TRUST WHAT’S INSIDE YOU
BETH NIELSEN CHAPMAN shares her philosophy of life with Spencer Leigh

This feature appeared in the February 2007 edition of Country Music People and was heard in a shortened form in On The Beat on BBC Radio Merseyside on 13 January 2007.

Although I have admired Beth Nielsen Chapman’s albums for many years, I expected this interview to be sombre, introspective and difficult. Her outstanding album, Sand And Water (1997), described how she was coming to terms with the death of her husband, while Deeper Still (2002) was made while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. Her latest album, Hymns, was sung in Latin.

I meet up with Beth the morning after a show in Bolton. She looks refreshed and happy and is very enthusiastic about her current and forthcoming projects. Maybe her encounters with serious illness make her want to pack as much as possible into her days. She relishes touring and she loves meeting her public, dispensing, it would seem, all kinds of life-affirming tips. You could say that she is on a mission. She believes that everybody is creative and this interview, which is largely about songwriting, will tell you how to unlock the talents within yourself.

Sitting in the hotel lounge, she says, “Can’t we turn this music off? I can’t think clearly when it’s on.” Her tour manager and band member, the ever-genial Maartin (sic) Allcock, formerly from Fairport Convention, finds us a spot away from piped music. “Do you ever hear yourself being played over the tannoy?” I ask. “Unfortunately, yes,” she replies, “and friends call to say that they have heard me at the mall. It’s good to get heard but there must be so many people listening who wish you weren’t there at all.”

I have a list of questions to ask Beth, but I don’t use it as Beth’s comprehensive and informative replies guide the flow of the conversation. “I hope I’m not derailing you,” she says when we break for coffee. “We’re not talking much about country music.” There are anecdotes about Harlan Howard, Willie Nelson and Faith Hill, but I can see what she means. However, country music deals with life’s problems and the songs are about passion, compassion and human relationships, the recurring subjects in this interview.

You have chosen a name which is difficult to remember at first hearing. Why didn’t you just go with Beth Chapman?

When I was signed to my first record deal in 1979, it was the same year as I got married and Capitol Records in America was very keen to have me as Beth Nielsen as they thought that was really good. I said, “No, I want to be Chapman, I’m getting married.” They were not thrilled about that. What’s really funny is how many people think that Mary Chapin Carpenter and I are the same person. Yesterday someone said that they loved the song I wrote, The Moon And St Christopher, and I said, “That would be Chapin.” We are good friends and I have always thought that she is an astoundingly good writer. It has been great to be able to work with her.

You were born in Arlington, Texas in 1956 but your father was in the air force and you moved around a lot. Does that mean that music was one of the few constant factors in your childhood?

I’ve never thought about it in that way, but that is true.. Air force radio was a melting pot of lots of different styles and in the early 60s when my ears were developing, radio was much healthier in terms of its cultural diversity. Moving into different areas taught me, ironically, how people are the same rather than different. Since I was 11, I have had this idea of doing a record where I sing in different languages and I am finally finishing this record and putting it out next year.

I was exposed to a lot of different cultures. I am a Catholic and the mass on the air force base was from 10 to 11, and from 11 to 12 it was a Protestant service, and on Saturday it was a Jewish temple. They rolled the Cross in and out and they put in the different symbols and so I realised that worshipping God resonated with a different frequency with different people. It was an amazing way to grow up, and I can do all these different accents. (Beth mimics various American accents: it is hilarious.) My voice can go all over the place so yes, my upbringing had a big effect on me.

Were you based in Germany some of the time?

I lived in Germany in sixth, seventh and eighth grades and I started to learn German but then we moved and unfortunately Americans don’t place much emphasis on learning other languages. In Europe and the UK almost everyone speaks two languages, which should be the responsibility of every human being. I don’t speak any other language myself although I have learnt to pronounce them phonetically. With each song in each different language I have worked with a scholar of that language or someone from that country. Hopefully, they caught me before I made a fool of myself.

What music do you remember from your youth?

The Beatles came along when I was in fifth grade. I remember being in a friend’s house in Germany and hearing Penny Lane and I was jumping on a bed and thinking that I had to own that. That was the first time that I heard music that I wanted to go and buy.

