A Conversation with Lori Lieberman – HuffPost 10.4.13

Mike Ragogna: Lori Liberman, you’ve been killing me softly with your songs for years. There, I said it! And how the heck are you?

Lori Lieberman: I’m okay. I recently lost my mom, so I’m a little up and down. It’s been a bit of a tough time, but I’m very happy to talk to you.

MR: Thank you very much, my condolences.

LL: Thank you, Mike.

MR: I imagine you were very close to your mom?

LL: Oh yes, very. And you know, she was eighty-seven but are your parents still alive, Mike?

MR: I have an eighty-six year-old father and that’s it.

LL: Yeah, so you know what it’s like. You don’t really know until you’ve been there. Now I know.

MR: Yeah, and it is tough because in addition to the closeness and the love, it’s a significant milestone in that even though this isn’t the reality, it feels like you’re a little more alone in the world.

LL: Yeah, it does feel that way, which is why I’m glad to talk to you. It makes me feel more connected.

MR: You’re very sweet, thank you. Okay, Lori, you have a new album Bricks Against The Glass. My feeling is each of these songs showcases some boundary expansion by either the protagonist or in the concept of the song.

LL: Thank you for saying that. I really appreciate you saying it’s a boundary push, because I think like I was pretty conscious in the writing of this album and the writing of each song. What was clear to me was that, at this age, I did not want to leave anything just hanging. I really wanted there to be a question and an answer at the end of each song. I wanted so much to know that I hadn’t lived this long just to leave it as a big question mark. Do you know what I mean?

MR: Yeah, you were dealing with topics and issues that you also wanted to talk about as things that had perhaps been left unsaid.

LL: That’s true, that’s really true. And because several of the songs are more politically motivated, I think that along with the election and what’s happening in the world and then being a mom, also, of seven blended kids and two sons of my own, it just became more clear that I thought that I wanted to talk about their future and what they’re dealing with right now and certainly what I’m dealing with. I’m incredibly disillusioned and I think that this album has to do with wanting so badly just to speak up and do whatever we could just to change. I worked for McGovern way back in the seventies and I wrote a song for Daniel Ellsberg and met him, by the way, and for some reason, it feels full circle to me now.

MR: When I saw Bricks Against The Glass‘ cover, I wondered if this were a protest album in the traditional folk artist way. Then I listened to it and realized you’re blending that concept with so many other things. I realized in general, you’re also protesting the status quo in a lot of ways.

LL: Yeah, that’s actually true, the status quo of where things have been in our world. And also, I found myself thinking that my stories, somehow, were worth talking about and that while I was grieving the loss of a dear friend, I was able to put that in there with Bricks Against The Glass because this friend and I had fought for so much and sometimes we really didn’t know what we’re really wearing our arm bands and our headbands for. When she passed away, I felt that I wanted to honor her in this song.

MR: And it honors the concept of the energy of youth, like it doesn’t matter what you’re protesting as long as the voice is getting heard and as long as the discussion is being had. My personal feeling is that’s something that happens when we’re younger, then we get a little more jaded and as we grow older, then we get disillusioned.

LL: That’s really true, that’s so true. I agree and I think that is a little bit about the disillusionment. But my hope is that people, when they hear it, won’t feel disillusioned. I finally understood that I could write a serious lyric and it didn’t necessarily have to have a lamenting melody or beat. I finally got that you could say what you want to say and have it be an uptempo song. Believe it or not, after forty years, I finally just understood that part.

MR: Which brings us to “Rise,” and a continuation of the thought. It’s a call to arms–meaning raising your actual arms, not so much second amendment rights.

LL: [laughs] Right! The song itself was born of a performance in The Netherlands with a very young artist who’s very well known there. Her name is Celine Cairo. I was to write a song that we both could sing, and I thought, “Well, I can’t write a love song because she’s so young and she hasn’t been through what I’ve been through.” Then I thought the one thing that we definitely had in common was this idea that we could somehow make people aware of a situation that was going on both in The Netherlands and Europe and the States, more of a universal discussion, really. So that’s why I wrote “Rise,” for us to perform and sing, and it was so well-received that I recorded it and put it on this record. It’s been a complicated thing for me, Mike, because every song that I write is a personal song, and for me, it all goes back to one big theme, and that is that I started in this business at nineteen with a big voice to sing with and no voice to speak up with. I let so many things go. I was choking on my own belief and opinions and everything, and yet I could sing clearly, strongly, and everyone would say, “What a big voice for such a little girl.” I think that’s the main theme, that I can talk about the world and this. For me, it’s a very personal statement about standing up and speaking out and feeling that even though I’m standing in a current that I’m not going to be swept away.

MR: Beautifully said. I want to also ask you about “Ticket To Leave” tying into all of this. It’s deceptive because the phrase “ticket to leave” can seem like a “let’s get away from all the hypocrisy and all that” statement. But in this case, it seems like you’re saying stay where you are and actually make things better.

