Resilience, Hope, and Grace
The Music of Beth Nielsen Chapman
Spring, 2005
 Beth
Nielsen Chapman is a renowned singer and songwriter. She has written
songs in diverse styles for singers Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris,
Neil Diamond, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Bette Midler, and Trisha
Yearwood, and wrote a hit song for Elton John and Faith Hill. During
her childhood, she was exposed to a wide variety of cultural influences
and musical styles. She loved the music of Gershwin, Cole Porter,
Joni Mitchell, Carole King, the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Motown sound,
Jimmy Webb, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Ella Fitzgerald. Those influences
influenced her ability to create a diverse repertoire of music. She
developed a pure, powerful songwriting style and a beautifully clear,
expressive voice. Her recent album, Hymns, has been a huge success
and she has a new album, Look, coming out in June. For more information
about songs, albums, and future appearances of Beth, go to her website:
bethnielsenchapman.com.
Raz Ingrasci: Much of your music is about resilience,
vulnerability, healing, hope, and grace of life. Do you sit down
and try to write about that?
Beth Nielsen Chapman: No. Often I hear the sound
of the vowels prior to the consonants and I hear the sound of the
line before I know what the meaning of the line is. It’s a
drawing together of all these elements; like the way that sacred
music and really well written songs seem to resonate with the voice.
I mean, the sound of the tone and the note and the vowels all sort
of go together in an amazing way. And the greatest songs ever written
all have that character.
RI: Are the vowels where the emotional aspect
is?
BNC: There is actually a connection between the
emotion of the music and which vowels resonate the most. I think
in a song like “Sand & Water,” the way that it repeats
three times, “All alone …, All alone…” It’s
like this wave that just hits three times. My experience performing
that song is that there’s always more than one person in the
audience who will come up to me afterwards and say: “I haven’t
been able to grieve since my loved one died.”
There’s something about that song that just sort of gently
pries open that resistance and by the end of the song they’re
just completely able to get in touch with those feelings.
RI: You’re writing from your deepest emotional
truth.
BNC: Well, yes, as much as I can, but I’m
actually also writing from a very unconscious, unanalytical place.
Actually, the sorrow and loss that I’ve gone through has perhaps
made me more tuned in, in a sense, to a healing vibration. My attempt
to get my balance, through songwriting, also resulted in my being
a vessel for that sound to come through, creating something that
can help others to heal.
RI: Well, we all know that there are soothing
sounds and there are antagonizing sounds.
BNC: Yes, and it really has an effect on many
levels of the etheric field and on down to the skin and bone. I
wasn’t aware that I was doing that when I was younger. There’s
a song on my very first album called “Emily” that is
about losing a friend. In high school, I actually lost two people
in my life. Five years after I wrote it I figured this out. I didn’t
figure it out at all when I was writing it. I just followed the
sound of it. There were two people in my life, two losses, that
informed the writing of that song; so this character Emily doesn’t
really exist as one person. Somehow the loss of two different people
combined to somehow make that song gestate within me.
RI: Your songs are hopeful and spiritual and
full of grace and healing. They’re songs of redemption and
resilience.
BNC: Well, they write themselves that way. I
can only imagine that one of the things you can say about loss is
that when somebody dies there’s every reason to believe that
the person’s soul and the connection that you have with the
spirit of that person can continue. The beauty of the heart is that
it just keeps expanding, that there is always space for new love
and a place unique to each loved one inside.
RI: So, what’s happening is that you’re
writing and singing from a place that is beyond, that’s transcendent
and can take us to a place that is both greater than the pain and
yet includes the pain.
BNC: Every single painting I’ve ever seen,
every manifestation of someone’s creativity, even if it’s
not a great painting or not a great song, everywhere that door opens,
and what I call divine intervention is allowed through, is where
God just presses up through all the resistance that we have. And
I think I do use a lot of my skill to write those songs, but the
actual raw material of them comes from something with more wisdom
than I can hold in my brain. I don’t know how to think that
stuff up. I don’t think anybody who’s creating something
that moves a lot of people is doing it alone. It’s like standing
next to the ocean and the vastness of it. It’s all the sadness
and it’s all the joy and you can just be in wonder of it.
And I think one of the things I pulled through all of the loss
was my sense of wonder. It is just ridiculously enhanced. I mean,
I walked outside this morning and one of my tulips was blooming
and I just about fell over in tears of joy. It really feels corny
when you react that way, but it is important to be able to notice
it and just stop whatever I’m running around doing and go
look at that flower. To me that’s also God saying hello. It’s
comforting to me to feel that music is helping me and helping others
and that art does that. God leads us to art as a path to healing.