Before that I was listening to Tony Bennett and Robert Goulet and other records from my parents. I loved any film that had music in it and I knew all the songs in The Sound Of Music. My mum was a nurse and my dad was in the military and then he was math teacher. They both sang in choirs and I can remember standing between their kneecaps and hearing their voices. We were raised in a Catholic family so there are these beautiful old hymns that I knew. As I have gotten older, I have been amazed at how they resonate so deeply with me.

And some of those hymns have survived 150 years.

Yes, and when I do my show, one of my favourite covers is Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke, and I get the whole audience singing with me, which is really great. They didn’t know they could sing that good and I usually follow Sir Duke with Mozart’s Ave Verum and it slides right into it. You would never think in a million years that those two songs could be back to back but my voice is the same voice and it is pulling it through the thread of my way of sounding as an artist. It is still a very different song but it has a context which brings it together.

The Latin Hymns record came out last year in the UK and that was just a tangent I went on after Deeper Still and Look. I was still working on this collection of songs in all different languages and I realised that I needed one in Latin, and I thought it would be easy. I would get a CD that had all the great hymns that I grew up with but the only one I could find was by a priest with a guitar and it wasn’t well recorded. I thought it was sad that I couldn’t find all the songs that I remembered so I made the record on my own and I got my son to sing the tenor parts and my dad to sing bass. It has done very very well. There are a whole lot of people who missed those hymns.

So you didn’t go through a record company?

I was on Warner Brothers for 10 years but for quite a few years, I have been doing my own records which has been wonderful. I will make a licensing deal with a label in the US and another in the UK and I get a more direct relationship with the people I am working with. With Hymns, I didn’t particularly look for a label, I thought it would sell 200 copies and my mother would give it to all her friends. In the States, I put it on my own record company and then I got a publicist as I thought it would be fun. I never expected to get on National Public Radio on a show called All Things Considered. After an 8 minute segment on that show, the CD went to No 3 on amazon.com. I sold out in 12 hours and I was getting emails from nuns and priests who wanted to get it. It was a labour of love and it was just one of those things that nobody had done. My favourite email was from a woman who was a survivor of the Holocaust and she had been meeting with other women who were survivors. They needed some music to play in the background when they shared some time together. She told them that this CD was very soothing and they put it on and they found it was lovely music – it wasn’t about the lyrics and the dogma and what the words mean although that is very important to some people – on a tonal level, they were able to feel comforted by the sound of the beautiful songs. One of the hymns I love is called Shalom Aleichem which is a beautiful Hebrew hymn about peace. Someone from the Jewish faith would know it immediately.

When you heard Penny Lane, did you have in mind that you wanted to be a songwriter?

Not in terms of a profession, no. I thought vaguely that I would like to be a veterinarian. I would sing in folk mass and in folk clubs and then as I got a little older, I was singing at weddings every weekend. I was writing the whole time and I always wrote the melody first. My experience of writing has been that the song is already written and I am unfolding it in layers. I will get a melody out of nowhere, just by stumbling around on guitar. I record what I do as so much of what comes out in the very beginning is subconscious. My creative spirit is taking a leap off a cliff and going – whoosh! My fingers go to chords and I don’t know what they are going to do next and it is magical. Often I will do that for 15 minutes or so and turn the tape recorder off and I will have no idea what I have played. I will get a cup of tea and listen to it, and I am hearing it like a listener for the first time. I will find the things in it that are working and I will go with that and learn how to play it. I have to go, “What was that chord that I went to?” At the some point the melody will be in place but I won’t necessarily have the words. Then I start singing in tongues (demonstrates) and very often the vowels that start coming through with some regularity will be the same vowels that line up when the song is finished a week later, a month later or two years later. I have had songs that have taken me years to finish and yet if I go back to the first work tape, you can hear ‘o a i’ all in place on the line.

Your first country hit was Strong Enough To Bend, which was a great title and a No 1 for Tanya Tucker in 1988.

