Karla Bonoff Live

[Bill]

My copy of the just-released "Karla Bonoff Live" double album just arrived (autographed) and my two year old daughter is absolutly mesmerized, singing along. I think I first picked up one of her albums in the late seventies after recognizing her name from Linda Ronstadt's Hasten Down the Wind album...fell in love! I've gotten to see her perform a few times over the years, and she ranks up with Gord, Kottke, the Beatles, and Kristofferson for me. Her fans anticipate for years the release of new material the way we count down Gord releases.

When she lays into the notes of a lyric it will just buckle your knees! (ok, I know my wife'll see this!). She's been largely overlooked by the public because she was never a prolific recording artist, but she's one of the most professionally respected artists to come out of the Southern Califirnia scene of the 70s. Check out her work with Brydle too...both have good websites. Some stuff on Youtube.

Years ago Rolling Stone had an ad simply stating that her voice is the perfect instrument to sing her songs.

[Paul Grosso]

You can find out more about the CD - and download a free sample of "Someone To Lay Down Beside You" by going to www.karlabonoff.com/live (http://www.karlabonoff.com/live)

Cheers,

- Paul

[Paul Grosso]

My mistake. The correct link is www.karlabonoff.com/live.html

[charlene]

FolkWax has this part one of an interview with her:
http://www.visnat.com/entertainment/music/folkwax/backissues/folkwax_344.cfm -
you have to register I think.

This telephone interview with Karla Bonoff took place on Tuesday October 2, 2007. Bonoff was at home in California and I was in Birmingham, England. Many thanks to Tamara Saviano in Nashville for setting up the interview. Bonoff recently released the twenty-one-song, two-CD recording Karla Bonoff Live. I began the interview by asking how she approached the songwriting process...



Arthur Wood for FolkWax: Musically speaking, what came first for you, wanting to play an instrument or write a song?



Karla Bonoff: Definitely learning to play an instrument. As a kid I tried different instruments. I played violin, clarinet, and I took piano lessons. When I was about twelve I finally hit on guitar. I was listening to Peter, Paul & Mary and Joan Baez and that coincided with wanting to play guitar.



FW: So it was the early 1960's Folk explosion.



KB: Yeah. I don't know, the guitar appealed to me. I was okay with playing piano, but the whole Classical lessons thing wasn't fun. We had this Russian piano teacher that would come and crack the whip for two hours every week. There was lots of homework and that didn't do it for me. I'm glad in retrospect that I got the technique down when I was seven, eight, and nine because you can always pull it back, which I did. The guitar is really where I first started writing melodies. My sister wrote lyrics and that's sort of the beginning of my career in terms of writing music.



FW: You mentioned taking piano lessons at the age of seven, was that when you began playing the instrument?



KB: I probably began taking Classical music piano lessons at the age of five or six.



FW: Were your parents musical? Is music present in the family gene?



KB: Yeah. Even though he was a physician, my grandfather really loved to play violin. He would liked to have been a Classical violinist, but his parents wanted him to be a doctor so he wasn't able to do that professionally. My mum was a really good Classical pianist - not professional, but she taught. My dad played great Boogie-Woogie piano and my parents listened to music all the time. I grew up hearing Bennie Goodman and Frank Sinatra. We were exposed to a lot of different kinds of music and really encouraged to play instruments, not forced to, but I feel the value of playing an instrument was definitely high in my household.



FW: Was there a school-based programme that you tapped into, as well as having private lessons?



KB: Yes, there was a combination. At school you could join the orchestra. My first memories are of being in a grammar school band where I played clarinet. You had to read the music and play the alto parts. It was really fun.





"For me, writing lyrics
is kind of a Zen process..."




FW: Did the piano lessons end when you picked up the guitar?



KB: Yeah. I think even before that. Every time that Russian piano teacher's car appeared on our driveway, my sister and I would run screaming. It was always a case of "You go first," and "No, you go first." [Laughs]



FW: So you eventually pick up the guitar. I believe that Frank Hamilton became your teacher [Editor's Note: In 1957 Hamilton and Win Stracke (d. 1991) founded the still vibrant Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. Hamilton was also a member of The Weavers 1962/63]. How did that happen? Was it through a family connection?



KB: No. I went to summer camp when I was around eleven or so and I was a junior counselor and my counselor - Alice, I can't remember her surname - she had this guitar. It was the first Martin guitar I ever saw. She opened this case and I saw this Martin guitar and I went "Wow." Just the way it smelled and looked. She had taken guitar lessons from a woman who had taken lessons from Frank. I basically went and found that woman and my very first guitar lessons were in a group with her. Then I got to a point where she said, "I think you're kind of beyond me. You should really go and take lessons from Frank. He teaches in Hollywood." It was kind of a roundabout way that I got to him.



