SHAWN COLVIN

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.

One of the dumber things my manager said was, Stick to the melody. But I can't.

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 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 have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.

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.

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

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 wasn't creative when I was depressed. When my depression got treated, I was creative again.

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.'

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.

When I became sober, I was 27 and struggling as an artist.

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.

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

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

For a long time, I felt like I failed myself, my career, and my record company.

I get a lot of joy out of covering other people's songs, and, at my best, I think I bring something a little new to a lot of them.

I'm a touring musician. I don't watch the charts. I had the kind of success I'd hoped for. I won Grammys for a folk record, and that was magic.

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

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

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.

I can perform easily; I don't mind getting up in front of people at all. I've always sung and felt confident about that, and guitar playing isn't a stretch, but songwriting is. We all have our challenges in what we do, and that's mine.

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

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.