| Shannon Wright (June.07 issue) |
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| Written by Jeff Clark | |
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Page 1 of 2 qs105.jpg "Image") Fear and BeautyShannon Wright Lets The Light Shine Down Shannon Wright's biggest passion is her music. So when she tells you in the next breath that she's gonna give it up, it's sorta shocking, even after she clarifies that by "give it up," she means to quit recording and releasing records, not stop playing for herself. Then again, she's been saying she's gonna ditch the biz ever since her first band, Crowsdell, broke up nine years ago, and yet last month Touch and Go's Quarterstick division delivered her sixth solo CD, Let In the Light. "The thing is," she says, "people keep rooting for me. ‘Come on, just make one more record! You can do this!'" Count me among the rooters. Let In the Light contains her finest work to date, and in many ways serves as a satisfyingly diverse and direct overview of the 38-year-old's strengths, as a singer, lyricist and musician. Songs like the mighty "St. Pete" recall how Wright indulged her inner Zeppelin on her last outing, 2004's Over the Sun - only better - while elsewhere she hushes the mood with piano-centered pieces, her playful style contrasting intriguingly with her dusky voice. "Steadfast and True" is inspired by her 2005 collaboration with French composer Yann Tiersen, and the big surprise of the album is "Everybody's Got Their Own Part to Play," a mid-tempo pop song that brings to mind John Lennon's work on Double Fantasy. An Atlanta resident since the release of her solo debut, Flightsafety, in 1999, Wright married Atlanta musician Chris Lopez (Tenement Halls) three years ago. Deciding that the West End was no place to raise their son (now one year old), they recently bought a home in Decatur. When I meet with her at San Francisco Coffee, upon her return from her latest tour of Europe, she seems more relaxed and unguarded than I've ever seen her. The changes in her life have quite obviously done her well... It seems to me if you were going to stop recording music, or at least stop for a while, then getting married and having a child would be a logical time to do it. But here you are. Has having a family changed your perspective at all? "It hasn't changed it. You know what's funny is, I haven't really talked about this with anybody, because I feel weird talking about such a personal thing, but I think people tend to think that when you have a family it's over. You're not cool anymore, you're not this and that. For one thing, my son is a total badass, and when he grows up, he's gonna really be a total badass. I can see it already. And I have to say, he really does love the songs. Not just because he heard 'em every day, but if I just sit down at the piano and play one of them, he stops in his tracks." I don't know how much you let personal events affect what you write about or the style of music, but you wrote much of Let In the Light while you were pregnant. Did that experience seep into your songwriting in any way, that you can discern? "I'm sure it seeped through in some ways. I think the main thing for me, it brings beauty, and a lot of fear, when you have a kid. It's like, ‘What the fuck, man, this world is so fucked up.' You kind of think about what you've been through, and you're like, ‘Oh, man, how are we gonna [keep] that sad stuff from him?' I think I still write about the same things I always write about, you know. It really hasn't changed, except that this has brought beauty to my life, and to Chris' life. And Chris did the same thing for me. And that's really awesome." This probably has nothing to do with that whole situation, or maybe it does, but Over the Sun was such a loud, thunderous, and in some ways angry-sounding record, while Let In the Light is largely more piano-based, and your voice has a lot more depth and delicacy to it. It seems like there's a lot more beauty on this record, sonically and lyrically. Would you say that's accurate? "Well, with Over the Sun, honestly I wanted to make a total badass guitar record - as badass as I could make it. You know, because I feel like sometimes what I do live, I can't capture on a record. And to me it's just a rock ‘n' roll record, and sometimes I get really bummed out that people think I'm so angry. It's like, man, I'm just playin' rock ‘n' roll, just like anybody else! And just because I happen to be born this gender...I don't think people really point that out with men. ‘Your record's really angry...'" Take it from me, guys are always angry. "But women are angry all the time too! It's just that it's not as common in a rock n' roll mindset, or a punk rock mindset. I have always had that. I mean, my God, I was 15 and one of my favorite bands was the Birthday Party. It's just who I am. And so, I write those kind of songs, and I have this other side. And if you listen to Over the Sun, there's that song ‘Avalanche,' which is very piano-oriented. And to me, this record is more of that, which has always been there. It's like the underbelly." And then there's "Everybody's Got Their Own Part to Play," which jumps out at you at the very end with this total pop sound, which is really unlike anything you've done. "Yeah, hahaha! That was the plan! Everybody thinks they've got me figured out, and it's like, ‘Sorry!' You know, that song I almost didn't put on the record. Chris was really rooting for that one. In the end I was really happy with it." |
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