1999 Los Angeles Times interview
with Shana Morrison
by Mike Boehm
From The Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1999
Transcribed by Jesse Mayers
About a year ago, Van Morrison told an aspiring singer-songwriter he
liked her band's first do-it-yourself CD, nothing that two songs in
particular were "really good."
Having gotten this rare blessing from the austere, enigmatic and
much-beloved eminence of soulful rock music, the up-and-comer:
- summoned all her friends to celebrate with champagne until dawn.
- chose the solitary exultation befitting an artiste and started scribbling in the diary.
- kind of forgot some key details of the incident.
The answer, c. becomes slightly comprehensible when you realize that,
for Shana Morrison, he's not Van the Man, but her old man.
'He thought my voice was getting better and he liked the songs," she
recalled of her father. "He mentioned two - 'Those two are really
good.' "
Which ones were they:
"I can't remember. It was about a year ago."
Maybe the famously introverted Van was mumbling, as he sometimes does
on stage. Or maybe it's a comment on the inherent imperfections of
parent-child communication. But fans of bluesy, adult-alternative style
pop and rock are apt to find a favorite or two of their own on Caledonia,
the album Shana Morrison, 28, and her band will bring as a
calling card to their Orange county debut Sunday afternoon at Mulddon's
pub in Newport Beach.
Writing and performing with four seasoned players from the Marin
County music scene, the younger Morrison arrives with a catchy, varied
and crisply performed CD that builds on the promise developed over the
past five years in her first professional gig: singing backups and duets
in her father's band.
The alubm flits between melancholy liquor-stoked lust, romantic
longing and airy moments of fun- showing a command of blues, country and
soul on songs that summon up the likes of the Wallflowers, Natalie
Merchant, Sheryl Crow and Bonnie Raitt.
Where some have allowed themselves to be overshadowed by the
influence they're drawn from Van Morrison's idelibly idiosyncratic
singing style his daughter confidently proceeds in her own voice, even
while covering dad's glowing 'Sweet Thing.'
Shana (rhymes with Donna) grew up surrounded with musical influences.
Her mother, Janet, is a singer and songwriter who hails from a musical
family (Van dubbed her Janet Planet during their marriage, in which she
was the romantic muse for his most widely cherished albums, including
Astral Weeks,
Moondance
and Tupelo Honey. They split while Shana
was still a toddler; she has no memory of them together and spent her
girlhood shuttling between their separate Marin County homes.
[ED: read this 1998 interview with Janet Morrison Minto].
Shana said weekend and holiday with her father revolved around music
and books.
"Band members would come over, people would want to go over ideas.
My dad's a huge record enthusiast, so there was tons of record playing,
and he would buy me records."
Van didn't try to impose his taste, she said, but added he has almost
no tolerance for music he doens't like. "Sometimes you put on something
and he runs to the stereo as fast as he can to turn it off because he
can't stand it."
Shana said he has toned down his response - somewhat - for certain
less keenly received recordings of her own.
"He's heard all the demos I've done. Some of 'em, you can tell his
brow is a little furrowed and he storms out of the room (after the tape
ends)," she said lightly. "It's a massive three minutes he's had to
listen to the record."
Also important were her grandparents. George and Violet Morrison, who
moved from Belfast to Marin County when Shana was 2, and stayed for the
next 10 years.
"My grandmother taught me the first songs I ever learned - 'Star of
the County Down,' 'Danny Boy', 'Tell My Ma' (and other Irish folk
standards). She would hold me on her knee and the whole afternoon just
sing song after song."
Shana said the at 77, Violet, to whom Caledonia is dedicated, "is
one of my best friends in the world" and still capable, when visiting
from Belfast, of getting up with her band to belt out a good blues.
George Morrison, Shana said, was a withdrawn man who seldom spoke but
loved collecting jazz and blues records; her grandparents ran Caledonia
Records, a shop in Fairfax (in Marin County). Shana, whose middle name
is also Caledonia - the mythic name of Scotland, as well as a
near-ringer for "Caldonia,' the Louise Jordan jump-blues standard -
worked at the record store as a girl, paid in vinyl.
"When a customer came in, George would just run in the back," Shana
recalled. "My grandmother worked at the cash register. She could
entertain people for hours; she was a great conversationalist."
That easy affability must have rubbed off on Violet Morrison's
granddaughter, a ready, bright talker in a recent interview from her
Mill Valley home - unlike Violet's son, who is notorious as one of
the most elusive, uncomfortable and sometimes hostile interview subjects
in all of rock.
