THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
BETH NIELSEN CHAPMAN
by Debbie Kruger

What strikes you first about Beth Nielsen Chapman, and then again repeatedly on further meetings, is her lightness. She is a woman who has been through profound darkness and has come out the other side of the tunnel exultant and radiant. Proudly wearing her heart on her sleeve, Nielsen Chapman has reached a career peak, ironically, due to the personal and artistic growth and creative outpourings that resulted from personal tragedy — the death from cancer of her husband Ernest Chapman in 1994.

Already an established recording artist and prolific songwriter whose songs had been cut by members of the Nashville recording elite — Tanya Tucker, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Alabama and Trisha Yearwood to name a few — Nielsen Chapman found a new and expanded audience worldwide following the release of her 1997 album Sand and Water, inspired by her loss. Prior to its release, she gave Elton John, already an admirer of her work, a copy of the master cassette. A few months later, when interviewed by Oprah Winfrey about his feelings over the deaths of close friends Gianni Versace and Princess Diana, Elton credited Sand and Water with having provided him with great solace. The album was already destined to become a major musical statement on enlightenment through grief; Elton's endorsement propelled its success to unimagined heights.

While some people are still discovering Sand and Water, Nielsen Chapman is moving on to happier themes. The hit song she co-wrote with Annie Roboff and Robin Lerner, "This Kiss," was taken to number one by Faith Hill last year, and her songs have also been popping up on popular soundtracks for films including The Prince of Egypt, Practical Magic and Message in a Bottle.

Born into an Air Force family, Nielsen Chapman lived in different locations across America and in Germany as a child. She wrote her first song, with a cowboy theme, at age 11. In 1979 she married, moved to Alabama, signed as a writer with Screen Gems, and recorded her debut album, Hearing It First, which is now a collectors' item ("My mother has the only copy left," she says). After the birth of her son in 1981, she took time off from songwriting but when she relocated to Nashville in the mid-'80s, it was with a focus and commitment that soon paid off handsomely.

Talking with Beth Nielsen Chapman about her music is to talk with her about her life; the two are inseparable. As she moves on after 10 years with Warner/Reprise, a Greatest Hits collection, drawn from her three albums with the label, affords her the opportunity to look back on the enormous changes and developments in her life, and to look ahead with ecstatic optimism. She is performing more than in previous years, and is currently on a European tour that includes a concert date with James Taylor. With a beauty that comes from clarity of vision, Nielsen Chapman is indeed music's "Happy Girl."

I've read that your formal musical training was short-lived, as you were playing and writing everything by ear? Most of the music I was hearing was piped in through the airforce bases in Germany where we lived. Perry Como, Robert Goulet, my mom and dad's records. And then all of a sudden one afternoon my brother brought home the Beatles and the Monkees and all that, Rolling Stones, all that got mixed in. I was always really just surfing for songs, I was always interested in what made something a great song. So even as a child you were interested in a song rather than an artist or a group. Yeah, the form of a song. There were certainly artists that I loved that did great songs consistently, there are so many of them. But a great song could catch my attention. So when somebody says who did you listen to, well I listened to this song from that person, and this song, I mean I just listened to so much. And then when I was older and I was working at the Riverview Plaza Hotel for two years — when my son was first born I was singing in a little happy hour — I went to the public library and I got every record that was, every top

ten of every era of every year. I just started learning the most popular songs, so I got this overview. You know, stylistically there's great jazz, great blues, great country, great pop, but a great song you can do in any of those styles and it'll bend and be flexible.

At what point did you form an idea of a career as a songwriter as distinct from a performer?
Well I really don't know that I had them separated, and in some ways they're always really intertwined. But I had my first success where money actually appeared in my mailbox as a result of Tanya Tucker recording a song that I wrote with Don Schliss — a song called "Strong Enough To Bend" — that became a number one country hit. And I'd done a pop album in '79, but as an artist I wasn't established, so everything I did as an artist was money going out and the things I did as a writer seemed to create income and I was amazed that I actually made money out of it.

So the concept of being a writer whose songs could be performed, recorded by other artists was actually very attractive to you?
Yes, I like that a lot. And I never really intended to record as a country artist. I think some of my songs — even the ones I've recorded as an artist — are certainly in that line of style. But I didn't want to just have to do one style of music, so I just always thought of myself as a singer-songwriter who wrote a lot of different styles. And I happen to live in Nashville. "Strong Enough to Bend" wasn't something I was going to record on an album of mine, so it was great.

By then you were already quite a prolific writer, As your writing was blossoming, perhaps even before you recorded your first pop album, were there specific artists whom you hoped might record your songs?
Yeah, I mean, Roberta Flack, Barbra Streisand, all the great voices. And the singer-songwriters who very much influenced me — Carole King, Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell — absolutely. And then there were singers like Ella Fitzgerald and artists like Billie Holliday whose phrasing and music I listened to and studied and I tried to feel how each one would interpret a song. So sometimes I would be influenced to write a song with more of a jazzy bent to it from listening to that, with the idea that somebody with that kind of a voice would record my song. And all the time I was always thinking in terms of things that I was singing myself as an artist, too. I know there are some artists who write their own material who save it for themselves and they don't want anybody else to cut it. And that always mystifies me. Like, Trisha Yearwood has recorded songs off of the albums that I have done in more pop versions, and she's done them more country. I'm thrilled for her to do her own version of it and make it her own. And as an artist I'm honored, and as a writer I'm honored and also paid. So, I mean, there's nothing to lose!