People write songs in different ways and the hardest thing in the world for me is to write from a title. I walked into Don Schlitz’s office and I was thrilled to be writing with him. He said that he had this title, Strong Enough To Bend. I do have a very healthy, loud, obnoxious intellect and my intellect is a know-it-all, and if it gets in charge, it interrupts the good stuff, which is coming from another direction. The creative spirit that flows through every single person won’t interrupt anything that is already there. If there are a lot of other things going in the psyche, it won’t interrupt as it is too self-conscious. So when I started writing with Don, my intellect goes, ‘Oh, we have to figure this out now. “What does Strong Enough To Bend mean?” I said, “Can we just make up a melody, something we can play around with and we will get to the title.” So we started and I went (Sings) “There’s a tree out in the backyard.” We wrote it in 20 minutes and we wrote another song and went to lunch. My head was spinning as I hadn’t written a song in one day before, much less in 20 minutes, but Don would do a morning session and an afternoon session. He calls his songs his children and he said that The Gambler has been to college and graduate school and kept going.

Did the Willie Nelson hit, Nothing I Can Do About It Now, come next?

Fred Foster was producing Willie, and Willie was going through a divorce and a few other things and needed some songs. Fred told me that Willie liked Strong Enough To Bend and would I write a song for him. He gave me three months to write it. I thought of the title first, Nothing I Can Do About It Now, which sounded like the perfect Willie Nelson title. The world can be falling apart and he is saying, “Hey, I am doing the best I can.” It had a friendly tone and it seemed that everybody I ran to was saying that phrase. I kept hoping that nobody would say, “That’s a great title, I think I will write that.” In fact, Don Schlitz would say to me, “Be careful how you write your songs. You can’t copyright a title and if you are writing a song with a great title, bear in mind that somebody else may be writing a song with the same title, and yours had better be the better one.”

I gave the song a train beat rhythm like On The Road Again but it was hard work as I had to rhyme “now” in every verse. There is brow, how, vow, wow, I didn’t even use wow. I had 20 pages of rewrites and I grew as a lyricist. I finished it at 1am and Fred was flying to Austin at 6am. I met him at the airport in my slippers and my robe and handed him the demo. The following night we got a call from Austin. It was Willie and he said, “Come on and play guitar on it.” Within 24 hours, I was sitting with Willie Nelson in the Cut’n’Putt studio which is in the middle of a golf course, and I was watching him with that guitar with the hole in it. They kicked off the song and played it once. The drummer changed the feel to a shuffle. I thought they were just running it down and Willie would say, “Let’s listen to the demo again.” Instead, he said, “That’s great, let’s go to lunch.” I said, “I think Paul might have played it like a shuffle.” Willie goes, “Paul, did you play that like a shuffle?” He said, “Yes, I did.” Willie said, “That’s what I thought too. Let’s go to lunch.” That was it. The farther up the chart it went, the more it sounded like the perfect way to do the song and it went to No.l. He did If My World Didn’t Have You on the same album and on the next he did, Ain’t Necessarily So, which was also a single. I have told I am available for co-writes but his songs come through so purely that I don’t think he does much co-writing.

Never mind, you’ve written with quite a few of your heroes.

Well, I’ve not written with Willie but I have worked with Waylon. Waylon was so funny and so entertaining to be around, and I had a lovely time with Hal David last summer and we wrote three songs together. I was very nervous of being with Neil Diamond. I thought, “How can I write with Neil Diamond, I will have to do this perfectly.” I teach songwriting and I forgot everything that I taught because my ego took over, “Let’s not make a mistake and make a really good impression” and so on. As soon as that is going on, your creative energy goes out of the window. If the ego gets into your head and makes too much noise, you are in trouble. I said, “Neil, I’m sorry. I’m not normally this halting, but you’re Neil Diamond.” He said, “How do you think I feel? Every time I write a song I have to live with being Neil Diamond.”

Come on, he’s not all that great – “And no one spoke at all, not even the chair.”

