A Conversation with Beth Nielsen Chapman (continued)

PM: Let's talk a little more about Look, the CD that's coming out in the States shortly. When is that appearing on Compass, do we know?

BNC: Coming out in June.

PM: In June, okay. I love the opener, which I guess was the first UK single, that you wrote with our buddy Bill Lloyd, "Trying to Love You." That's a beautiful tune.

BNC: Every time I've put a record out, Bill Lloyd has had a song on there.

PM: Really?

BNC: Every single one. [laughs] So it's almost a superstition now.

PM: Yeah, right. He's one of my favorite Nashville guys. He does so many things well.

BNC: Yes.

PM: Is there a story connected to the three-way write with Al Anderson and David Baerwald, "Will and Liz"?

BNC: Well, that was written at the Durango Songwriter whatchamajigger. I was teaching songwriting there. Al was there, and David. We just ran into each other in the lobby, and we decided we had to go find a room and write a song. [laughs]

PM: Wow.

BNC: I'd had the first part of the melody for a while. And Al threw in the other part of the melody. And we just started talking about love that's destructive. I was sort of gathering these songs for Look. I mean, Look as a record is really--if you do the overview, it's various songs coming from different angles talking about love. There's "Who We Are," the song about a parent and child. And "Trying To Love You" is a song about, really, all the aspects of love in one relationship. So I thought it was intriguing to write a song about a relationship that's very destructive, where two people kind of crash into each other and it ain't so healthy.

PM: Right.

BNC: And it's not meant to be funny, but it's got a kind of a caricature thing to it. It's very unusual for me. I don't normally record stuff like that. But anyway, it was great working with David Baerwald. And I'd worked with Al--

PM: Yeah. They're two real characters.

BNC: Yeah! [laughs] It was a fun afternoon, I can say that.

PM: And that's also one of the places where guitarist Tom Bukovac gets to shine. He's amazing.

BNC: Oh, yeah, yeah. He's great. We actually had him playing when we did a demo of it, and we just called him back in there and said, "Okay. Well, you've got to do that thing you did."

[laughter]

PM: Have you ever seen him play around town with Pat Buchanan?

BNC: I know Pat very well, but I haven't seen them play together. I bet that's great.

PM: Your co-writer Matt Rawlings plays some unbelievable piano on "Touch My Heart," which laid me out really bad several times in a row.

BNC: Yeah. He's amazing. Matt and I, again, we've written many times for my records. We wrote "Color of Roses" together, which is on the Sand and Water album. Matt is just such a genius. I mean, when we get together and write, he just starts playing chords, and I just start singing over them, and something happens that neither one of us can take full credit for. [laughs] It's just an amazing thing--it's incredible that we don't do it more often. He's out on the road with Mark Knopfler right now. Actually, he's in India with Mark Knopfler, which ought to be so much fun. But it's just such a gift to have him in my life as a co-writer. What happened on that song is we sat down, and we scoped out this melody, and then about two years later, after many attempts, I finally, in the eleventh hour, finished writing the lyric to that song. And it was so emotional for me, even though I didn't feel it was even my own emotion.

PM: It's a great set of lyrics, too. It's just fantastic.

BNC: Thanks. I dedicated it to a friend of mine who lost her daughter, and actually, I feel like, in a way, that child sort of wrote that song with me. In sort of an odd way.

PM: Wow. We touched upon it briefly, that was an incredible record you put out called Hymns, Latin Hymns out of the Catholic Tradition before Vatican II and the folk mass changed all that.

BNC: Yeah, it's been amazing. That thing just keeps going.

PM: As a young at altar boy, I served mass in Latin hundreds of times, so that really resonated with me.

BNC: Oh, yeah, then you really remember that stuff, too.

PM: Oh, big time. Were you a Catholic School kid?

BNC: Sure, yeah, the whole deal.

PM: Yeah, me too. How many years did you do?

BNC: It sounds like prison, doesn't it?

[laughter]

PM: Yeah, right.

BNC: I got out when I was a young teenager--pretty much off and on until I was in high school, and then it was like, "Okay, that's it, Mom. I'm not doing that anymore." I was rebelling, of course, as everybody who's Catholic eventually does. [laughs] But I have to say, from a very early age I've believed that all religions have a reason to be here and a value and a purpose for people, and different cultures should celebrate their own ways of looking at however they want to pray. I was actually working on an album of world hymns, which I've been working on for several years, and I'm still working on. And each hymn is in a different language from a different culture. I'm singing one in Hebrew and one in Sanskrit and one in Tibetan, you name it--

PM: What a beautiful project.

BNC: Even one in Farsi. [laughs] So that has been a labor of love, and it continues. It'll probably be at least the end of the year before I'm finished with it. But in the process of doing that, when I came to the Latin hymns, I thought, well, that'll be a cinch, because I grew up with those, and I'll just go down to Tower Records and find one of those collections of those hymns and pick out my favorite ones. And I started looking around, and there was just nothing recorded in a collection. There would be one here, and one there.

PM: Very surprising.

BNC: Yeah, it's amazing, because I thought it was bad enough that they didn't do them very often in mass anymore. I used to sit there in the folk mass and go, "Hey, let's do 'Dona Nobis Pacem'!" They'd be looking at me like, "Are you kidding?"

PM: They'd be saying, "Let's do 'Kumbaya' again."

BNC: "Kumbaya"!

[laughter]

BNC: In fact, right now I'm writing an article for the Catholic Digest, and I'm talking about that very thing.

PM: Unbelievable. So are you a very confirmed and practicing Catholic?  continue

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