"This record feels like I really got it right for the first time," says Louise Goffin. "It took me a long time to be able to go my own way, but I'm finally feeling comfortable enough as a songwriter to break the rules I used to try to fit." The album in question is Sometimes A Circle (released Feb. 12, 2002), Goffin's DreamWorks Records debut.
Some of the rules Goffin is breaking were handed down from the Tin Pan Alley masters to her parents, revered songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin. King and Goffin in turn influenced a generation of songwriters with innumerable pop classics, including "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," "Locomotion" and "Will You Love Me Tomorrow."
Instinctively drawn to songwriting and performing even as a child, Goffin was nonetheless intimidated by making music. "I started off feeling immense pressure because both my parents were exceptionally good at their work," she confides. "I played the piano and wrote from the time I was a kid, but I was incredibly shy about singing. I didn't sing – I whispered. In my mind I was competing with the artists I loved, like Aretha Franklin and The Beatles, and I had no idea how to get from my child voice to this big adult one. It was a challenge for me."
Goffin says a special trip with her mother, however, helped her overcome her reticence and cemented her musical ambitions. "When I was 12, I went on tour with my mom and James Taylor in England for the summer, all of us traveling together on the bus," she recalls. "That had a big impact on me."
However, the camaraderie she'd felt on the road was hard to recapture. "I was constantly putting bands together," she attests, "but somehow not getting what I needed."
Eventually, she realized she was compromising her musical impulses to make the band configuration work. Only after making the difficult decision to pursue a career as a solo artist did she feel liberated creatively. "I think leading a band, trying to keep everyone together and happy, are mutually exclusive," she says. "Now I focus on songwriting, and the band just grows organically out of that."
Helping her grow on Sometimes A Circle was writer-producer Greg Wells (Creeper Lagoon, Amy Correia, Rufus Wainwright), who is also Goffin's husband. "There's a magical chemistry between the songwriting and production of these songs," she says. "Greg and I are a complementary team; we up each other's game a lot, and since we weren't recording for a label when we started the record, we went down a creatively healthy path – we weren't pleasing a committee. I didn't know where the songs would end up, so I just let them go."
Goffin says of the album's subsequent path: "[DreamWorks principal] Lenny Waronker, who signed me, heard the masters by coincidence and just loved them, so he wanted to meet me. I was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant – I looked like I'd swallowed a planet. It's funny, because at that point I was thinking to myself, ‘Of all the times in my life I've wanted a record deal, right now I couldn't care less,' and then it was handed to me."
She and Wells recorded most of the record in her former home studio, located in Los Angeles' storied Laurel Canyon area. "We were about to move when we started the record, but the place we were moving to wasn't ready. There was recording gear all over the place, sleeping bags, couches – we even had an artist from England staying with us who couldn't drive! It was like a college dorm," Goffin reports. "But when I listen to the tracks we recorded then, it sounds like we're having an immense amount of fun. How on earth is that possible?"
Unruffled by the intricacies of juggling music with family, Goffin set about finishing Sometimes A Circle after the baby was born. "I wrote and recorded during nap time," she states matter-of-factly. "I think I was more focused after the baby was born."
Says Goffin of the album's content: "It's about stripping life down to the essentials. It's a humorous look at the absurdity of modern life – the race to accumulate more stuff, more money, and always trying to be perfect."
"I'm over the ‘difficulty' of making music," she concludes. "With this record, I'm past all the songs about longing, unconscious heartbreak and unspecified poetics. I'm not alluding to anything – I'm coming right out and saying it. There's a lightness and a sense of humor. I'm not trying to prove anything anymore. I've been there and done that, and it just takes the fun out of everything."
Source: http://www.louisegoffin.com/
