A Conversation with Jen Chapin – HuffPost 5.7.14

Mike Ragogna: Jen, what are you doing on the road? I hear it’s three shows a day, with you guys setting up.

Jen Chapin: Yeah, and it’s pretty epic. But it’s better than not reaching people. I heard the number 2,000+ kids and grownups in that week, and we had many opportunities to connect. We had the grand finale concert at the River Music Experience in Davenport, which was a really nice show. I had reached out to Ben Kieffer at Iowa Public Radio; we had been on his show in the past at the coffee shop in Iowa City, and he was excited about taking his show on the road, so they did a recording of the concert at Redstone Room. There was a great audience! There was nice press and IPR gave us some plugs a lot of people heard, so it was this grand climax to a lot of work. They’re going to broadcast that concert on IPR on May 19th.

MR: Since 2002 when your first album was released, it’s like you’ve been living on the road, no?

JC: Well, not really, but the same thing happens to me–I look at emails from musician friends and see their list of tour dates and think “Wow, you guys are really on the road,” but you don’t list all the days when you’re home, in your sweatpants. So I’m far from being on the road all the time. My husband Stephan is out quite a bit more than I am with his own group, with different ensembles, so a lot of times, I’m home with the kids. But this is a big trip. We’re doing these three weeks, we had one long weekend in January and we’ll do another long weekend in May again back in the mid-west; then we won’t really be on the road until August. So it balances out.

MR: You have lots of things to juggle, including writing and recording new albums. What’s your secret?

JC: I’ll confess to being very far from the mindset of doing new music at the moment, and I think in the next six months I’m going to start freaking out and will need to focus on writing. But a lot of my creative energy for the time being goes towards putting together the patchwork of tour dates, working on some kind of promotion, thinking about music videos I want to produce, and things just in terms of selling the music I’ve made. Because of really believing in and investing time and money in the new album Reckoning, I’ve been at peace with the idea of giving up this year and following the album’s release towards really giving it my best shot at putting it out there, playing the songs, making videos, and telling the story about the album. Then I’ll start thinking about what’s next.

MR: You ended up getting Kevin Killen to produce the album.

JC: Yeah, that was a big decision to go outside of our own little cozy circle and home studio, because I’ve made a number of albums over the years that I feel very good about that were produced by myself, by my husband, and a lot of time with a wonderful collaborator–who’s very much off the radar–Rod Sherwood, who co-produced the albumsLinger and Ready, which were my best known until Reckoning. But Kevin is the full package of recording engineer, mixing engineer, and producer, and his producer-vibe is very transparent; he wants to let the songs and the musicians speak for themselves, and his technical competence becomes this real liberating force for being able to focus on the music, just making the instruments sound as good as they can. He really had some fantastic ideas. He contributed really unobtrusively, kind of a low-key, “Well, how about if we try this?” He helped with song structures–little tweaks to the form and so on. He’s so credible because he’s been involved in so many hit songs and iconic and historic recordings like Peter Gabriel’s So, and Unforgettable Fire. He’s been witness to history in a way. And he’s the nicest dude in the world, it was a pleasure working with him.

MR: You have a couple of songs, “Gospel” and “Let It Show” in particular, that seem to be aimed at having a kid and also singing to your kid before they were born. You were in that moment of impending “mommy-hood,” weren’t you?

JC: “Let It Show” definitely, and that’s actually the older song on the album. All the songs are new except that one which had appeared on a previous album Ready, and that whole album, from the songwriting to the production of it, was traveling my due date, basically, of Maceo, my first son. But “Gospel” is one of the few songs that, thematically, is outside of parenting; it’s very much a big-picture anthem of social movements and the questions of economic justice which were random in society.

MR: What have you been feeling very strongly about in the headlines lately, and are you involved in other kinds of social causes?

