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August 17, 2001/Av 28, 5761, Vol. 53, No.45
Kaplansky couldn't escape life of singing
LEISAH NAMM
Assistant Editor
It took years of therapy to convince Lucy Kaplansky that her destiny was to become a songwriter.
The singer-turned-psychologist-turned songwriter joins three other songwriters 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 19, at Red River Music Hall in Tempe to help promote her new album "Every Single Day."
She says that although her musical style defies categorization, the best description is a "combination of country, rock, pop and folk."
She'll be performing "On a Summer's Night" with singer-songwriters John Gorka, Cliff Eberhardt and Cheryl Wheeler.
"We are all pals and mutual fans and I've known them all for years," Kaplansky, 41, says. Each will perform their own songs with the others harmonizing or playing accompanying guitar.
It's a career she couldn't avoid.
After singing professionally in Chicago clubs for a year, Kaplansky left for New York City at age 18 to pursue her dream of singing. Her flair for harmony led to singing as half a duo with songwriter Shawn Colvin.
But then she dropped everything.
"It's a long, twisted story that I'll make very brief," she says. "I was just too full of conflict that I wasn't aware of about things that being a singer brought up for me and I ran away."
She left the musical scene at age 23 to pursue a doctorate in psychology from New York University, then worked at a New York hospital with chronically mentally ill adults and started a private practice.
Yet she continued to sing.
Friends who had received record contracts asked her to sing on their records. She harmonized on Colvin's Grammy-winning "Steady On," on Nanci Griffith's "Lone Star State of Mind" and "Little Love Affairs" and four of Gorka's albums. She also sang with Suzanne Vega on the "Pretty in Pink" soundtrack and with Griffith on "The Firm" soundtrack, as well as "The Heartbeat of America" Chevrolet commercial.
"Anyone with half a brain would have looked at me and said, 'well obviously Lucy, you want to be a singer,' " she says. But she continued to tell herself it was only a hobby.
Then the truth sank in. "Years later, in my own therapy, I figured out the truth - singing was always what I wanted."
In 1993, she returned to pursuing music seriously while still practicing psychology. "I had to make a living," she explains.
After the release of her first album "The Tide" (Red House Records) in 1994, she signed with booking agency Fleming Tamulevich & Associates and within six months had such a tight touring schedule that she had to stop practicing psychology.
She says that in her first three albums - her other albums include "Flesh and Bone" (1996) and "Ten Year Night" (1999) - she never made any direct references to her psychology background.
However, she credits the impact of her psychology career with helping her become "more observant and perceptive."
"I think about what goes on inside people and I think that can't help but show up in what I write," she notes.
However, "Nowhere," one song on her new compact disc, is directly inspired by symptoms she had heard about from her patients. "It's turned out that people respond to that song in a much more general way than I thought," she says. People "experience it as a song about alienation, which it certainly is, and not a song about mental illness."
Kaplansky was raised in a "very Reform" Jewish home in Chicago. She now lives in New York with her husband Rick Litvin, who is a film professor at NYU.
Her musical influences include Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, The Beatles and singer-songwriters of the 1970s. She says that most of her favorite music today is rock, folk and old country - "stuff that's good and tends not to be on commercial radio."
She has been featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," "Morning Edition," "Mountain Stage," "West Coast Live," "Acoustic Cafˇ" and "World Cafˇ." She is also featured in "SOLO: Women Singer-Songwriters in Their Own Words," a book profiling female performers such as Jewel, Sarah Maclachlan and Sheryl Crow.
"Every Single Day" (Red House Records) will be available Sept. 11.
Details
What: "On a Summer's Night"
When: 7 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 19
Where: Red River Music Hall, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe
Cost: $25 in advance, $30 at the door
Call: 480-829-6777
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