Yeah, but that to me is a mystery song lyric. That is a weird song and I should have asked him about it. I did ask Jimmy Webb about the “sweet green icing flowing down”, and he said, “No, no, I’m not going into that.” I try to make sense with my lyrics, I don’t like these opaque lyrics which can mean four things and it depends on what you had for breakfast. Songs are about communicating something but it doesn’t mean that you have to be dead on it. Paul Simon wrote, “She wore diamonds on the soles of her shoes”, but who cares what that means? The feeling is so strong that it transcends the literal meaning of the words. The melody of MacArthur Park is so ridiculously good that Richard Harris could be reading the phone book. It is a rare exception where the sound of the melody with those words is the thing. There is a feeling of angst in there, “Ah, my sweet beautiful thing is melting.” It contains disappointment and despair and it is a great song.

What makes you want to write a song with anybody else when you can write both words and music, or do you have half-written songs that they could help you complete?

The songs that I write by myself tend to be very different and some of my best songs have been co-written and so I am hooked on that. One of the reasons I co-write is to hang out with people I admire. I never imagined that I would meet Neil Diamond or Bonnie Raitt or Harlan Howard. I sang Time Won’t Tell last night which is on the Look album as someone called it out. Harlan wrote incredible songs like Heartaches By The Number and I’ve Got A Tiger By The Tail and I loved to write him as he was a powerhouse writer.

Didn’t he write his songs in the bar?

Not really. He would meet you to write at 9.30 and promptly at 11.30, it would be time to “go drink lunch”. The first time I wrote with him I had to get a friend to pick me up. (Laughs) I never drink during the day and he was going, “You gotta have one of these, it is a White Russian, you gotta try it.” Okay, what the heck? Melanie, his wife, was a smart, wonderful woman. She would call the bar and have the bartender give him the lightest possible amount of alcohol. He would stay until 4 in the afternoon so he had to pace himself.

Could he write drunk or sober?

I don’t think he wrote a lot when he moved into the lunch part of the day but he wrote so well before that that he had usually finished a song. I walked in and I said, “I have got this title and I have got this melody and you have to got to write it with me.” We roared through it for two hours and then it was time to drink lunch. He thought it was finished, but I said, “No, no, we have to write this extra little verse” and he was going, “No, we’ve got to go.” I was forcing him to stay longer and at 2.30, his wife Melanie came in and said, “Harlan, are you okay?” He said, “She’s giving me a hard time, Melanie.” Maybe I did, but we got a great song. He rang me when I was touring in the UK and he said, “What are you and Nanci Griffith doing out there touring? You get your butts home and write some songs for other people.” I really miss him.

So co-writing is an adventure.

Usually. I will write with somebody I admire or somebody I meet and have a good feeling about. It doesn’t matter whether they are well known or not: I will write with them if they have got something that I resonate with. The other kind of writing is with young writers who are very much in development. Most of the time I don’t take a piece of the song. I do a song doctor thing, I will say, “That verse is great and the next one needs to be that good.” I love to give people direction as I have had people do that for me and that is an important part of your development as a writer.

Have any of these new writers come really good?

My son. (Laughs) I have been working on him since he was 12. He’s 26 and he is just finishing his first record. He is writing for himself as an artist and he is very talented. Watching him develop is very exciting for me.

You lost your husband over 10 years ago. Was he in the business too?

Ernest was a counsellor and he ran a group home for adolescents when I first met him in Mobile. When we moved to Nashville in ’85, he continued with a private practice, but he started doing some publishing for me when he became ill. He had a tremendous influence on my development as a writer. He was a very talented writer and a poet and he was very astute and well read. It was putting my stuff through his sieve. When our son was born in 1981, I had decided that I would not be a songwriter as I had lost my record deal with Capitol. I went into this huge denial of my core and it was a dark night of the soul. At the same time, I was a young mother and having an incredibly good time having a baby. All my creative energy went into making fun things for my baby. I was sculpturing with Plato and was making these tiny little heads and I was becoming a visual artist, except Plato doesn’t last long. I can remember my husband coming into the kitchen at 3am and I was working on a nose and he said, “Honey, you really need to be writing songs as this is getting ridiculous.” I started crying and for the first six months, my writing was very jerky and it was as though I had lost the muscle. It is like being a runner. People who have never written a song can try it and say, “That sucks, I am not cut out for this.” Really, you have to give yourself a year and be very kind to yourself. Give yourself that gift of showing up with the idea of creating something. My workshops on creativity are open to everyone, it is not just about being a songwriter and making money: it is about being a person and realising what is inside of you. It is wonderful watching people’s pilot lights going on. They will be going, “Okay, I can do that.” It’s in the same way that exercise is great for nearly everyone who does it. Of course, I never get to the gym, but time to reflect or to mediate is essential and so many people forget about these parts of themselves and they are limping along in their lives. They are not happy and they don’t know why. I don’t get enough sleep, I don’t eat the right foods and I don’t exercise but I know that being creative is just as important as breathing air and drinking water.

