"the point is to make people feel more alive
and alert, and to, you know, hopefully
open their minds and hearts"
GC: Where were you born?
LC: I was born in Great Bend, Kansas.
GC: Which is close to . . . ?
LC: Close to Colorado. And I’ve only been through there since once.
GC: How many people were in that town?
LC: I don’t even know. We moved away when I was quite young, like a baby.
GC: My paternal great-great-great-great-grandfather came from a family of 12 boys all named Childers, in the Midwest.
LC: And it’s a name given to orphans.
GC: Where have you lived since?
LC: A couple other places in Kansas that I don’t remember. Jackson, Mississippi, where I started elementary school. Neverie, Louisiana, I almost finished elementary school, then we moved to Woodland Hills, California—northwest corner of Los Angeles—and I was there for five years, including first two years of high school, and then I moved to a small town in Louisiana called Mandeville which had two thousand people at the time, which is a little like moving from one planet to another, at age 16. And I went to college in Baton Rouge, and then graduate school in Eugene, which brought me to the Northwest.
GC: That’s where you’ve stayed?
LC: I actually spent most of the 1980s working on fuel-efficient cooking stove projects in Africa and Asia. So I have lived in other places—I’ve lived on five continents.
GC: Through . . . ?
LC: As a consultant for the most part, but there was a non-profit organization that I was one of the early members of, including before it was officially an organization that works on decisions. And my degrees are in ceramics, and I teach ceramics at the Benton Center.
GC: What brought you to Corvallis you already told me—
LC: Well that got me to the Northwest, but my husband is a professor at Oregon State University, in hydrology. So he got a job here. But we had already agreed this was probably the most ideal place we wanted to live.
GC: We’ve just been here eight years and love it.
LC: Twenty-one for us.
GC: What instruments do you play?
LC: Well, the only instrument I feel like fully comfortable with—although of course I keep growing—is my voice. And then next on the list would be the piano, and next on the list would be guitar, and when I’m pressed I can do a shaker, although I have a great respect for everyone who does percussion—including shakers, little eggs!—and occasionally other percussion things, but—I have been known to play the harmonica on a song or two, but it’s not—you know, not without a lot of work.
GC: How would you describe your music to your audience, if you had to say this is what I am?
LC: That’s very hard because I grew up on rock’n’roll, I had a roommate for two years in college, a classical pianist, and felt like I got this great education in classical music, and I can see how it influences the songs I write, and my preferences. And for my last semester in college, I went to the Southern University Jazz Institute and took a class on jazz improvisation, with the wonderful Alvin Batiste. And that class opened amazing doors for me in terms of being able to compose music, which isn’t very jazzy but it’s not John Denver either. I mean it’s not traditional jazz, but I tend to prefer those interesting chords—hear them and prefer them. So, how would I describe my music? (pause) I’m always stuck with that one. But the category singer/songwriter, it seems to be where people get placed. And that I’m comfortable. iTunes for some reason put me in Christian music, I think because one of the categories I was allowed to chose was spiritual, and I do feel like my music is spiritual, but I think anybody expecting Amy Grant is going to be surprised, especially—I mean I was particularly surprised because there’s a song on my album called Goddess Mother. (laughs) So anyway, I feel informed by folk music, rock’n’roll, jazz, and classical music all—and luckily my bass player Bill Veley understands it all and can keep up with me.
GC: He’s quite good.
LC: He’s amazing.
GC: What about your actual—your first experience with music? Searching way back in your mind.
LC: Well I was—because my grandmother had been a piano teacher, and my mother had taken piano lessons probably from her, then we all had to have piano lessons, at least all the girls in the family had piano lessons, and I remember I hated it because my teacher would slap my fingers with a ruler if they weren’t curved enough, and all my old music teachers used to say “curve your fingers, curve your fingers!” Obviously I had bad habits, but she didn’t teach me to love the instrument. And then when we moved to Los Angeles I was able to tell my parents that I wanted to change instruments—which was a way to get out of having to take piano lessons again—and so I wanted the guitar because it was more—more sociable.
GC: That was the era that was taking—
LC: That was happening, yeah. That was 1968, so that was a good time. But in truth I think I only had seven guitar lessons in 7th grade, and that was kind of it. Although a few years back I took some from Alex Contreras, who’s from Costa Rica and he’s a master guitarist here. You know, I could stand to learn some things. It’s great—I mean I’m not, but he is.
GC: As a child, is there any song that you remember while starting out?
LC: Hmm. Well, since my mother’s name is Dorothy and she was from Kansas, we watched The Wizard of Oz every year when it came on TV, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow was there. In the Deep South there were a lot of hymns, but none that particularly made sense to me. But I know that—I guess I should include church music in my list of influences, just because I grew up with a whole lot of it. I remember I loved the song Edelweiss. But I also spent hours and hours and hours on the living room floor with headphones on, listening to rock’n’roll music. What I was hearing—and I’m sure there was a lot I was hearing unconsciously—but I mainly loved the expressiveness of the main vocalist. That’s the main thing I was hearing.