JC: For me, the questions of injustice are so completely connected to the key issues of our time. Like minimum wage. Basically, a living wage is the solution to hunger and there are 49 million Americans who are dealing with “food insecurities,” where they’re not starving, but they’re dealing with a nutrition deficit. They might even be, in many cases, obese or suffering from diabetes. A lot of these people are working, and they’re working in food jobs; they’re working at poultry processing plants, they’re farm workers, they’re working at checkouts in grocery stores, and they’re not being compensated for doing essential, honorable work. This is a key moral issue, it’s totally unsustainable, and it’s bad economics; multi-national corporations like Wal-Mart are squeezing their profits out of cheap labor, and are cutting into their own market because people can’t afford to buy their products. And of course they’re massively subsidized – one could argue that Wal-Mart might be the single biggest recipient of food-stamp money because they and other companies encourage their workers to get those benefits. So the taxes we pay are going right to the people who need it least, the most profitable companies. And there’s climate change; industrial agriculture is one of the main contributors to global warming, as far as how it affects the quality of our air and water, the droughts that we’re seeing across the west; and the farming system is an intensive utilizer of petroleum products, fertilizers, and water. And there’s the immigration issue, where our food system basically depends of illegal immigrants, who are a massive class of people living in fear of deportation. The issues are all over the place, but for me, it’s the coherence–the fact that all these problems are connected, and all these solutions are connected. At WhyHunger we strongly believe, and we learn from experience and scientific data that agroecology really is the future. Small, sustainable family farms and local food systems that are networked with each other and not networked with the global system of treating food like a commodity, but are more connected to “What are the needs of the given community?” This is the hope for feeding the world. We just spent a week in Iowa, and of course Iowa is a poster child for what’s wrong; driving through certain areas, all you smell is the waste from pork processing plants, or all you see in the mono-cultures of corn and soybeans. But on the other hand, every little coffee shop we went to was highlighting that they were buying stuff from local farms. Really, there’s a lot of hope, and there’s a lot of exciting progress as far as people reconnecting. It’s both the future and the past, because it’s recognizing that we’ve lost a kind of primal connection with our food and with our communities, and I think beyond a physical hunger there’s a spiritual hunger among Americans and people all over the world to get back to that.

MR: How do we turn it around? How do you get to the fundamentals of a human being to help them change their patterns? How do you turn around mentalities that have been a certain way for a long time?

JC: Well, let’s take cigarette-smoking, which has diminished exponentially in recent years because the public information is finally getting out there, and people feel a sense of making choices in their lives. I was just reading an article about how the places where smoking is most prevalent is basically in the poorest areas where there’s a sense of hopelessness, even though people know the information. But as a sense of empowerment, awareness and making your own choices is growing, and I think it absolutely is, people are making better choices. A 10-year study was just completed that saw a 33% drop in childhood obesity in kids under 5. Obesity rates have not only plateaued but they’ve gone down. It’s hard to say what’s causal and what’s correlative, but you can guess that parents are starting to question the food choices that were ubiquitous. It’s very small in the scale of the negative parts of our food system as far as people seeking out better options, which are often more expensive and not as accessible, but it’s happening.

MR: I was a fan of your dad Harry Chapin and I especially admired his efforts and the energy he put into everything he did, whether it be a concert, WhyHunger, or just helping people. I’m not saying to speak for him, but what thoughts do you think your dad might have had these days about what’s happening on those fronts you’re talking about?

JC: Certainly my mother, who has never by choice been a public person, was really the instigating factor behind his advocacy, behind his thinking in terms of community and connecting with the place where we lived, and the issues of hunger and poverty being the most crucial issues of our time. I was proudly raised–as were my four siblings–in that context of questioning. So much has happened, and I can imagine that he would be disgusted with how far we’ve fallen politically and how far we’ve veered to the right as far as where the center is in American discourse. Obama’s more to the right of Nixon, basically. But as far as what happening with real people, what we do at WhyHunger is we’re a grassroots support organization that goes into communities not to tell them how to solve their problems but to amplify their voices, make connection, set up peer-to-peer learning networks and try to magnify the best and most innovative solutions to hunger and poverty, which are happening in small models all across the country and the world. There’s a real food movement where people recognizing common challenges and common solutions, and he would have been totally excited by that. In his lifestyle, he didn’t really take care of his body more than what was absolutely necessary, as far as sleep and food; he was certainly into American “convenience” habits such as grabbing junk food on the go because he just had so many things he wanted to do, so it would have been interesting to see how would have heeded the call of “slow food,” because he didn’t do “slow” anything. But it goes into the overarching theme that we’re very efficient at doing emergency feeding programs, and shipping tons of processed foods to poor people; we’re very efficient at harvesting millions of bushels of this and that; everything moves very quickly, but I think that’s being recognized as part of the problem, and we’re recognizing the need for a little patience, a little more care, and a little more sense of the external costs of our productions methods and consuming habits. That probably would have been a challenge for him to walk the walk in that sort of way, given his tempo. But then again, he’d be 71 at this time, so he probably would have slowed down at least a tiny bit, maybe.