Did you know shortly after he died that you wanted to write about it and hence the album Sand And Water?

I am going to sound like some mystical woo-woo person but most of the songs on Sand And Water I wrote half or two-thirds of them before we even knew he was ill. He said that No One Knows But You sounded like somebody was leaving me or going to die. I said, “I know and maybe it is because my parents are getting older.” I had two verses of Seven Shades Of Blue and he said, “I love that song. It is like a Bob Dylan song.” We had no idea about some of the lines in that song. It says, “In the hollow of your shoulder, There’s a tidepool of my tears, Where the waves came crashing over, And the shoreline disappears.” It is about being in a sorrowful place and not knowing where it is going and you can’t even see the horizon. Six months later, we were in the middle of dealing with his diagnosis. He was given a couple of months to live as his cancer was very advanced and there was a moment when I was leaning against him and crying into this hollow. I had the startling feeling that this is what the song was about. He went through 18 months of treatment and he did well for a while and we were both very hopeful. It was an incredibly tense period and the songs were getting finished all through that. I remember writing the last verse to Seven Shades Of Blue just weeks before he passed away. He wanted to have his ashes scattered in the Gulf of Mexico and I wrote this verse, “The whales will steal my laughter and the birds will sing my song, And I’ll be happy ever after, And the world will get along.” I thought it was perfect but he said, “You have got to change that song. I don’t know whether I’ll be happy ever after. I am not happy about this, I would rather stay here.” I said, “Okay but I’m writing the song.” So it became ‘”I’ll be OK forever after”, and when I sing that song, I get a smile on my face as he was very opinionated right out to when he was “stepping out upon the shore”.

My son was 12 at the time and when I got breast cancer, my son was 19 and that was a very different kind of grieving all over again. I could understand what chemotherapy felt like, how it felt to have your hair fall out, and to my son, it was a huge journey as he was reliving the stuff he had put in the back of his mind. We had some very difficult times during my treatment but as I got well and got my energy back, it turned out that going through breast cancer was one of the most healing things that we could have done together. Last night I sang Emily which is a very emotional song about loss and the audience was moved to tears and I said, “Okay, we will do Happy Girl now but isn’t it good to cry?” When you get grief going ,you can pick up all the threads of that extra stuff that you haven’t dealt with. You don’t really have to cry about what you’re crying about, you can go, “There was that time when…” By going through breast cancer, I went through a lot about my husband’s death and I was more okay with it than I was before I had breast cancer. My cancer is cured now and I am happily engaged to a wonderful man and richness is all around me, and I see the world in a different way.

That album has helped a lot of people to come to terms with grief, notably Elton John.

Oh, that was a tremendous honour and I am very aware that when these songs come through us, they can be deeply universal. Elton John had a huge impact on me as a songwriter. He has written so many songs that are universal, so to have him choose that song of mine, from artist to artist, is an incredible honour. His reasons for not singing Candle In The Wind were very honourable as he wanted to keep it special, and so he sang my song about loss instead.

What about the image of sand and water in that song? I always feel that songs that contain the elements can have a special power and the images in your song are so striking.

Sand And Water was one of the first songs that I wrote after my husband’s death, about a month after his death. Rodney Crowell came over to write with me as he was friends with my husband and he told him to give me about a month and then get her off her butt and make her start writing songs. He said he was coming over and we were going to write a song. I thought, “Oh god, I had better pick up my guitar before Rodney gets here. That song came through very quickly”. I told him, “We can write this song as it is not finished.” I sang him Sand And Water and he almost fell off the chair. He said, “I am sitting here listening to this beautiful song that is going to move so many people and you like an idiot don’t even know what you’ve done. Don’t change anything.” Two weeks later I am driving in my car listening to a demo of it and all of a sudden, I thought, “That’s really good.” Again when I am in the state of writing, I am not intellectually there. I think “Solid stone is just sand and water” is a line of some magnitude but I didn’t write it, I just wrote it down. I didn’t figure it out. I wrote it because of the song.

