This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #97 (December 2001/January 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.
Eliza Gilkyson Make it a Beautiful Life
by Kerry Dexter
For Eliza Gilkyson, writing a song sometimes begins with cleaning her house.
"It's true," said the singer, who was recently chosen Austin's most underrated artist by the editors of the national website Citysearch. "It's about inviting the song in, for me, finding a point of entry, and while I'm working my way around to that it often turns out that I clean my whole house, get the dishes done, pay all my bills — it's like clearing your desk and getting everything out of the way. Then picking up the guitar and waiting, inviting it, trying to find that way in, that point of entry."
Gilkyson's songs include "River of Gold," "Rose of Sharon," "Rose Strikes Back," and "The Beauty Way," the latter about life as guitar-slinging poet which has become a regional hit from her current record, Hard Times in Babylon. She's been making music for more than 30 years and has built a devoted following in the west and southwest. She's also thought deeply about her chosen road. "I think you could use the word bard to describe what we [singer/songwriters] do. It's an old tradition, and if you read about what the bards did, they moved around from town to town and were invited in and sang about what was going on. A lot of times that was love interest, that was big fun, or political stuff, or just, you know, stories, and I think that's what we do. It's a time-honored tradition."
In Gilkyson's case, it's also a family tradition. Her father, Terry Gilkyson, was a folk singer in the 1950s, writing such classics as "Greenfields," "Marianne," and "Memories are Made of This." "It's great, great folk music and it really holds up. He was the kind of guy, from that generation, he got up early, just got on the freeway every day in Los Angeles into Hollywood and went to work and sat down at his desk and wrote songs — that's what he did. He also had a band called the Easy Riders, which was sort of like a less-collegiate-sounding version of the Kingston Trio," she recalled. "There were always musicians around our house, much to my mother's chagrin, and I knew early on I was fascinated with music. I was hooked from an early age. I was also sort of an early tragedienne, so I recognized that this was going to be a great outlet for my theatrics," Gilkyson said, laughing.
She wrote her first song at age 12 ("It was called 'I Want to Be Free' and was probably directed at my parents," she commented) and as a teenager sang demos for her father. "He never pushed us into music, but he was very structured about how he taught us, how [he] evaluated our work," said Gilkyson, whose family also included sister Nancy, now a music business executive, and brother Tony, a rock guitarist. " I wasn't very structured at the time when I started out, and he kind of overlaid that on me."
The young singer was coming of age during the folk revival of the 60s, and she soon began to learn from those musicians as well. "The first record I bought was Phil Ochs' 'I Ain't Marchin' Anymore'," she said. " My aunt had a record store in Santa Fe and we went went up to visit, and we each got to choose a record and I got that one. I think it's kinda perfect in a way," she said. "He was dark, complex, politically oriented, and socially concerned — it fits!"
She also listened to Joan Baez (an artist she's been compared with) and, through Baez, began listening to Bob Dylan. He proved a seminal influence on her writing. "Really, before Dylan, in songwriting you had a very specific rhyming scheme that you went with: AB AB, verse-chorus-verse chorus, or some variation of that, and really you didn't even experiment with words that didn't rhyme exactly. What Dylan did was that if it sounded like it rhymed then it fit — it didn't have to be all the same letters. That was huge. Just technically speaking, that was big.
"Then there was the idea of bringing attitude, personal attitude into it," Gilkyson continued. "That was a whole other thing. I think before that folk music was eyewitness accounts of events at best. You didn't have the sense of the artist's own personal emotion behind it, whether that was anger or love or whatever. Dylan added that, you could put your own emotion into it as well. Then there was the imagery itself. There was very specific imagery in songwriting before Dylan, whereas once he came on board you could draw from anything. You could draw on the Bible and you didn't have to be a religious person, you could draw from all the archetypes, characters, and you could have any number of emotions. It became unlimited," explained Gilkyson, who recently contributed a recording of "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" to the Red House Records 60th birthday tribute to Dylan, A Nod to Bob, and included the song in her "Austin City Limits" concert, which is airing this fall.
This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #97 (Dec. '01/Jan. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.
