From that moment I changed the way I approached songwriting, I changed how I sang, I changed my work ethic, and I changed my life.
The strong desire to become a better songwriter dovetailed perfectly with my budding friendship with John Stewart, who had written “Runaway Train” for King’s Record Shop. John encouraged me to expand the subject matter in my songs, as well as my choice of language, and my mind. I played new songs for him and if he thought it was too “perfect,” which was anathema to him, he would say, over and over, “but where’s the MADNESS, Rose?” I started looking for the madness. I sought out Marge Rivingston in New York to work on my voice and I started training, as if I were a runner, in both technique and stamina. Oddly, it turned out that Marge also worked with Linda, which I didn’t know when I sought her out. I started paying attention to everything, both in the studio and out. If I found myself drifting off into daydreams—an old, entrenched habit—I pulled myself awake and back into the present moment. I opened my eyes and focused. Instead of toying with ideas, I examined them, and I tested the authenticity of my instincts musically. I stretched my attention span consciously. I read books on writing by Natalie Goldberg and Carolyn Heilbrun and began to self-edit and refine more, and went deeper into every process involved with writing and musicianship. I realized I had earlier been working only within my known range—never pushing far outside the comfort zone to take any real risks. I had written songs almost exclusively about romance and all the attending little dramas of loss and lust. It was legitimate, certainly, but only one small mode of transportation over a vast landscape of experience that might be fodder for whole new categories of songs. I started painting, so I could learn about the absence of words and sound, and why I needed them, and what I actually wanted to say with them. I took painting lessons from Sharon Orr, who had a series of classes at a studio called Art and Soul.
I remained completely humbled by the dream, and it stayed with me through every waking hour of finishing King’s Record Shop. We were so far into the process that it was too late to add songs or change the ones that were there, but I vowed the next record would reflect my new commitment. Rodney was at the top of his game as a record producer, but I had come to feel curiously like a neophyte in the studio after the dream. Everything seemed new, frightening, and tremendously exciting. I had awakened from the morphine sleep of success into the life of an artist.
The cover of the King’s album won a Grammy for best art direction. It was a photo of the actual King’s Record Shop in Louisville, Kentucky, hand tinted by Hank DeVito. I had seen the image at Hank’s house and begged him to retake the photograph with me standing in the doorway for my cover. He declined, as the hand tinting had been laborious, but he did agree to take my photo in a doorway and then digitally insert me into the original shot of King’s Record Shop. I didn’t actually visit the real store until the record was released, when we held a press conference there. Sadly, King’s Record Shop has gone the way of most mom-and-pop record stores and no longer exists.
I ended up having four number one singles off King’s, a first for a woman in the industry. Although it was my sixth album, I felt like a beginner, and I was relieved and grateful for the chance to start over, to go deeper into sound and texture, language and poetry, and the direction of my own instincts.