'I think he's a very introverted person," Shana said of her father.
"My grandfather (who died in 1988) is the extreme; my dad is not even
comparable to him. Maybe it's hard for him to open up to complete
strangers; I don't know exactly what it is. It's definitely not just
when it's time for an interview. He's just a very inward,
thought-driven person."
As Shana reached her teens, Van Morrison moved to London, his parents
returned to Northern Ireland and she joined her mother in Los Angeles.
"Gladys," the most poignant song on her album, begins with a memory of
the parting: "Gladys hides her sadness/In a small cigar box her daddy
left behind so long ago."
"I actually do have a cigar box of my dad's that was left when he
moved out of his house in Sausalito....it's where I keep my keepsakes
and stuff."
Shana sang in high school musicals and in college choir while
attending Cal State Northridge. Her mother, who was pitching songs to
Top 40 artists in the 1980's, commandeered her as a demo singer. Shana
learned vocal and stylistic dexterity trying to make her mother's
efforts sound like the latest hits. But that close-up glimpse of the
struggle and uncertainty of the music business made her shy away from a
performing career.
"My mom would drive me crazy, writing songs and doing demos. I would
be like 'God, what a life. She never leaves the house and never gets a
paycheck.' She had her studio in the house and would end up never
leaving."
Shana decided that finance and law would be better. Her father, a
veritable geyser of malice toward the music business, was blunt when
informed of the prospect of his daughter in pinstripes: "He said , 'Why
do you want to do business? Business people are assholes.' "
Van Morrison arrived on the Pepperdine University campus for Shana's
graduation in December 1993, a knight in artistic armor - or so we can
only speculate, since our request for a few moments on the telephone
with him was predictably futile - bent on the chivalry of saving his
beloved damsel from the dungeons of industry.
"We had that fatherly-daughterly conversation. Did she have a job
lined up? No? Then how about joining his band? It was completely out of
the blue," she said - and welcome.
"I was so burned out from sitting in front of a computer. I wanted
to do something creative."
She thinks her father may have been encouraged by the heightened
interest she showed for his music during 1993 - a result, she said, of
his hiring Brian Kennedy, a Belfast-raised singer she befriended and
recommended to her dad while spending a college year in London.
Her father can be a stern musical master, but she had special status.
"He's very demanding, very critical. There's a tension about it, and
people know you have to be consistent and also...able to be
experimental...otherwise, you're gone. I didn't really feel that
pressure...I felt he was being more supportive to me because he wanted
to encourage me and not scare me away."
After a year working steadily with her father - she has sung
periodically with him since - Shana moved back to Marin County, got a
day job as a paralegal, and began singing in Claddagh, a Bay Area
Institution that plays rocked-up traditional Irish music.
She eventually formed her own band, Caledonia (what else?) with
fellow Claddagh alumni. They built solid club following in Northern
California, and Shana's appearances on Van Morrison's records and shows
helped them progress quickly. Shana, who manages the band, said several
record offers came in; she was about to sign last year with a subsidiary
of MCA that Dolly Parton was launching, but a corporate shake-up brought
on by Seagrams' purchase of MCA derailed the deal.
Caledonia is a collection of demos, it came out independently last
St. Patrick's Day and will be relaunched with national and international
distribution next month.
Morrison and her band played their first Los Angeles showcase two
months ago in hopes of attracting label interest. She has joined
producer Narada Michael Walden for songwriting sessions in Hawaii and
traveled periodically to Nashville to hook up with writing partners.
Her first big musical validation came last year when "I Spy," the
lightly funky, instantly memorable leadoff track on "Caledonia" was
recorded bilingually by a French singer and became a hit in Europe.
"Labels have told me it's a hit song, and it turns out it is," she
said prouldy. "I'm excited about it. I think if we do make a CD under
a major label, we'll re-record that song properly, not in a bedroom"
Morrison said her band already does welll enough with its gigs to
sustain itself indefinitely.
"I would like to have a career singing. I enjoy doing it, I like
the entertainment...and the creative aspect of it."
Last month, Shana sat in with her father as he played a series of
shows in San Francisco.
"I told my dad, 'Nobody's singing soprano backups. I could do that'.
He said, "you're not a backup singer' I only sing duets now. I guess
I've been promoted."
In the family tradition, it seems that Shana Morrison has reached the
point where it's too late to stop now.
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