Today I pulled out Shawn Colvin’s 1992 album, Fat City.

This is another of the oldest CDs in my collection. I first heard it the summer after high school graduation, when I received my first CD player. It was a favorite of one of my fellow staffers at the summer camp where I worked for three years; she had first heard it when friends used “I Don’t Know Why” as their wedding song. We played the stuffing out of Fat City all three summers I worked at the camp.

I fell in love with the record, finding in it my first real taste for exquisitely heartbreaking singer-songwritery goodness. I swooned for “I Don’t Know Why,” and obsessed over the lyrics to “Polaroids.”

Listening to the CD today, I found new favorites. I had always kind of relished the heartbreak of “Monopoly,” but heard those lyrics with a little more understanding and genuine ache than I had as a teen. Back in the day I used to sometimes skip over “Set the Prairie on Fire,” but I rather enjoyed its slow burn today.

So the revisiting of Fat City was enjoyable, but it reminded me that I like my singers to have some edge to their voices — some cracks and fissures that somehow bespeak authenticity of feeling, that rip my heart out along with their own. It’s why I love the Patty Griffin, and the Ryan Adams, and so forth; it’s why, when Brandi Carlile’s voice breaks in “The Story,” I decide it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever heard (key moment is around 2:50):

Shawn Colvin has a lovely, lovely voice, but it’s a little too smooth, and sometimes a little too girlish, for my liking. I want the edge, I want the breaks, I want the human force and feeling in my singers’ voices.

Not that Shawn Colvin doesn’t seem like a dame, and someone you’d want to get a beer with. I saw her with Patty, Dar Williams, and Mary Chapin Carpenter one time, and those broads’ banter was almost better than their music.

I wonder what happened to the girl who introduced me to S. Colvin. We kept in touch for a while after the summers we worked together, but it’s been easily a dozen years since I saw or heard anything from or about her. She was something of a fragile soul, so I hope the years have been good to her. I wonder who she’s listening to these days.

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