GC: So has your music changed dramatically, from your youth to the current day?
LC: I think the most dramatic change is that I never ever ever ever ever thought I would perform. I did not see myself as a musician; I didn’t see myself on that trajectory. But especially after taking that jazz improv class, when I started writing music a lot, music—and I did pick up the piano again as a teenager and learned Cat Stevens and Joni Mitchell songs that I really liked. But it was just something that I did when everybody left the house—it was like I had my own private little spiritual cave that I could crawl in and I could write my songs and play my songs, and you know I had a terrible sense of timing, I was lacking a lot of things, but it really—it was a spiritual activity for me. And I sort of got thrown on stage—do you want to hear that story, how that happened?
GC: Yes, what was your first on-stage experience?
LC: How did that happen? (laughs) I mean I had sung in the church choir because my mother did and she wanted us to, and I enjoyed some of that too—my older sister is the one who had the beautiful soprano voice, and my parents I think expected her to go on and sing, but she was tragically killed right before she turned 21, so you know that ended that, but she was the one in the family with the voice. And then I was visiting my younger sister some years back, probably the year 2000, I think, the summer of 2000, and I ended up just with my sister and a woman friend of hers, and we each had a little kid running around the house too, but we ended up doing an impromptu song circle, where we took turns singing songs, and as usual if I ever had to play in front of anybody else, I was sweating, I was nervous, it was very unpleasant, and my sister mentioned she used to have the same reaction until she started going to a song circle that was in her town, which is Santa Fe, NM. And that she had eventually gotten over it, and it wasn’t such a big deal. And I remember thinking, I’ve lived in my house for nine years, and I know there’s a song circle in my neighborhood, and I’ve never gone—I’m gonna start going. So that was in August, so in September I went to the song circle, and I was really nervous and I sang with my eyes closed, and you know—was able to do—
GC: What age were you?
LC: How old was I? Um . . . 43. Old. (laughs)
GC: Not old, but older than a teenager child.
LC: Older than average! And I sang with my eyes closed, and I sang harmony just impromptu with somebody who was singing a really beautiful Paul Simon song that I loved, April Come She Will, just really pretty. But anyway, afterwards one of the people who had—he’d come a little late but he’d heard two of my songs, and he said to me afterwards, he said are you—this is Bill Smythe, by the way, who you should interview—he said to me, would you ever be interested in singing for the Bestseller Coffeehouse, which the Corvallis Folklore Society puts on once a month. And I had actually thought, okay this is what I’ll do, I’ll get used to going to this song circle for a year and a half or two, and then I’ll ask if I can perform at one of these—so it’s kind of amazing to be asked right away, and I remember I kinda gulped and said uh sure, and he said, well we have one opening this year. And it was for September, it was two and a half weeks from then. And we’d all already talked about how Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer were going to come and play for the next Bestseller, and I’d heard them sing twice before and I loved their music, and so to open for them—in retrospect I was so proud of myself for saying yes, (laughs) because I was truly scared shitless, but I loved their music, and I just felt like that was an amazing honor. So I spent the next two and a half weeks playing piano several hours a day, practicing my songs, figuring out what I could play in the half hour allotted to me that I would feel I was doing justice to, being very nervous—I had to get lots of exercise just to get endorphins and calm myself down—I mean this was—it was just a huge obstacle. I never ever felt like I was made for stage. Some people you see them on stage and you just think, that person was born to do this. I had to learn. And I called all my friends who perform and said how do you do it? So one friend, who’s in Arizona now, I said, how do you sing with your eyes open? And she said, practice with your eyes open. Amazingly it works! Because you—you know, that’s where you feel your equilibrium, is if you’re doing it as you practice. So you stand up when you’re going to stand up singing, you sit down when you’re going to sit down singing—you need to practice it that way so that as much as possible it’s normal. Other friends said, Bill Smythe included, said you get lots of big muscle exercise—get those endorphins going. That really helped, I did that a lot. I would last about a day and a half after a good workout. But I really had to contend with a lot, and really I was just so nervous while I performed. On the other hand, I had something happen that has happened very rarely since, and several people have told me has never happened. On the fifth of the six songs, I completely forgot where I was. I was totally back in my spiritual cave. And just into what that piece meant, and how it felt, and so I must have achieved something with all that practice and preparation, but still I remember being disappointed. I remember a few saying that was pretty good, and feeling disappointed. But two things happened that made it so that I was willing to perform again, because normally it’s just not worth that much—few things are worth that much stress, right? But one, that night Dave Carter LOVED my music. And three times during his performance he talked about my music. And asked people to applaud me, or he dedicated a song to me, or whatever. And the song that he dedicated was, um—what’s it called? East of Eden or Garden of Eden, I’ll remember it—anyway it was a brand new song at the time—the Gentle Arms of Eden, that’s what it’s called—and I felt really heard, when I heard the lyrics of that song, I knew that he had really heard what I was singing. And now—I got to know him a bit after, and I understand he couldn’t help but listen to the lyrics same as me, that’s what matters. And I had a long conversation with him afterwards, and he said how come I haven’t ever heard you before? And I said, David, nobody has! I’ve been in a cave! And he invited me to go up for a songwriters’ workshop and I mean, it was all very overwhelming and wonderful, but it was a couple of years before I really felt ready to do that, and he actually died a year or two after that, so it was a very sad, tragic loss, but anyway that really—that was very encouraging. The other thing that helped is we videotaped the performance. And when I watched it the next morning, I was really with my critical eye looking for those mistakes I made, and I literally—I could not hear them. I would back the tape up again, because I remembered just being really disappointed—and I could not find my mistakes. And most of the time I was thinking, you know I may have played that better once or twice in my life, but it was, it was okay. And this was the mistake-obsessed newcomer, right? One of the other people I called, Fred Towne, who you should interview—when I asked him, how do you prepare, and how do you deal with mistakes, and stress and all, he said, I just figure I’m going to make mistakes. (laughs) Which is actually very good advice. So all three of my friends gave me very good advice.