LL: Yeah, that’s actually true. I think it might mean different things to other people, but for me, it did have that feeling. I don’t think I really meant when I wrote it for it to be, “Let’s move away to Canada, let’s hide away” thing. I think I meant, “Gain some perspective.” It was all about that. And as a footnote, when my mother passed away, I was playing it and right over the song, “We’ll fly away…” is when she took her last breath. So it has a very profound meaning to me now. I think that is really the tone of it: Take note of what’s going on and look at it from a distance. That’s what I was hoping it would say.

MR: As you said before, you had a strong voice but you couldn’t say what you needed. However, in all of the songs on this album, it seems like you are saying what you needing to say, and very strongly, especially in a song like “The End Of Our Story,” which is my favorite of the relationship songs.

LL: I’m so glad you said that. I wondered if I’d done a good enough job with that because it was so important for me to be able to say, “This is the end of our story but the beginning of my story. I’m really glad you responded to it. That makes me feel great.

MR: Thank you, and the fact that you followed it up with “It’s Another New Day,” as in, “This is my time, I’m starting over,” it’s almost like they were companion songs.

LL: Oh, I’m really glad. “It’s another new day” is a very different song for me, but I have to just tell you that my son Dan is an editor in Brooklyn and he was here for Winter vacation. He’s a guitarist as well. I heard him messing around with that riff and I yelled upstairs, “Dan, can I have that?” So we kind of wrote that a little bit together. There is some seriousness to it, “I think I’ll push delete and throw it in the sea and start all over,” and there is that choice in my life. I’ve often hung onto some pretty bad information or emails or whatever and there was something just so cleansing in saying, “You know what? I’m not going to go there, I’m going to press delete. It was a great thing for me, personally.

MR: I also wanted to talk about “On These Streets/San Francisco.” What’s the story behind that?

LL: There is a Dutch artist named Ruben Hein, and he’s a well known artist and great guy in The Netherlands. I do a lot of work there. He came out here to write with me, but he spent a week first in San Francisco, and when he came out, he was filled with that and I had already written the chorus. From there, we just wrote the rest of it together. For me, the thing that I responded to the most is that I wanted to remind him who we were and who I was. There’s just something I wanted to take that chance to show him, what I used to be and what I might be in case he’s forgotten. That was something in the song and I’ve always loved San Francisco as well. In fact, one day I hope to move there.

MR: Yeah, California seems to be your thing, though, Monterey also being one of your albums.

LL: [laughs] Yeah, that’s right. I’ve had strong ties to California. I was born here, I moved to Switzerland and moved there for most of my childhood but coming back here, it was where my relatives were, where the record business was centered and where my two sisters are. I think now maybe the world is a little bit more open to me so I don’t know where I’ll go next. Maybe Chicago.

MR: Oh, nice, definitely come to the Midwest!

LL: [laughs] There you go.

MR: Lori, I have been a fan for a very long time. In fact, I was gifted your first album by my mentor when I was like fourteen years old. To me, there is a big difference between the Lori Lieberman of the first albums on Capitol and your later material. Again this ties into how you had a very big voice but it wasn’t about what you were saying, because it seemed like in those days, it was about what Gimbel and Fox were saying, not you. I feel like, in a lot of ways, one of the things that might have hurt your initial launch wasn’t so much that Roberta Flack and Joel Dorn grabbed “Killing Me Softly,” but it seems to me that it was too much to ask for people to just buy an album of somebody who was singing almost whole albums of other songwriters’ songs, unless, of course, you were The Partridge Family or something like that. I never understood the paradigm although those songs were beautiful. On the other hand, I thought what you did with those songs was amazing and you did THAT all on your own. So for me, it was a bit of a challenge to try to understand the kind of artist you were back then, though that said, you made three great albums, especially the first. “There’s A Harbor,” to this day, I still kind of sing that one randomly.

LL: Yeah, I could talk about that for probably a year and a half and never be done with it. It was such a complicated time in my life and you know what? You’re absolutely right. Gimbel and Fox were looking for an artist they could produce, publish and manage and they found me at nineteen fresh out of Switzerland and naïve as you could ever imagine. They began to work with me and I was incredibly grateful, but my own writing I put aside and then a personal relationship ensued with Norman Gimbel and that was incredibly complicated for me. He was a lot older. So I was all kinds of mixed up at that moment and when I went to see Don McLean at the Troubadour, I wrote a poem about seeing him there and hearing his song “Empty Chairs” and it was on our first album. That was such a personal story and yet when I look at some of the others, like “Double-Decker Jet Plane” and “Time For Me To Go,” and of course “My Lover Do You Know” is the one song I did contribute, but they were taken largely from the experiences that Gimbel and I were having and a lot of them from my journals and things like that. I tried to inject my own personal identity but frankly, Mike, my identity was long gone. I’ve really only claimed my own identity in the last ten years. It’s been a very big struggle for me. I was kind of overwhelmed and robotic…I was sort of just going through motions, singing very predictably. I was kind of a mess. “There’s A Harbor” is one song that I so related to and oddly was written before they met me. That was the first song they showed me and the first song I learned and I loved it so much, but there were a lot of lyrics that I don’t know if I truly understood because, again, I was only nineteen and yet he was talking about, “It’s a year of change and the year changed me and the driftwood dries from the stormy sea and a bygone love is a love gone by, I can’t let go and I don’t know why.” I don’t know that I understood what he was saying. I didn’t have that experience.

