My introduction to Shawn Colvin wasn’t through her smash hit single “Sunny Came Home”, which reached number one on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and received the Grammy Awards for Record and Song of the Year in 1998. It wasn’t through her equally successful debut studio album Steady On, either, which won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1991. It was her duet with Ernie from Sesame Street, in which they performed the beloved tune “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon” for the children’s series’ primetime 30th-anniversary special, Elmopalooza, in 1999. I owned and wore out the special on VHS as a toddler.
As such, it felt like I grew up with Colvin. Her rendition of “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon” was one of the first songs added to my first-ever iTunes library when I was nine, where it continued to receive heavy airplay on my various iPods throughout my adolescence. It was the only song of hers I really knew, but it felt deeply personal, like home years after I outgrew Sesame Street.
It was only during the COVID-19 pandemic, when I began compiling a playlist that started with songs by female artists from my childhood, that I stumbled onto some of the recordings Colvin made that weren’t children’s songs. Among them were compositions like “Anywhere You Go” and “Whole New You”, the latter the title track from her fifth studio album. For me, the song symbolized shedding old layers of skin and opening oneself up to new opportunities in whatever form they may come. Until recently, and as Whole New You turned 25 last week, I was unaware of the turbulent history the LP occupies in Shawn Colvin’s discography.
Although the singer achieved critical acclaim early in her career with Steady On and its follow-ups, Fat City and Cover Girl, Colvin’s records were not commercial smashes. Despite going on to win a Grammy Award, Steady On only reached number 111 on the Billboard 200 chart, and Fat City peaked at 142. As she shared in her 2012 memoir, Diamond in the Rough, Colvin was once signed to Columbia Records, which believed in developing artistry rather than chart performance.
“What I do is kind of archaic. I don’t belong at a label that’s going to want a million-selling record,” she wrote. “I go and play shows with a voice and a guitar, and people come to see me because that is what they want to hear… I am not a big-hit artist, although I did have a big hit.”
She’s referring to “Sunny Came Home”, the second single from her fourth studio album, A Few Small Repairs. Colvin believed that record excelled because she let her guard down and wrote music she just felt like writing at that time. “It was as though the stars had aligned,” she wrote. Referring to her collaboration with her longtime producer John Leventhal, Colvin remarked, “I guess we had both grown up a little—after all, it wasn’t rocket science. It was fun.” The release of A Few Small Repairs in 1996 also aligned perfectly with the launch of the Lilith Fair music festival, where Colvin’s career would soon gain a whole new legion of devoted followers.
By the time the album’s successor, Whole New You, came out five years later, however, everything was different. “I basically followed up a hit single with a pregnancy,” Colvin wrote on Instagram last week in commemoration of the LP’s 25th anniversary. She described Whole New You as something of a “sleeper record”, and the fact that it took longer than expected to make did not please the record company. In her memoir, the singer referred to the album as a “strange, confused, moving piece of work”, writing, “It was never promoted, and it never sold, and I largely ignore it in my live performances, which is a shame, because there are special songs there.”
The one Shawn Colvin described most in Diamond in the Rough and chose to share as audio in her social media post last week is the opening track “A Matter of Minutes”. To an unassuming ear, it’s a song about someone with commitment issues, an inability to stay in one place for long, someone who can literally and figuratively pack themselves up in a matter of minutes: “If there’s one thing certain / It’s there ain’t nothing for sure / And I want to run / But I can’t do that anymore.”
The track is an ode to postpartum depression, and Colvin attributed the lyrics to the urge she had to run away from the giant task that is new motherhood in the first year of her daughter’s life. “I don’t like being made to do anything, but it’s so wrong to want to run away from your baby—how could I say that?” she wrote. “I could sing about wanting to run but not being able to, chastising myself for having to grow up under the gun, finally.”
As the singer attested, Whole New You received minimal promotion and coverage. Our own review of the album in 2001 was a bit lukewarm, complimenting the “sepia portraits of romantic angst” among other things and calling Colvin a “mistress of the melancholy” who “will once again win the hearts of earlier subscribers to her work”. The singer described it as having “tanked”, although its chart performance was in fact better than some of her earliest albums, but nothing in comparison to the success of “Sunny Came Home” and A Few Small Repairs.
“Nobody bought it; hardly anybody heard it,” Colvin claimed. “It had been too long, five years, since the previous hit record, and the people at Columbia felt that the material was not going to be radio worthy.” She wrote of the hurtful experience of only finding out after the fact that her manager at the time had spoken with the then-president of the label, who said that there was “nothing [they] can do with this record.” She left Columbia, fired the manager, and signed with Nonesuch Records for two additional critically acclaimed albums: These Four Walls in 2006 and All Fall Down in 2012.
Twenty-five years later, Whole New You is a body of work that testifies to the fact that creativity can’t be rushed, and neither can good work. Having been unexpectedly launched into minor-league pop superstardom by her previous record, it seems that Colvin’s label at the time set unrealistically high expectations for her follow-up.
Although A Few Small Repairs is among Shawn Colvin’s most cohesive records, Whole New You is a return to the quiet folk star that the world met in the early 1990s; it’s just that the world had apparently moved on as Colvin took time off to have a child and gain new inspiration. Had Colvin’s profile been even larger than it was—taking home the Grammy for both Record and Song of the Year in one night is no small feat—or if she were a man, perhaps she would have been allowed a better grace period.
However, the singer knows who she is, and she wasn’t about to start chasing someone else’s pop dreams. Perhaps that’s what makes Whole New You still so captivating: aside from some highly loveable songs that evoke the soundtracks of dreamy coming-of-age dramas on 2000s television, the record exists in between grand success and the next chapter, in a way charting its own course to hang out and be who it wants to be outside of heavy expectations from both sides of the aisle.
A quarter of a century later, the most striking track from the album is arguably “Another Plane Went Down”. Shawn Colvin described it as an “eerie journal about the fragility of life”, with its lyrics referencing a friend of a friend who died in a plane crash as well as dark dreams of human disasters. The eeriest part of all is that Whole New You was released some six months ahead of 9/11.