It makes me feel reassured that we’re very cared for.
RI: There’s that line in your song, “Every
December Sky”: “Sometimes I have to trust what I can’t
know.” It sounds like you try to live it. You did the Hoffman
Process eight years ago.
BNC: My husband died in ’94 and my dear
friend Rodney Crowell had done the Process and we were making the
record Sand & Water, which is a musical account of my journey
through grief. I was falling apart throughout the making of that
record and I was difficult to work with. And Rodney stayed so centered
and was able to navigate through my mood swings and really stayed
steady for me. And after it was all over, one day when I took him
to lunch to apologize for how hard I was to work with, he said,
“Well, there’s this thing I did that really changed
my life and maybe you might want to think about doing it.”
And he told me about the Hoffman Process and he told me how he had
found out about it through someone he knew whose voice actually
changed from high-pitched to lower and more centered after completing
the Process. He said to that person, “I want what you’re
having. What happened to you?”
And he’s a pretty smart guy so I thought, “Well, I’ll
go do this. Why not?” I had no idea of the extent that it
would change my life and in ways that I didn’t even know about.
I mean, I knew I needed to go and deal with the grief of losing
my husband, but through my process I was so busy working on my relationship
to my parents and myself, I almost had no time to get to grieving.
RI: Yes, in the Process you expand your emotional
and your spiritual range so that you can have access to the dimensions
of yourself that are big enough to deal with a grief like that.
I would imagine that your grief, your grieving for your husband,
Ernest, changed.
BNC: It changed and allowed me to let more of
it in. I mean, grief is so big. I was married for 15 years and it
was so big. It was like standing in front of a boulder. So I had
to break it up into smaller pieces and really over a long period
of time in different ways I would grieve. And I explain to people
that I think of grief as a spiral and you’re going up but
you don’t feel like you’re going up ’cause you
keep looking out the windows and you’re seeing the same thing
that you just saw the last time you went around. And so you’re
thinking, “I’m not getting anywhere,” but then
you really are so it’s just an odd kind of juxtaposition between
those two things.
RI: We try to do a lot of things with our unwanted
emotions so as not to feel them, but this kind of suffering, sometimes
referred to as “the dark night of the soul,” can be
an initiation into the divine. It’s where most people come
up against something that’s so huge they just can’t
do anything with it. And then to find your way through it and to
find that voice within you that is healing and guiding is pretty
extraordinary. It’s like every moment becomes more present
and precious.
BNC: Well, it’s a gift that I never want
to take for granted, and I actually feel like everybody in the world
has within them the capacity to find the gift to express that. I
feel like there’s this invisible hole in the top of our heads,
like a spiritual belly button where, if we can allow it, we can
work through our grief, and tap into the flow of creativity with
all of its infinite possibilities and healing properties.
One of the songs that I think was a direct result of the things
I learned at the Hoffman Process is called “Deeper Still”
(written with David Wilcox). It’s about forgiveness. It says,
“To give my life beyond each death from a deeper well of trust,
to know that when there’s nothing left you will always have
what you gave to love.”
Even if you love someone and they break your heart or they stomp
you flat, at some point later on if you can heal and bring yourself
to a place where you can forgive them, and even thank them for the
lesson they brought you, for being cracked open and growing through
the healing. It’s just an amazing way of getting back everything
you invested and more. You can’t lose by loving someone. It’s
an amazing dynamic.
Coming through the Process really helped me see that. My mom and
I used to have more arguments and buttons got pushed. And after
I did the Process she didn’t have to change a bit but we have
a much better relationship because my relating to her changed without
patronizing her or feeling sorry. In fact, I’m able to love
her even more. It’s because of this ability to relate to her
differently and not go down that dark path.
RI: You relate to the person instead of to her
patterns.
BNC: Yes, yes. And that’s been just an
incredible thing. And of course once you do that with your mom,
you can relate that way to other people in your life.
RI: Your son Ernest did the process recently,
didn’t he? And how was that for you?
BNC: I thought it was incredible. He was 12 going
on 13 when his father died. The father is very important in that
time archetypal. Also, when I went through breast cancer, he was
19 going on 20. That’s when a son is turning away from the
mother and finding a woman.
I told him, “There’s some big plan for you, buddy.
You’ve got some mojo going on.” When I did the Process,
he was about 15 years old. I had no idea that some of the things
I was doing were affecting him in a negative way. And I came home
and I changed some of these things. I lived differently.