FW: Had a few more years elapsed by the time you got to Frank?



KB: Probably fifteen, sixteen - somewhere in there.



FW: In all, how many years did the guitar lessons last, five or six years?



KB: Yeah. By the time I got to Frank they were less like lessons. For instance, he taught me "The Water Is Wide" and many other great arrangements. My sister and I were beginning to write songs, so we would play them for him. He would write these great second guitar parts for my sister to play with my parts. He was arranging our songs basically, and writing musical parts for us so it was really beyond guitar lessons at that point.



FW: Had your older sister Lisa been taking guitar lessons as well?



KB: Yeah. We went to see Frank together and worked on the songs we were writing.



FW: As a teenager were you an avid reader: novels, poems, and magazines?



KB: No, not at all. I was more into listening to music.



FW: I was wondering where your inspiration for lyric writing came from?



KB: You know, I don't know. That's always been so much harder for me. It was something I had to force myself to do because I wanted to be a songwriter and wanted to write my own songs. It has never come easy to me. It was something I had to pull out of myself somehow. Whereas I have friends who, like you say, read a lot and are always thinking in those terms and write down verses when they come to them. I wish I could be more like that, but my brain doesn't work that way.



FW: During the period from picking up the guitar through to graduating to Frank Hamilton, were there particular recording artists that influenced you?



KB: Coinciding with Frank, Joni Mitchell's first album came out. Lisa and I would sit for hours and try and figure out what tuning she was playing. Frank would figure it out in two seconds. We'd take them into Frank and he'd go, "Oh, it's this." He'd have that "Marcie" tuning in two seconds [Editor's Note: The song appeared on Mitchell's March 1968 debut release, Song To A Seagull]. He was really helping us with that stuff and was just amazing. Lisa and I got into writing a lot of our songs in weird tunings and then we'd go play them to him. So I loved Joni and also James Taylor. When I was in my late teens I witnessed the beginnings of what became the Seventies singer-songwriter movement.

2nd part of PART one to follow

[charlene]

Part two of the interview (part one)
lol
FW: What about East Coast performers like Laura Nyro?



KB: We were huge Laura Nyro fans. I don't know many people in California that weren't. My friend Wendy Waldman and I must have listened to New York Tendaberry about fifty thousand times. [Editor's Note: Nyro's third album was released in late 1969] Laura was a big influence on my piano playing as I got back into piano.



FW: Had you also been listening to songs by Brill Building writers, for instance, Carole King and Gerry Goffin?



KB: Well, we didn't know that we were, but yeah. I grew up in Los Angeles and we would go down to the beach and lie listening to our transistor radios - Pop and Motown performers. As I grew up, I think listening to classic Pop and classic Motown had a lot to do with the Pop facet of my songwriting.



FW: Although you were co-writing with your older sister at the outset, have you ever sat back and questioned, on a personal level, what made you want to write songs?



KB: At the time we were going to the Troubadour in West Hollywood and I was hearing songs that were so moving to me; people like Jackson Browne. He was probably nineteen. I remember when he played "Song For Adam," probably for the first time in public. It was a Monday night hoot. Maybe it was actually "My Opening Farewell," that's what it was. It just blew me away and I thought, "That's what I want to do," as opposed to what I was facing, which was going to college. It was clear to me that I was passionate about how emotionally moving those songs were. I wanted to be able to do that myself.



FW: At what age did you start going to the Troubadour? Was there an age limit?



KB: No actually. I was probably aged around sixteen. That's the first time I heard James Taylor. And then I heard Jackson Browne. They had a Monday night open mike and you could sign up to play that. They'd pick four people each week and I used to cut school. You had to line up in front of the club at around noon, so I'd go over and get in the line. There was a lot going on musically at that point especially around that club. The musicians who formed The Eagles were circling around. In those days the Troubadour would book a performer for two weeks, so we could see Joni Mitchell every night for two whole weeks in a club that holds two hundred people. James Taylor, I remember when he came through with Carole King in his band - the original band with Russ Kunkel, Lee Sklar, and Danny Kortchmar - and he played for two weeks. That was my world as a teenager. Looking back now, I realize how incredibly fortunate I was to grow up where I did.





Karla Bonoff Live

Click Cover For More Info



FW: Initially you wrote the music and Lisa wrote the lyrics. Obviously there came a time when you begin writing on your own.



