Lucy Kaplansky – An Xperience Interview

Lucy Kaplansky – An Xperience Interview – by Liam Sweeny.

Lucy Kaplansky once tried to run away from music. And if you hear her songs online or in person, you can feel the path she ran on. She will be bringing decades of folk singing to Caffe Lena on November 23.

RRX: You’re going to be playing at Caffe Lena on November 23. I know you’ve been to Lena before; what do you think about it? Do you think it has anything that you don’t see anywhere else?

LP: It’s a really great venue. I mean, it was always a good venue and a fun venue, but now it’s one of the premier intimate venues in the country, with the sound and the way it’s set up, the renovation, it’s incredible. It is just a total pleasure to play there. Plus, their live streaming is really high quality, and people like to watch that too.

RRX: Do you have anything coming up for us? A new album, new song, new video, new recipe for stuffing and gravy? Anything on the horizon?

LP: I’ve got a new album that came out in January that’s called “The Lucy Story.” Somebody called it a musical autobiography. It’s mostly never-released tracks from my entire career, a lot of live recordings, album outtakes, and then some demos that people have never heard. And it literally goes back to my bedroom when I was 16. They’re almost all cover songs and just songs I’ve sung over the years, and I’ve never put on a record before. So that’s new.

RRX: When you’re going through music to put an album together and you’re looking through all the live stuff, do you have to pore through all your live work to find the good stuff, or do you know right away, like “that’s the one I want”?

LP: I have no idea. I have to go back and listen. Definitely have to go back and listen. Then there is also the guy who produced it, who engineered and mixed the album. His name is Mark Dan. He has this software where you can take an existing track and really make it sound better. So he took some of my live recordings that were OK sonically and made them really good sonically. So there was that too.

RRX: Two of the passions in your life are music and psychology. There’s a commonality in that they both help people feel better. And you were playing music before you had earned your PhD. What drew you to psychology?

LP: It’s a complicated story, but I’m gonna try and simplify it. I was really running away from music when I went into psychology. I always wanted to do music. I was kind of too neurotic to let myself pursue the thing I really wanted. So I was literally running away, and when I finally figured that out with some really good psychotherapy, I realized I had to go back to music, that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t do music. And then I got too busy with music, and that was the end of my psychology career.

There are similarities in the sense that I guess they both probe, at least some of the time, the human psyche. People often say, ‘Is music therapy?’ Having been a psychologist, therapy is therapy. Music can make you feel and experience things in a very unique way, for sure. And move you. But it’s not therapy per se. Therapy is where you’re developing new understandings of the way you function and your motivations, and try to function in a more adaptive way. How’s that for a long answer?

RRX: I read that your father was a well-known mathematician. And a classical pianist, and that he made music for you to play, a math-oriented kind of music. Can you describe that?

LP: He wrote songs just as a hobby, and he did write a couple of songs that are based on math. And one of them, if you go to my website, was a song about pi. There’s a music video that my husband directed of the song. It’s hilarious, and years ago, when I was first starting out performing, I was trying to think about something funny I could have in my shows. And my husband said, “Why don’t you do one of your dad’s songs?” So that’s how I ended up doing them. He didn’t write them for me. He just wrote them, and he was thrilled when I would perform them sometimes, when I was performing in California, where my parents lived. He would come sit in with me on piano on his songs. We’d do a couple of his songs together. But they were his songs that he wrote for fun. I just kind of, what’s the word? I took them over that way.

RRX: OK, so you’ve been in and out of the folk scene for decades. You’ve seen the music transform in ways the average listener probably might not catch. Have you seen anything that you think has been evolving in folk music since you started? In the music itself, or in the community.

LP: There’s just been so many changes. I mean, I’ve been part of the folk community for almost going on 50 years. It’s changed multiple times. There was a real kind of folk revival in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And then, singer-songwriters really kind of became the thing. I was friends with Suzanne Vega when she first started out. And when she came along in 1986, that really was when women singer-songwriters started to be able to have real success. So she was one of the first, I think. And then there was radio to go along with all that, and they played people like me and Richard Shindell, and then that all went away. But in the last few years, the radio went away. It’s just very different now. They don’t play people like me anymore. So then streaming came along and kind of decimated CD sales. So there’s been many, many changes over the years. A lot of them not really good for people like me. And yet people like me, we soldier on because there is an audience out there. But it’s harder to get to them. I guess that’s the point.

RRX: What would you like to tell people who are gonna come see you in November at Caffe Lena?

LP: I will be doing old songs, new songs, and I always take requests because it makes the whole thing more interesting. Well, people like it, and it makes it more interesting for me to not know what I’m going to play and sometimes play things I haven’t played in a long time. I’ll be telling some stories, and I hope people find it fun and also moving.

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