She also seems to be phenomenally busy. For instance, not only has she’s just recorded her 20th album, which will be released in May, but she recently played a gig at The Bootleg Theatre in LA to an audience that featured such luminaries as Jackson Browne.
Despite often being labelled a “folk singer”, Sainte-Marie has pursued an eclectic musical path. When discussing what has shaped this approach to music she says, “It’s my own interest [in music]. I really do love pop music. I really do love the music of the 1600’s in Scotland. I like music from China, India and the Middle East and I always have. I didn’t know enough to do it one way only. [Also] I guess I get bored easily.” When I raise the idea that Sainte-Marie was punk long before the movement’s ‘70s heyday, she bursts out laughing and says, “Thank you. You are the only person who ever noticed that. Because I don’t know any better, haven’t been to musical school and I’m not one of the guys, it has kept me unique. Sometimes I try things. My doing punk before punk came along was a lucky coincidence.”
With protest songs such as Universal Soldier, in which the futility and madness of war is laid bare, Sainte-Marie demonstrates music can achieve a whole lot more than mere entertainment: it can provoke thought, inspire reflection and perhaps even change minds. Speaking about the benefits of using music to convey political messages, she says, “In my heart what it’s all about is the art of the three-minute song. If you can say something in three minutes, I think you can have more impact than as if you had written a 400-page book that sits on the shelf too heavy to lift. It’s a real people’s way of saying something concisely. [With] the world being what it is, [I] think maybe I can make my little contribution through the three minute song. ” Her belief in the power of brevity was confirmed when she got to mingle with the denizens of a rather famous fictional street. “For five and a half years I was on Sesame Street and that brought that home to me again,” she explains. “The idea of short attention spans and being able to make a point in three and a half minutes is something to aim for.” The durability of song is also important to Sainte-Marie. “Great music is not only diverse and comes from everywhere but it lasts,” she exclaims. “A great song doesn’t stop being great just because another song comes along.”
A song’s durability and currency is guaranteed when it’s kept alive not only by the originator but by other musicians who imbue it with their own style. It’s testament to the quality of Sainte-Marie’s songwriting that so much of her work has been covered by a staggering and diverse range of artists. Sainte-Marie’s dark tale of addiction Cod’ine, for instance, seems to have been covered by everyone from Donovan, Janis Joplin, The Charlatans and Quicksilver Messenger Service to Dave Graney and Courtney Love. Discussing her response to other people covering her material she says, “I wrote a song called Until It’s Time For You To Go which is a real pop song and I didn’t even tell people that I wrote it as it’s such a pop song. The ‘folk police’ used to get after you if you strayed into pop music. But then Bobby Darin recorded it and he didn’t do it the way I did and I just didn’t know what to think of that. It took me a while and then I started to just take it as such an incredible compliment that people who I have never met, people from different kinds of music than I’ve ever played were recording my songs and it was a real thrill. It’s a great compliment when anybody else does your song. It’s good.”
Discussing her upcoming gigs in Australia Sainte-Marie says, “The program that we will be doing in Australia this time is very diverse. Depending on the length of the show, I will usually throw in the songs that I think everyone is hoping that I will do like Until It’s Time For You To Go, Up Where We Belong which won me my Academy Award, Universal Soldier, some Native American things like Starwalker, some that you have never heard before that are from the new album. It’s always a mix of what I think people are hoping we will do and things that will surprise them. I don’t just do a greatest hits show because that would get boring for me so I always throw in some new ones. It keeps the band fresh too.”
BY GRAHAM BLACKLEY
