pleasure out of a lot of things in life. As long as I'm fairly healthy, it's hard to stay dismal for very long.”

“I'm not a go-out-with-a-band artist. I'm an intimate, storytelling folk artist. It guides the writing and makes for a concert that I'm proud of.”

“I think the thing that has made it possible for me to write personal songs and sing them year after year is the sensibility for good writing. Just opening your veins all over the paper is not necessarily going to be interesting. I wanted to speak to people.”

“I would say my whole first record, 'Steady On,' had a lot to do with healing.”

“I always wanted to be a songwriter, and it took a while.”

“I consider myself as a singer first, but something that really helped me come into my own is that there's not a separation between me singing and me playing the guitar. The two fed off the other.”

“I don't support Trump. We'll put that right out there.”

“When I'm writing with John Leventhal, the music that he's written mostly comes first. And I'll write the lyrics and the melody.”

“I'd like to think I've overcome. I was not a person that was supposed to survive New York City, that was ever going to write my own songs or have children.”

“I've had a prolonged adolescence, like a lot of my generation.”

“When you get into recovery, you have to relearn a lot of perceptions, attitudes, and self-awareness if you want to stay clean. You really do change.”

“There were bars that began to have acoustic musicians play, it was 1970: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, America, The Eagles, all that kind of stuff was popular. It was very easy for me to just kind of move in and be noticed.”

“I'm not gay - everybody thinks I am - but I dig 'The L Word.'”

“With my songs, the question is always, 'Can you pull it off live, alone on just an acoustic guitar?' That's the litmus test. If I can, then it's a song I ought to record. If I can't, it's probably not good enough.”

“Put me in a room with a songwriter, and I just clam up. I get shy.”

“When you know part of the industry thinks of you as a one-hit wonder, that's painful.”