A reference near the end to "blooming" meals will make more sense if you know that the lunch we had at the cafe had edible flowers in the salad. That part got edited out.
I hate the title. I hate the lede. I probably will hate the article, when I reread it. But I love Sloan, so here it is.
From Dirty Linen #73 (Dec '97/Jan '98)
Sloan Wainwright
No Thinking Too Much!
by Pamela Murray Winters
Can you have it all? And if you had it all, where would you put it?
Sloan Wainwright’s treasures are in Katonah, New York. It’s the area where she was raised and where much of her family still lives. (Brother Loudon visits when he can.) It’s the home of the Bakers Cafe, which she runs with her sister. It’s where her husband, too, was born, and where the couple lives with their two sons. And it’s where the roots of her creativity and her personality run deep.
Wainwright had a classic baby-boomer childhood, with an artistic twist. “We had a great piano in the TV room, and I would come home from school and play piano and watch TV concurrently and sing little songs about what had happened in school that day... I was one of those kids who loved to listen to show tunes and get up and act them out.”
When you take your show out of the living room and onto the road, sometimes things change, as the young Wainwright discovered performing original songs in New York folk clubs. “I had a very hard time dealing with the scene. I was young, and I was perhaps not motivated enough, didn’t want it bad enough to just continue forward. I was oversensitive... it was very hard for me to deal with criticism.”
For a time she turned to traditional music, finding that it was easier to express herself without the burden of that personal connection to the songs. (She said old-timey music also suited her “pounding” piano style.)
She’s still a closet trad player, though she won’t bring out the banjo onstage. “It was refreshing and renewing, and it was detached from my whole sort of personal expression — even though what it really did was bring up a whole new bunch of stuff for me. But I wasn’t singing words about what I was feeling or what I was seeing.”
Meanwhile, she was getting married, having children, and working at the Bakers Cafe, where lunch is a treat for the senses. So how did Sloan Wainwright find her way back to the stage and to the studio?
“I was involved in a local production company,” she said, “and we were doing original children’s theater with original music...and what started happening was that these shows had to be performed. And that was how I squeaked back onstage. That was about 14 years ago.” She never stopped writing songs, and as she found that her earlier hypersensitivity had faded, she returned to performing her own compositions. Sloan Wainwright was released in 1996 on Waterbug, and a new album, tentatively titled From Where You Are, is due this spring.
Working with a strong band — “Even though I write the songs and sing the songs, the individual personalities of the group come through” — has probably led to some of her success on the adult album alternative market.
Her sound combines folk, rock, jazz, and funk in a way that fans of Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading will recognize. She hopes that her new album will include more of the solo work that once frightened her off the stage.
The power of her voice and her imagination makes it sound like she’s never stopped singing. Anne Saunders of Falcon Ridge Productions said, “Her range must be close to five octaves and starts somewhere down where only trees and other elemental beings of the earth can hear.”
Thus, the origin of “On a Windy Day” (from her self-titled album) seems appropriate. “It was a little assignment I gave myself to write a song from the perspective of a squirrel. Now at a show I would never tell anybody that before I sang the song — it would ruin it! And it’s about death and renewal... but the original idea was I was sitting there and playing, and I was looking out the window and going ‘A squirrel!’ ”
She seems like the earth mother so many of us want to be, but when asked, “What’s it like being a superwoman?” she recoiled, laughing, protesting. “There’s a part of me that feels a little shy about ‘Sloan: mother, wife, baker, business owner, musician...’ ” Sometimes she worries about how it looks to outsiders. “My biggest fear is of being a dilettante — being a doer of many things and not really very good at any of them.”
Deep down, where it counts, she knows that it’s all part of the same creation. There’s an organic unity to her life that pleases her. As the Bakers Cafe serves up blooming meals and her sons reach maturity, Wainwright feels the nourishment of her roots and rejoices in fruition. “The creative expression is always there.” Waving her hand across the sunny table, she continued. “I did it here — expressed myself through this place, expressed myself through my children. And now I can stand on a stage and sing, which is really what I’ve been waiting for, saying what I want to say. I’ve been waiting. And if I think too much about it, I get scared — I think, ‘Is it too late?’ I hope not!
“If I think too much... I’m tired. But isn’t that true for everybody? Don’t worry, be happy? Or as my dear sweet acupuncturist Dr. Wong says: ‘No thinking too much.’ ” She offered a serene smile. “No thinking too much. Very good phrase.”
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