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The songs on Shawn Colvin's new album, "These Four Walls," represent a fresh start for the Grammy-winning, Austin-based singer-songwriter who recorded the 1997 hit "Sunny Came Home."
The wistful "Summer Dress" is a reflection on the life changes Colvin, performing Monday at the Moore Theatre, experienced as she turned 50 last January.
"I put on my finest summer dress," she sings. "So light and thin, it was my best/ I brushed my hair, I held my breath/ I went out to face the wilderness."
"It's one of those songs that kind of wrote itself," Colvin said in a phone call from a tour stop near San Diego.
"I haven't analyzed the song, but I started writing it after I'd gotten divorced, after I'd left my record company, after I'd gotten a new manager and a new label. So there's a sense of shaking things off and starting anew."
"These Four Walls" opens with the upbeat "Fill Me Up" and includes some of Colvin's best material since "A Few Small Repairs" in the mid-'90s. The songs are spare but riveting.
Colvin went into an Austin recording studio with a batch of songs created by her longtime producer and co-writer, John Leventhal, and began fleshing them out with themes and lyrics.
"The songs just sort of got written as they got written. And then every now and then, we looked at what we'd written and wondered if we needed a song with a certain kind of color to help round things out."
Most of the lyrics were created on the fly, a method of songwriting Colvin has relied on for years.
"Initially, when I'm working on songs, it's best not to think too much. "It's best to enjoy the sounds of the words in conjunction with the melody and the track and not try to have a meaning right away," she said.
Colvin has often written lyrics "out of the blue" and later created the music to fit. But starting with the melody first helps the songwriting process.
"It pushes you along and things come out of your mouth," she said.
Reaching the big 5-0 figured into the overall theme of the album.
"It's a bit of a watershed, turning 50. It made an impression. Mortality begins to factor in," she said.
The goal on "These Four Walls" was a less pop-oriented album than "Whole New You." "We wanted it to be more rootsy than the previous record. That was a guiding principle."
Aiding and abetting the writing, production and recording of the new album was her new label, Nonesuch Records, a nurturing, artist-friendly Warner Bros. subsidiary whose roster includes Ry Cooder, the Black Keys, k.d. lang, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris and Seattle's Bill Frisell and Laura Veirs.
"It's really a music label, not a money label," Colvin said. "I met everyone who worked at the company in one room. So there's a big difference right there. The three guys who started it -- and they're still with the label -- have been there for 25 years. And that's not about to change. And there's nobody there in the background deciding to 'shake it up.' "
Colvin is known for her carefully chosen "cover" songs. For "These Four Walls," she recorded "Even Here We Are" by Paul Westerberg of the Replacements and "Words" by the Bee Gees.
"The new record was done and we were mixing it. And while John and I were waiting for the engineer to get done, we just started messing around," Colvin said.
"I was reading a magazine and John was playing the piano and he'd do a song, like maybe a Beach Boys song, and I'd just sing it.
"When he played 'Words,' I said, 'Wow, I love that song.' And I grabbed a guitar and said, 'Turn on the mike. Let's just play it. It'll be fun. And we just banged it out."
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