Can you talk about the different writing experiences you have writing alone and writing with other people, and what draws you to write with other people?
Well my personal reason is very selfish. I want to learn something I don't know. And I will write with people who I resonate with, where we're already on the same wavelength. Like Annie Roboff, who's very successful at the moment. She and I have very similar tastes and very similar influences. But she comes from a hooky musical kind of key change... "Let's do the bridge over here and come back." Like when we wrote "This Kiss" where we had to get back to this key before the next verse and she just, "Oh, piece of cake," and she goes around here and comes back. She has a real expertise in that department. And there's a way that I have an expertise in terms of lyric writing that she seeks out when she writes with me, so we have a real simpatico. And there are other artists and writers that for me to sit down with them and spend the day is a treat, so the natural thing is you just write a song.

Like writing with someone like Eric Kaz?
Oh, you know, to be able to sit down and write a song with him — and he wrote "Love Has No Pride" and these incredible songs! I know. To me I'm just seeking out that inspiration. And I have to be really careful to balance that out. I'm going to take a week off this summer and go to an artists' colony in West Virginia to write by myself. Because my life has gotten so incredibly hectic and it's really hard for me to say no. There are so many people I like — I mean I love the people and I love writing with them, and I'm getting pulled in so many directions. And I'm starting to get requests to write with really established artists. It's an honor to be asked and it's like really being pulled. Annie and I wrote with Mary Chapin Carpenter, the song that's her new single that just came out. That was a mutual love thing, we all wanted to write with each other, and that was a blast, I mean to write with a writer of her caliber, and pop popcorn and hang out all day and eat popsicles... we just had a great time.


So the music is always what comes first for you.
For me the music comes either right with the lyrics, or just before it, or long before it. The guy that I wrote "Say Goodnight" with on Sand and Water is a lyricist named Joe Henry — there's a recording artist named Joe Henry who's a different one, but — Joe Henry the lyricist is from Colorado. He wrote a lot of stuff with John Denver, he's very very talented with words. He's been writing this novel for 15 years, and he wrote this poem called "Sleep," and the words of this poem were so extraordinary to me, and he gave me a copy of it and one day I was just sitting around and I wrote this melody to it. And it was so unusual, which was almost like it just fell through the top of my head. And I'll probably put it on my next album. And then I got him to write the last half of it lyrically, cause it was only a half-written song by then. But that was a gift, I don't normally naturally do that.

Normally I get sort of a melodic idea and then it's almost like I'll just sing these nonsense syllables into the air, and I just keep the tape recorder going the whole time, because I get into this sort of unconscious place of just playing around with the melody and I go back through and I sing it again and I change it and then I decide I liked it better the other way. The whole time I'm singing "nothing" syllables. And what's interesting is when I go back and listen to the work tape to try to see how I'm shaping it up, see what I like about what I did. Sometimes I don't remember what I did — I mean I'll go back and listen to it and I'm like listening to it as an observer for the first time. And the vowels will line up in a certain way — like I might have said "hand it over" instead of "sand and water", and then two weeks later I'm singing "sand and water" and it means something.

What makes you start some songs on the piano and others on the guitar? "Sand and Water" could have been a piano song.
I believe that the songs are actually in the instruments and you've got to dig them out. It couldn't have been a piano song.

You've described how "Seven Shades of Blue" and "No-one Knows But You" were premonitions, because they had started to come to you before you even knew that your husband was ill. Are you more alert now when songs spring up from somewhere that they could be premonitions — not necessarily of bad things, but some sort of portending to something that's going to happen?
Yes, absolutely. And I've always known that before but I didn't really have it hit me quite so strongly as when those songs came out. But I think we all kind of already know on some level — there's a part of us, our higher self, or whatever — a lot more than we know down in our grounded part. And I really trust this unformed sort of sense of connection, I guess. I just trust that there's accessibility available if we're open to it and we're receptive to it. If you ask for help it just is amazing how it shows up. And I did that many many times after Ernest died and it's never let me down.

I wondered if it was important to do this retrospective at this time to show audiences who only discovered you through Sand and Water that there are many other facets to you as a writer, as a woman, and many other things that you're capable of exploring.
Yeah, and I'm always exploring, and I'm sort of working on my next record right now, but I'm not on Warner Bros. I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to approach the next record, I may do something on my own, I may do something with a major label, I may do something sort of in-between, you know, a distribution deal. Because there are so many things that have changed in the environment. Even since last fall, my gut feeling was it's time for me to move into another realm. And Jim Ed Norman [at Nashville's Warner Records] really was very supportive — in fact he made it very comfortable for me and he's been a great friend and creatively he's been a mentor for me. And I feel lucky. There's a different regime in Los Angeles and they weren't really up with the history that I'd had with the company, and there was a little more corporate stuff going on. And, you know, I'm a singer-songwriter and I would rather do this in a fresh beginning the next time around. So I really feel rejuvenated by being able to have these options now. The funny thing is, as soon as I left Warner Bros I got a song on the Prince of Egypt soundtrack, and then I got two songs that ended up in Message in a Bottle, and then all these things just sort of started happening. And each of these masters that I've done are available for me to put on my next record, too. My manager worked it out that way. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens next.