GC: Easier said than done sometimes, I would imagine.
LC: Yeah, yeah. But you do have to just accept that it’s a live performance and it’s different. So anyway that was a very pivotal time in my life, I would say, and after that I thought, okay, if I’m going to be doing this, I’m going to take voice lessons, which I had never had, so I took those at OSU. And that was very helpful too, just for, you know, one semester.
GC: Well, it sounds to be a pretty nerve-wracking start.
LC: Yeah, for me.
GC: What do you do to relax? Because it doesn’t sound that like you’re—
LC: Well, playing is very relaxing. In my home, and for myself. And songwriting is just like one of the greatest gifts that life has given me. And if I feel a song coming on, you know, I just—I will do everything I can to put everything else aside and capture this song as it’s floating through the air. And some of them you know kind of are hatched whole, and others take a lot of time, but it’s just such a gift to work on—it helps me process whatever I’m thinking about or what’s important to me at the time, and they’re just—they’re very special. So I love that; I would never give that up. But learning to perform, it took a couple years before it really wasn’t a big deal. And then—and there was a transition point when I realized that extra little bit of, you know what used to be nervousness, was now just this energy that I would transform into being on stage, and it made things sound better than when I practice.
GC: Well, I would imagine that you’re probably much more relaxed practicing, then the voice comes out much smoother.
LC: Yes. And sometimes, I mean I have a song I wrote called Lost, which I wrote after I lost something, and you know it’s a pretty barebones piano and vocal piece, and it’s an odd key, and in any case I’m playing it one time—I was performing it, and I just kind of lost where I was, and I said, I lost it! And everybody laughed, and it was funny, you know? You wouldn’t do that on a recording, but its fine live. Because the point is to make people feel more alive and alert, and to, you know hopefully open their minds and hearts, but you want them to enjoy being there. So they probably enjoyed that song more because of me making a joke of it than playing it perfectly. The perfection is for, you know.
GC: That’s for the recording studio.
LC: Yes, it’s for the recording studio. Because you know if there’s a recording and there’s a flaw, it’s really painful to listen to it a second time. So it has its place. But anyway.
GC: Inspirations—you’ve talked about how you started out playing, and some of these people locally that are inspiring and have helped you along your way. Have there been any international or national types of stars that you think, this is what I would like—
LC: To sound like?
GC: —to sound like, or inspired by?
LC: Hmm. Well, I think as a kid, my favorite voice was Diana Ross. And a lot of people tell me I sound like Joan Baez, and I certainly listen to a lot of her albums—we both have that vibrato. And as I have gotten older, I think I prefer the lower register. I have a pretty big range, which I can’t take credit for but I appreciate, and I prefer to sing in the lower part than the higher part. It’s nice to be able to reach them and not hit the ceiling too soon, but I don’t find that the prettiest to listen to, and I think it’s harder to be expressive up there. You can growl more and you can be breathy and you can do—you can make more—you can have different texture and different sounds in your voice in the lower ranges.
GC: Your music has been quite varied. Outside of music, are there any artistic endeavors—you say you teach ceramics—
LC: I teach ceramics.
GC: —that you, not dabble in, but go after—
LC: Go after big time? Definitely ceramics. That’s been my passion since I was 13; I remember seeing a lump of clay and saying, that’s it. That’s the stuff, because it can do anything. Which is not quite true, metal and glass can do some things that clay can’t, but the fact that it was three dimensions and had a surface you could paint on was really intriguing. And I love painting watercolors.
GC: It has been a pleasure to speak with such a multi talented individual. I encourage folks to get out and see you in person. Check out the u-tube too.
April 2012 / Emended for length and clarity.