You are fortunate that this happens to you.

No, no, we all fortunate. My battle cry to the world is, “It’s not just me. I don’t have some lucky connection that nobody else has.” We have varying degrees of making ourselves accessible and the door opens on our side. I don’t think that the creative spirit stays away from anyone. It waits. If you can put away your ego and intellect and back it away from its central seat of controlling everything, what will amaze you is that the creative spirit will come in. The very beginnings are messy and vague and mushy and that is the playfulness, and that is the chaos out of which comes amazing stuff. Being afraid of chaos is one of the things that shuts the ego down. People say, “I sat there with a blank piece of paper and I tried to write a poem and everything I wrote was rubbish.” I said, “Who said that?” Someone wrote to me and said that they had a blank piece of paper and couldn’t think of anything for an hour. I said, “Wow, you have just lifted 2,000 pounds in the gym of creativity. You showed up, so give yourself a star.”

You like helping people so much so why not put a melody on your website and invite people to put a lyric to it?

That could be very dangerous! If I get a melody, I love the melody, and so I would get territorial and I would want to write the lyrics to it. I got together to write with Jimmy Webb a couple of years ago and I gave him this melody and he gave me one of his and I haven’t written anything to his melody yet. Now I have written Prayers Of An Atheist to the melody I gave him, and I still haven’t called him, I hope he doesn’t read this before I’ve had a chance to tell him that I would like my melody back!

Prayers Of An Atheist is a grear title. You immediately want to know what it is about.

When my husband was near his death he wrote a letter to everybody who meant something to him. He sent out about 75 letters and he said, “Tell me what you think will happen when we die.” They were people he had known and loved and they responded from all sorts of cultural backgrounds. The most moving letter was from a friend who was an atheist and he said, “I haven’t changed and I haven’t got anything to say that would inspire you and I am really sorry. I love you and you’re my friend and for what it’s worth, I knelt down today and I sent up for you the prayers of an atheist.” That letter made him cry and he said, “That might be the most powerful letter” as he is going through what he thinks is a meaningless exercise just because he loves me. You might say that Prayers Of An Atheist doesn’t belong on the record because it is not a path to God, but I would say that it is. It is the farthest distance one could walk from.

Another uplifting song is Heads Up For The Wrecking Ball.

When you are dealing with a devastating illness, you are very busy just being the caretaker and there is not a lot of time to feel sorry for yourself. You have to postpone all of that. You don’t have time to fall apart and I built up this big brick of tears. I was saying, “I can do it, I can do it” and I was getting on with life. I don’t think I cried once in the year after my husband died as I was still unravelling the shock of it all. It took a year to melt that down to where I could cry and by the time we were recording the Sand And Water album, I was deeply grieving and sobbing half the day.

One day I was out walking and feeling okay as I had some emotional circulation going. I usually go with a pad and a pencil and something to record anything on, but this day I hadn’t. I was halfway through this trek in the woods and I got the melody for Heads Up For The Wrecking Ball. Straight through, words and all, and it has happened maybe three times in my lifetime. I didn’t have my cellphone and I didn’t have a pencil. I kept singing and I knew I would forget it if I didn’t meet somebody. I spied a discarded dixie cup and I sat on a rock and I carved the lines into the wax on the cup. I got home and I recorded it right away, and I should have sold that cup on ebay. The song says that you can do the best you can with what happens to you, but sometimes something comes from leftfield and knocks you down. It is our responsibility to be watchful and take care of ourselves when crossing the street, but sooner or later something is going to knock you down. Heads Up For The Wrecking Ball says, “Don’t worry, you’ll get through it.”

You co-wrote one of the best goodtime records of recent years, This Kiss, which was an international hit for Faith Hill.