After about three weeks at home, he said, “I don’t
know what you did but that was really good. You really listen to
me now.” I said, “What do you mean? I’ve always
listened to you.” And he said, “Yes, but you really
listen to me now, you’re really here.” I was so grateful.
When he was in his early 20s, he went through a big shift and
a big heartbreak and it just seemed like he was ready. He came to
me and said, “You know what? I want to go do the Process.”
It made me very, very happy. I’ve noticed him moving forward
in such a rich way afterwards. I sure wish I’d done the Process
in my early 20s! I could have avoided a few pitfalls. It’s
really funny; he uses his tools a lot more than I do.
RI: He’s a musician, too, isn’t he?
BNC: A poet and a really talented musician and
songwriter, and he’s engaged to someone who also did the Process.
RI: Last November you sent me your album Hymns.
Then I was driving along one day listening to All Things Considered
on NPR and you were being interviewed about this album. This album
suddenly just took off. It struck a chord with lots of people.
BNC: It really did and it’s just one of
those things. Sometimes you do something just as a labor of love
to leave a legacy for your kids or your mom. I’d always wanted
to record those hymns that I grew up with and I was working on a
project of world hymns in which each hymn is in a different language.
(I’m still completing that. It’s a long process. I mean,
I’m singing in Sanskrit and Tibetan and Hebrew so each song
is quite a learning curve for me.) But I grew up singing the Latin
hymns so I thought that would be easy.
I went to Tower Records to pick up a Latin hymn album and I couldn’t
find the hymns that I’d grown up with and I just thought,
God, that’s just a travesty. So I just stopped working on
world hymns and completely concentrated on just getting a collection
of my favorite Latin hymns. And I put it out on my own label because
I thought it’s just going to be kind of a personal thing.
And then I thought, “What the heck, I’ll work with
a publicist, why not?” And then she got me on All Things Considered
and I had so many emails and week after week I still do.
RI: You’ve sold thousands of this album.
BNC: It’s just been an amazing gift and
my favorite email is from a guy who said he hadn’t been to
Mass in 35 years and that he was quite overcome and he had to pull
the car over to the side of the road just hearing the first three
chords of the “Ave Verum Corpus” coming through the
radio just totally got to him. He said, “Thank you so much.
It’s the first time I’ve really felt connected to God
in a long, long time.”
To me, that’s just the music. It’s this incredible
piece of music written by Mozart and I just delivered it. I just
served it up so I don’t take credit for the way it moved him,
but it was so moving to me to be able to participate in such a deep
way with somebody I don’t even know. The beauty and the gift
of music is just this incredible power that it has to transcend
everything. That’s why I’m doing the World Hymns. I
think each of these sacred tones transcend the ideology and the
dogma and the things that get us worked up and make us shoot each
other.
RI: I want especially to thank you and Annie
Roboff for contributing the song “Happy Girl” to our
Hoffman Institute fund-raising CD Fearless Hearts.
BNC: In fact, Annie came back from the Hoffman
experience and the day she got home, she had this idea she wanted
to write this song, “I’m A Happy Girl.” And in
that song is all the stuff one has to go through in life and in
spite of it all, being able to stay in touch with that joy. It was
a song that got written very quickly.
RI: Well, it’s a kind of a spiritual song
in another direction isn’t it?
BNC: Yes. I think of that as a very spiritual
song. “I laugh when I feel like it, cry when I feel like it.
That’s just how life is and that’s how it goes.”
It’s like resilience beyond the things that try to knock you
back. That song is just amazing to me.
RI: What is your website? I’m sure people
would love to go on it and find out your tour dates, where they
can see you live and learn more about your new album Look, coming
out in June.
BNC: My website is my name, bethnielsenchapman.com.
RI: Beth, you’re a beacon of light and
love for people. Thanks for all your support.
BNC: Well, in so many ways the Process continues
to affect my life. When I went through breast cancer and I was lying
on the couch going through chemotherapy, having come through the
Process gave me tools to deal with just trying to accept what I
was going through and it helped me a lot. And so again there was
a purpose and a gift and a way to experience it differently than
just sitting there being in the horror of it.
Many times my songs are written about things, before the events
of them happening in my life. Creativity can come ahead of my life.
And then your life steps into it. This gives me reassurance that
there are angels by my side.
RI: It’s been lovely talking to you.
BNC: I’m so excited. I always dreamed of
being interviewed in the Light News.
RI: You made it. You made it to the big time
now. All that other stuff was just preliminary.
BNC: That’s right. I finally got in the
Light News.
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