MR: Yeah, but I do feel that with songs you may not have had total control over, the delivery that you had expressing those concepts made it seem like there was at least some sort of an empathetic relationship, at least with the tone of what was going on if not the lyrics.

LL: Yes, yes. You might be right, but I mean in the seventies and with things like that, I was very disconnected, I think, in general and then because I had no connection to myself, I had very little connection to the music and really only found my way at the fourth album, which was only released in The Netherlands and Europe and not here, called Straw Colored Girl.

MR: Was that a mixture of your material and Gimbel and Fox’s, then?

LL: Yeah, it was, and Straw Colored Girl was a direct story of my life in Switzerland.

MR: What is the story behind “Killing Me Softly”?

LL: The story of “KIlling Me Softly” happened the way it did. It was in periodicals and on the early Mike Douglas Show and all over the media of how the song was written. When Roberta Flack recorded it, she heard my version on an airplane and it was inspired by Don McLean and “Empty Chairs,” the song that he had sung. Don McLean has it on his website and he even invited me to a concert that he did a year and a half ago. I met him for the first time and introduced me from the stage and sang “Empty Chairs” to me again and invited me to participate in his documentary. I actually read the poem that I had written and talked about why I felt so moved by his music.

MR: With that period versus this period, what are some of the major changes that you feel Lori Lieberman has tucked under her belt now since then beyond finding her voice?

LL: Besides the fact that I’m an older artist I feel like I finally have my mission clearer than I ever did? If you had asked me five or ten years ago, “Who is Lori Lieberman?” I would have answered you differently from the way I would answer you now because now, the way I see myself right up there with being a woman is being a singer-songwriter with very much to say. Following that would be my family and my friends. But years ago, it would have been the other way around so the changes in my life are true growth in terms of my musicianship, my playing, my sense of independence, and where I could stand up solo, which is part of what that photograph on Bricks Against The Glass is. I have a feeling that I’m finally having fun and enjoying what I do. It has taken me so long and I have never felt that I’m singing stronger, playing better, or that my writing is stronger or that I’m more open to all sorts of music that I feel now that I didn’t feel before.

MR: Lori, I have a traditional question that I want to ask you at this point, especially after your thoughts about your own career. What advice do you have for new artists?

LL: This is a joke, but you know, a famous actor was asked the same thing and he said, “Take Fountain,” which is a shortcut to Sunset Boulevard. But my advice would be to protect yourself, to speak up when you feel it in your gut because if you feel it in your gut, it’s probably there, and to not give anything away as I did and to feel your value even if you’re too young to understand it, act as if. I think that’s my advice.

MR: That’s wonderful. By the way, I can’t remember was “Killing Me Softly” one of your singles?

LL: Yeah, actually, it was my single. I was climbing up the charts and I was the featured artist on American Airlines and Roberta Flack, I think, was coming from Chicago to New York and she heard it on in-flight. When she landed, she contacted Quincy Jones who said, “You’d better record that quick,” and then she got Joel Dorn and really made it something I never would have. She knocked mine right off the charts immediately. Her version… Honestly, it would have been just a simple folk song, which is what it was when I sang it.

MR: But you had other potential singles like “And The Feeling’s Good.” I know how politics are at record labels, I’m imagining they were totally weirded-out by what had happened with “Killing Me…”

LL: Yeah, I think also it was very complicated with the writers because they were thrilled to have it covered and then I became an artist whose songs became covered by other artists, Sarah Vaughan actually did record “And The Feeling’s Good.”

MR: José Feliciano as well.

LL: And Jim Croce with “I Got A Name.” It just kind of went on, but I think I basically began to feel like a demo singer.

MR: By the way, “My Lover Do You Know,” that’s my favorite song from the debut record.

LL: Are you kidding me, Mike? Oh my God, thank you for saying that. I have to tell you, I’ll never forget the press that came out at that time. They called me on “My Lover Do You Know”–and I fought for that line, I don’t know if I’d fight for it now–“…my softness is solidifying gel,” and the press called it “An unfortunate slip of Lori’s own pen.” [laughs]

MR: [laughs] Which I think was an unfortunate slip of their pens.

LL: I oughta find that guy.

MR: [laughs] Will you be touring to support the album?

LL: I am touring to support it, and I’m really excited because I’m going to be performing at the Grammy museum here in LA in October, it’s going to be a big retrospective or “An Evening With,” and it’s going to feature some musicians that played on my last record and it’s going to have some film. I get to really have an evening all about me and it’s a beautiful venue, so I’m really excited about that. That’s October 19, and then I’ll be doing some other things on the East Coast. I’d love to do City Winery there, but that’s not in place yet.

MR: Wow, if you do that you’ll have to let me know, I have to come and see you.

LL: I will. I think that’s about it, I don’t think there’s much more to say except that I so appreciate that you’ve taken me out of the down spot that I’m in today and I really appreciate your time, I really do, Mike.

MR: Oh, are you serious? I’ve been looking forward to this interview for years, and I love your music. It’s been with me forever.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne