Singer- songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman told David Hennessy about her forthcoming tour with Judie Tzuke, connection to Ireland and unfortunate experiences of grief.
American singer- songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman is touring the UK with Judie Tzuke.
Beth and Judie initially met at a song writing workshop where they wrote the Safe which Judie subsequently recorded and released in 2018 with Beverley Craven and Julia Fordham as part of her Woman To Woman project.
Thrilled by the reaction to the song, Beth and Judie decided to keep their working relationship going and put together some live shows.
Beth Nielsen Chapman has penned numerous tunes for many top artists including Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Bette Midler, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Trisha Yearwood, Martina McBride, Michael McDonald, Amy Grant, Keb Mo’, Roberta Flack, Waylon Jennings, Faith Hill, Ute Lemper, Willie Nelson, Bettye LaVette and many more.
Her hit This Kiss, sung by Faith Hill, was ASCAP’S 1999 Song Of The Year, garnering a Grammy nomination and she was Nashville NAMMY’S 1999 Songwriter of the Year.
Beth also received a special award by The Alabama Music Hall Of Fame and was the recipient of The Distinguished Artist Award from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2009.
In October 2016 Beth was inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame which she told us she considers to be the highest honour she’s ever received.
Often a keynote speaker on grief, it is a subject she knows much about.
When she spoke to The Irish World in 2022 about her album Crazy Town, she spoke about her first husband Ernest Chapman who passed away in 1994.
Just months after that interview, it was reported that her second husband Bob Sherman had died of leukemia.
Beth has also battled breast cancer and spoken about her brain tumour. Her music has often foreshadowed the tragic events of her life.
The Irish World spoke to Beth to look ahead the tour.
How are you looking forward to coming back for this tour with Judie?
“I’m really looking forward to it.
“Judie and I have written together.
“I thought I knew her catalogue and I’ve been really doing the deep dive in preparing to learn some more of her songs.
“I think it’s going to be a fun night.”
So is it a case of the two of combining on each other’s material as opposed to playing your own music?
“Yeah, we’re kind of combining members of each of our bands.
“It’s going to be great.
“What I love about it is that when musicians come together and they have a mutual love and respect for each other, there’s always great things that happen. Just fun, spontaneous musical things.”
As you say you and Judie go back a long way, don’t you?
“Yeah, there’s just a lot of history and I immediately loved working with her as a writer because she’s a really excellent songwriter.
“We wrote the song Safe so we’re going to do that song as well and we’re tweaking a few things in the lyrics and kind of putting it back to the original version that we wrote.
“It’s a really powerful song about just coming back into yourself after a long and arduous relationship and it’s a timely song too with everything feeling really unsettled in the world.
“I think going to the show is going to be an experience of just taking a deep breath before you go back out into the crazy.
“We have these big shifts in our government which are very unsettling and very concerning to at least half of our population if not maybe more than half at this point.
“The pandemic was such a global thing like we had never seen in our lifetime and I of compare it to when I went through breast cancer way back in the year 2000.
“When I got diagnosed with Stage Two breast cancer, I hit the ground running.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to do all the things. I’m going to take care of myself. I’m going to exercise and eat right’.
“I just threw my entire focus into getting through it and then a year and a half after all my treatments were done my doctor said, ‘Good news, you’re cancer free so go on back to your life and pick up where you left off’.
“And that’s when I hit the emotional wall because I was busy trying to survive and all of a sudden my brain was like, ‘What was that that just happened?’
“I had practically a year of feeling all the emotion because you can’t do the emotion and the survival at the same time.
“I kind of feel like part of what’s happening in the world is you’ve got all this emotional upheaval that you’ve never dealt with because you were too busy trying to just figure out everything and get through it.
“I think there’s a collective grieving going on.
“I really do.
“And grief is something I’m really, really up on.
“Since I spoke to you last, my second husband passed away.
“I’ve been really exploring grief through my songwriting for many, many years but in my life it’s been really about acknowledging it and not getting lost or stuck in it.
“So in a weird way when you go through difficult stuff, it’s like you get an opportunity to grow into being in a place where your overall life could be in a better place going forward, until the next thing goes wrong.
“We have got to just hang in there. That’s all I know.”
Sorry to hear about your husband. I remember that sad news not long after our last chat. You have had two husbands pass away, battled breast cancer and also survived a brain tumour so you have weathered a number of storms..
“Yeah, and it’s not something I would have ever signed up for.
“I’m not saying, ‘Oh yay. I got to do all that stuff’, but it becomes sort of a superpower in other situations going forward.
“One of the things that’s the hardest is when Bob, my second husband, died I mean he said the same thing that my first husband said before he died which was, ‘Please don’t stop, keep singing. Keep doing your thing. That’s the best thing for you’.
“2023/ 2024 I didn’t cancel a single show and I think that was the right thing to do but I also realised, ‘I really need to actually slow down and acknowledge that stuff that was not as much fun to feel’.
“It’s like cleaning out your garage of emotions.
“You have got to kind of move it on out, you know?
“And you don’t forget the person obviously but you shift into a place of acceptance and you just go forward.
“It’s a beautiful thing but it’s also, to someone who’s just gone through a loss they’re looking at you like you’re crazy, ‘How do you do that?’
“You don’t have to know how to do it.
“When it’s time, you’ll do it.”
If both your late husbands pleaded with you to continue with music, is there a comfort in the music for you now?
“Well the music has always been the way through for me even before any of that happened.
“But every once in a while, I can feel a sense that he’s checking in.
“I still feel that from my first husband weirdly.
“It could be my mind playing tricks on me but I choose to think it’s them saying hi.
“Most of the time I just think they’re probably sitting up there on a cloud laughing their arse off at me going, ‘There she goes, doing that again’.