I wrote This Kiss with Annie Roboff and Robin Lerner. Annie and Robin had got it started, and I didn’t know Robin very well. I was shooting the cover for Sand And Water in LA and I was under water when that cover picture was taken. The next day I was running on the beach in a yellow dress. Annie, who is one of my best friends, was in my hotel room and she was playing this riff, “It’s perpetual bliss”. I asked what it was and I told her to stop playing it as I would be getting ideas and I didn’t want to horn in on them. She said, “I want you to write this with us.” It had started with Robin, and Annie had developed it further. At the end of the chorus, it went “It’s your critical kiss” and I told them that it was a letdown and it would have to be changed. I was curling my eyelashes and when it came round again I went “This kiss, this kiss”, you gotta do that. She said, “That’s it, I’m calling Robin.” She said, “Beth came up with this chant for the end of the chorus and we’re going to make her write the song with us.” The next day we met up and we went on the beach with a little plastic Yahama – Annie was a career woman who hadn’t been on a date in five years, Robin was going through a divorce and I was a grieving widow woman and I hadn’t been on a date in a couple of years – so we were three women watching these beautiful boys walk down the beach and we wrote a song about what it was like to be kissed for the first time. We had a black woman sing the demo, almost like a fun R&B song. Two years later it still hadn’t been cut but then Annie said that Faith Hill was cutting a record and could we move the song to guitar, and it worked out great that way. We did a demo with Jamie O’Neal singing. It is not a country song by any means, but when you move it to guitar, add some steel and have Faith Hill singing, it comes close. I got to sing the background vocals and she made a great record and it was a hit. Boom! I always have a good time when I am writing with Annie. We wrote Happy Girl, Shake My Soul and It All Comes Down To Love and a slew of others together. They are always upbeat and you can tell we are having a good time.

Are there some covers around at the moment?

I have a new song called The Edge Of Love that I wrote with Mindy Smith and it is on her new record. Joan Osborne has recorded an astounding version of Time Won’t Tell, and I have been very enmeshed in this new record and I am looking for a name for it. I referred to it as World Hymns for a long time, but it is not just hymns. It is a very exciting project to be working on and it feels like it is going to be a double-album now I have these songs in English which resonate with the same ideas. I have just recorded Oh You Beautiful Fool which was written by Don Henry and it is about Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi and Jesus Christ, these people who inspire peace but it is not a preachy song but a beautiful story song.

Are you able to write on the road?

I don’t write on the road but anything that is a life experience helps you. I love performing and seeing fans and hearing what resonates with them. Last night I had them singing along with me to The Colour Of Roses and it is so magical that they have such respect for the work. It makes me want to go home and write so it feeds me. I love the UK particularly, as the audiences have been really supportive and Terry Wogan, Bob Harris and the rest of Radio 2 have made it possible for me to be heard. It is hard to get on the radio in the United States because of this corporate radio takeover.

Have you any ambitions?

Well, I love writing on assignment and I would love to work on a movie. My songs have been in films but it usually somebody sticking one of my songs in the early rushes and then bonding with it. They happened with Beyond The Blue in Message In A Bottle. I worked with Patrick Doyle who was doing the Calendar Girls movie and he asked me to write the lyric to a beautiful melody he had written for the film. I wrote it over the weekend and emailed it to him and by Monday morning they were recording it with a 26 piece orchestra. I have just sung at St Paul’s Cathedral with the London Oriana Choir and a woman came up to me and said she was the woman that Calendar Girls was about, and I was so thrilled to meet her. You do have to have a thick skin if you do movie work as the people making the decisions often regard the songs as furniture they can move around. They are not song people but film people, and yet in many cases the songs outlive the movies.

Beth Nielsen Chapman, thank you so much for talking to us so frankly and in such detail.

I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me.

And your message is “You too can do it.”

Absolutely. There is a hole in the top of your head and it is your creative belly button. I’m mixing my metaphors now but if you writing from your ego or your intellect, it is like digging around on the hard drive and not being connected on line. You can move sentences around and cut and paste, but you are not going to get the good stuff that is new and fresh. You have to get your spirit and your hard drive connected and when you do, amazing things can happen.