KB: My sister got burned out on the music thing and she, unlike me, was very academic. She really loved being a student and missed school, so she went back to school. Along the way I had met Wendy Waldman and Kenny Edwards, and then Andrew Gold through Wendy. We had come together and I realized everyone was writing their own songs, so I had to make the transition into writing lyrics. The music was easy for me, but I struggled with lyrics for a lot of years. Early on I think I wrote songs that don't make sense. [Laughs] I go back and listen to them and go "What was that about?" It took me - oh God - five, six, seven years before I really started writing things I was proud of.



FW: You said you had met Kenny Edwards. Was that around 1970?



KB: I met him in 1969.



FW: If you say that you struggle with writing lyrics, is there a lot of rewriting involved in the process?



KB: For me writing lyrics is kind of a Zen process where I have to get out of my own way and hope that if I get myself in enough of a trance-like state that something will come out of my mouth that's actually good. [Laughs] For me it's always been about reaching down to a deeper place and writing something very simple and pure and emotional. The best songs I've written have come out this way where I don't really understand where they came from. I'm not one of those people that goes, "You know, I needed to write a song about this." For instance, writing a song for a scene in a movie, I always feel petrified about that. I can't really do that very well. I can't really control what I write about.



FW: Focusing on melodies for a moment, do they come to you in minutes or do you toil over them for months?



KB: Some of them do come in minutes, but usually it's part of them. I usually get a really good verse and I don't have a bridge or I'll get a great chorus. It's over days where I get pieces of things and then they fit together. Very rarely, maybe once or twice, there's been an instance where I've written the music and the lyrics all at once. Most of the time, for instance with a song like "Someone To Lay Down Beside Me," I had that music around for about a year before I wrote the lyric. I knew the music was really good and special, but I didn't want to write just anything to it and waited till the right moment.



FW: As a lyricist do you keep a notebook and jot things down? For instance, do you observe people interacting and gather ideas for a lyric from things you see?



KB: No. [Laughs] People that are lyrically oriented do that. I wish I was more that way. I sit down and if I come up with something that's good I write it down, but I have to wait for moments like that to strike me. I don't come up with lots of ideas. My brain doesn't work that way.



FW: Has there been periods, for instance after you recorded three albums for CBS Records, where you didn't write any songs?



KB: Oh, yeah! There are periods now where I don't write at all. [Laughs] It has never been easy for me and to some degree I've developed sort of an aversion to it. I'm always afraid I can't do it or it's going to be bad or whatever. You get into that avoidance mode where you don't want to go in the room and face it. I've learned that I'm the most productive when I really discipline myself to sit down every day for twenty minutes or an hour or whatever and just make it like any other daily task.



FW: And do you actually accomplish it every day?



KB: I'm supposed to. [Laughs] It's easy for the whole day to slip away and find that you haven't done it. There are so many other things I can fill my day with. I've never been very disciplined. Had I been more disciplined and had better work habits I probably would have made more albums and been more successful. I never had that driving, driving ambition. It's just how I am.



FW: I know Townes Van Zandt fans will be upset by me saying this. In the first truly productive phase of his career, Townes recorded something like eight albums. Truth to tell, lyrically he pretty much said everything he had to say after the first three albums.



KB: Exactly.



FW: I'm not saying that his later studio albums are retreads, but he certainly revisited themes.



KB: I think there's a period in your life where you have this burst of creativity, in its purest form. I found that to be true. It's hard to go back and repeat that and it's also hard to grow into something completely different because the kind of music I do isn't going to change that much. I know what you are saying. Like an athlete, there's a period where you are really at your peak.



FW: Have you, as a writer, ever consciously or even subconsciously thought, "Well, I've said what I needed to say"? Is there a sense that you haven't felt compelled to continue writing and recording, because you feel you've said everything?



KB: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of truth to that. I think when I was writing the best, in a way, I was the most unhappy and needed an outlet for it. As I pulled my life together and got happier and more content I felt I needed to do it less. It's different for everybody, but I think there's a lot of truth in what you are saying. You do get to a point where you feel you've said it.



On the other hand, at one point I was going to a writing coach and complaining about not being able to write. He made me write a journal for a few days. Then he gave me an assignment to write this song about something I had written in the journal that was from a dream. He gave me the title and asked me to go home and write the song. I was like, "I so don't want to do that. It's going to be bad. It's going to be forced." The weird thing about it was, the song came out amazing. It made me realize that I possess the skill to write songs and if I manage to sit myself down with an idea I'll probably come up with a song that's pretty good. It proved me wrong about all my theories. It's interesting because someone used to say to me, "You just have to show up for your job." [Laughs]



FW: And the title of the assignment song was?


KB: "Daddy's Little Girl."



To be continued...



Arthur Wood is a founding editor of FolkWax. You may contact him at folkwax@visnat.com.



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