“I just feel there’s so much going on that you don’t have to know in your head.
“There’s a real magic to the ways that we can do things to help us heal.
“Music and performing and singing and writing has been my absolute main medicine and joy.
“Also, it’s a difficult time in the music business too.
“There’s a lot of ways that it’s not fair to the people who are making the music but what I tell my songwriting students is, ‘Write anyway, the one thing you can do is write the next song and be in your work as an artist, performing or working on your music. Nobody can take that away from you’.
“But without that, I can’t even imagine.”
Was it only ever music for you? Once you got that guitar in your hand, it was seldom out of it, is that right?
“Pretty much.
“I didn’t have a concept for how to be a professional musician really although my uncle was a very successful touring musician up and down the East Coast.
“I remember going to see my uncle Richard and going, ‘I’m going to do that’.
“But that wasn’t until I was pretty much almost ready to go to college and then I didn’t go to college because I got a publishing deal and I got a record deal and all this stuff started happening really fast.
“But there was a point there somewhere between pre-teen and older teenager where I thought I was going to be a veterinarian.
“That got usurped by the music so wouldn’t have happened.
“I still love animals.”
We spoke before about you being a ‘military brat’. Your father was a Major in the US Air Force so you did much moving around and were based in Germany for a time. Did music give you something in those times?
“Yeah, it gave me an anchor.
“I literally carried my guitar from one house to the next.
“When we moved, I hung on to that like a life raft.
“And when we moved from Germany to Montgomery, Alabama in 1969- which was a very intense time to come to Montgomery, Alabama. It was literally the centre of the civil rights movement.
“I had come from Germany where we had been studying about the Holocaust and I had even gone to this concentration camp. I was just shocked as a 12 year old turning 13, that people in the world could actually be that mean, that that could ever happen.
“And then we get dropped into this hotbed of civil rights intensity and then, for the first time, we didn’t live on an air force base, it’s a totally white neighbourhood and I’m around kids who have a very different experience of the other.
“I was just like, ‘Wow’, because I’d grown up with such a different experience of all different kinds of cultures and kids of different races and different religions and everybody played together.
“It was nothing.
“So it was really hard for me to understand, ‘Why is this a problem?’
“I was so naïve.”
You’ve won awards and played massive stages, what leaps out as a highlight of it all?
“There are many but I think probably one of the things I’m most grateful for is that I’m in the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.
“That was an amazing night.
“Just to be able to stand in front of the songwriting community and get to be a part of the Hall of Fame is a huge thing.
“If you’re a songwriter, it’s probably the biggest thing you can have happen.
“I’ve been nominated for a couple of Grammys and I haven’t won one but I loved that experience as well.
“But at least I get to be a Grammy because I have got two grandsons now so they call me Grammy because I didn’t win the Grammy.
“I said, ‘Well, I’ll just be a Grammy’.
“But definitely in terms of my career and my professional life being inducted into the Hall of Fame was a huge honour.”
Would you consider yourself a songwriter first and foremost more than a performer?
“They’re so intertwined.
“My experience of being a songwriter is driven by my voice, my voice is driven by my songwriting.
“I think if I stopped writing, I would keep singing and if I stopped singing, I would keep writing so they are separate in that way.
“But it’s weird, I kind of go like a pendulum.
“If I’ve been writing and writing and writing, I’m yearning to go out and sing and then I go out and sing and then I get on the road and then I’m like, ‘Oh, I gotta go home and write songs’.
“I used to be really good friends with Harlan Howard who was a very, very successful songwriter.
“He’s written so many smashes.
“He wrote all those hits for Patsy Cline back in the day.
“He was an older guy by the time I moved to Nashville and I got invited to write with him and he used to write a lot with Nanci Griffith and he would leave these messages on our phone.
“Nanci and I would laugh.
“We’d say, ‘Did he leave you a message too?’
“He’d leave a message on the phone and go, ‘What are you doing? Where are you? Get your butt back to Nashville. Singers are a dime a dozen, get home and write some songs with me’.
“I just thought that was the greatest compliment of all time, to have Harlan Howard begging me to get off the road. But I get pulled between the two.”
We spoke about your Irish heritage before. It means a lot to you, doesn’t it?
“My great grandmother is from County Down right there at the foot of the mountains of Mourne.
“And then my great grandfather, on my mother’s side, is from somewhere in the south.
“I do feel a very deep resonance when I come to Ireland.
“I always knew my great great grandfather was from there but I did not know about my great great grandmother.
“I knew they were from Ireland but I didn’t know one was from the north and one was from the south.
“The first time I went to the north I had already been to the south where I felt a real deep connection and then I went to the north and I thought, ‘Well, it probably won’t be the same. And it was just as interesting’.
“It was like, ‘Wow, I feel like I’m from here’.
“It’s fascinating.
“Ireland is Ireland and there’s nothing like it.”
Beth Nielsen Chapman and Judie Tzuke tour the UK from 18 October. They play The Apex in Bury St Edmonds 18 October, St George’s in Bristol on 19 October, Opera House in Buxton on 21 October, Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury on 22 October, Cadogan Hall in London on 23 October, Gulbenkian Arts Centre in Canterbury on 25 October, Cathedral in Derby on 29 October, The Stables in Milton Keynes on 30 October, The Haymarket in Basingstoke on 31 October, Fire Station in Sundreland on 2 November, Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh on 3 November, RNCM in Manchester on 5 November, The Atkinson in Southport on 6 November, Turner Sims in Southampton on 8 November and Pavilion De La Warr in Bexhill on 9 November.
For tickets, go to https://www.seetickets.com/tour/beth-nielsen-chapman-judie-tzuke.
For more information about Beth, click here.