By: centraljersey.com
But for all of the music she’s made, Ms. Lieberman doesn’t get to perform her older songs often because she’s usually promoting her newest album.
That should make her Sept. 25 Concerts at the Crossing performance in Titusville a special occasion for Ms. Lieberman and her fans because, as the evening’s headliner, Ms. Lieberman says she’ll have time to reach back and play some old favorites.
Part of the concert will see Ms. Lieberman performing with a band consisting of Eugene Ruffolo (who records Rounder Records) on background vocals and guitar, Maryann McSweeney on upright bass and Joe Bonadio – who has toured with Roseanne Cash – on percussion.
"It should be just a really nice ensemble," Ms. Lieberman says, "but halfway through, they’re going to leave me to do my own thing, where I’ll be able to sit at the piano and sing some of my earlier stuff, from my Capitol days."
She’s looking forward to performing some songs she hasn’t shared with audiences in a long time, from her earliest albums, when she recorded for Capitol Records, like Lori Lieberman, released in 1972, Becoming (1973) and Piece of Time (1974). She says she often hears from fans who wish they could hear songs from those albums.
"They want me to sing that stuff," she says. "I am just so looking forward to taking my time and just having it unfold."
Diving into her past not only means rediscovering some old songs, but also finding new meanings in them.
"I was so young when I started," she says. "When I recorded for Capitol, I was only 19 and a lot of the songs had an older cast to them, but now that I am older, I relate to them more."
Her solo set not only allows her to delve into her past, but let’s her be spontaneous.
"I think it’s going to be pretty loose, and I am just going to see how it goes," she says. "I’m hoping that one thing folds into the rest and that it’s an exciting and dramatic and moving evening, I really do. At least it will be for me, I’ll have a good time."
New songs, of course, are a big part of her concerts. Her newest album, Gun Metal Sky, was released last year. It was recently repackaged as Take Courage for the Netherlands, where she’ll be touring this November. Part of the repackaging included recording a new song, "Only With You," written in 1973 by Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys. Before recording it, Ms. Lieberman found Mr. Wilson’s version of it on YouTube.
"You know how we all know all the old Beach Boys songs but we probably never heard of that one?" Ms. Lieberman says. "That’s because it’s so bad, it’s so bad. But, I was able to re-orchestrate it and re-do it, and actually it’s turned out really nicely."
Most of the songs she prefers, though, are original compositions, and she says she has a very specific way of writing. "If I write an entire lyric, it overwhelms me and I can’t match the music to the lyric," she says. "And similarly, if I write an entire music piece, I (worry) that the lyric won’t be organic to the melody."
So she writes by creating a piece of music, then writes a bit of lyric, and adds more music, a melody or accompaniment, then back to lyrics until she has a complete song.
"It goes that way in steps, it kind of staggers until I have the whole thing," she says. "And I do many, many drafts, and I like to do it handwritten on paper… And I have a specific pad of paper and specific pen, and I have my candles, I have low light, and everyone comes into the room and says, ‘Turn on the lights.’ I like it dark and I always have my dogs with me. I just love it. If I was a smoker, I swear to God I’d be chain smoking, but I can’t do that, so I’m a gum chewer."
Ms. Lieberman also writes songs by experimenting. The title track of Gun Metal Sky started with a book of poetry.
"I opened it to a page, and found the word ‘gun,’ and I closed it, and I opened it to another page and it said ‘metal,’ and I closed it and I opened it and it said ‘sky,’" she says. "And that’s kind of the way I wrote this song. It was really cool. I thought, What would happen if I just had fun with this? What turned out were interesting images that I may never have put together. Something like two words like ‘crystal rain,’ I never would have written those words."
Yet another writing process involves drawing inspiration from other sources. She did this with her 1996 song "Girl Writing a Letter," from her 1996 album, Home of Whispers. The song is based on a poem by William Carpenter.
"It’s a narrative poem about a thief who sees a Vermeer painting in a museum, and enters it. He plays music for the girl, and they go out, have a beer, fall in love, and the girl feels alive."
The poem sparked Ms. Lieberman’s songwriting juices."I changed and adapted it, and put it into a rhyming scheme and added music to it with this heavily orchestrated piece," Ms. Lieberman says. "And it’s so cool! It’s really cool. Those are the three ways I write."
The most famous song in Ms. Lieberman’s set list is "Killing Me Softly," which she recorded for her debut album (and revisited for Gun Metal Sky). The origins of the song are one of the legends of popular music, right up there with who Carly Simon wrote "You’re So Vain" about, and who’s the target of Alanis Morissette’s "You Oughta Know."
Ms. Lieberman’s version of the events leading to "Killing Me Softly" is that she and a friend went to the Troubadour to see Don McLean perform.
"I thought he was really good," she says. "But slowly it started to seep in that he was singing about something that I was going through, I was only 19 but I was probably on my 40th breakup. He was singing a song called ‘Empty Chairs,’ and I just felt like he was totally singing about me and my life."
She says she wrote a poem on a napkin, which she showed to lyricist Norman Gimbel, which he and composer Charlie Fox based the song on.