MR: [laughs] I doubt he would have slowed down at all! So, what is your advice for new artists?

JC: What I tell people is that sometimes it takes a little bit of work, but spend the time, effort, focus, reflection and listening to dig deeper into yourself, and express who you are. Sometimes it takes really listening to your influences so then you can parse out “What part of myself comes from this person and how do make it authentically part of me?” etc. It can be a process, and it’s sort of a never-ending process, but I think any artist of any medium needs to express themselves and not some external idea.

MR: Your outreach on this album was larger than it was on the previous albums.

JC: Yeah, and when it comes to spending the money, I call Bernadette [Quigley] my paid best friend. I’ve been in different mindsets when it comes to wanting to promote. It’s natural and essential to my mental health to keep performing and touring, and keep the music going, and sporadically to have new songs, but as far as putting that energy and money into promoting, that’s not a constant. But I got the energy back and it’s been really rewarding, it’s been a new kind of energy this past year, as a product of Bernadette’s efforts, and my efforts.

MR: So this isn’t just a passing phase, you’re going to hang in there with this music thing a little longer.

JC: [laughs] That’s what it looks like! And even though I’m not exactly a jazz musician, jazz is my reference as far as a lifestyle and a set of goals. It’s not about being the most famous person selling out stadiums, but it’s about making a living and continuing to grow, and that could be going into your 80s or 90s as your body allows. If you look around at the jazz world, so many people remain vitally alive in the music, so that’s where I come from.

MR: Have you always had jazz in your life?

JC: Not always. My grandfather was a jazz drummer, and because of the era he grew up in, wasn’t really out in the mix of playing jazz, and he became an educator. He wasn’t part of my daily life until I started making music. And I came around to a peer group of jazz musicians and went to Berkeley college of music, that’s kind of where that came from.

MR: Jen Chapin’s future: what’s it look like?

JC: I don’t know if it’s a lack of ambition, or personality, but I just want to do more of the same, but bigger and better. My priority has always been authenticity, and doing things that feel very real to me, and sometimes I think “Oh I should just do an album that’s all dance music,” or sometimes I’ll have these ideas that I’ll do some kind of a reinvention on a subtle scale. But things take their own evolution, more than a revolution, as far as what I’m producing. I just want to build my audience, basically. I think at some point we’re going to ship out for a year in the next few years, and as a family we’re going to transplant to Africa for a stage and dig into some music and a different way of living outside the American consumer world. So that will be an adventure, as yet kind of abstract in the planning phase. I’ve never gone more than three years without a new album, so something will have to come together before too long. I tend to be in the moment and focus on the immediate challenges of touring and so on, and all the sudden it’s like “Okay, now it’s time,” and I get towards that planning stage.

MR: Nice. Is there anything we’ve left out?

JC: Oh, I can mention one thing which might be relevant. WhyHunger has been able to weather the economic storm since 2008, but this year’s been a little tough. So it motivated me to start a new campaign for fundraising, which is rallying Harry fans to be monthly donors. The website is http://www.whyhunger.org/harrysgivingcircle. For $5/month you can be “Keep The Change,” for $10 a month “You can always count on the Cheap Seats,” etc. It was a fun collaboration with the staff to come up with that kind of framework for it, and I’ve been raising money on the road as part of our concerts.

Transcribed by Emily Fotis