Spellbound was recorded during four sessions with co-producer Alan Silverman and a core group of musicians who have worked with Billy Joel, Elton John, Suzanne Vega, Joe Jackson, Duncan Sheik and others. It’s simply the individual sitting with their own persona, and they’re touched by angels. But all the analyzing doesn’t amount to much.
We have muses and we have DNA and we have disciplines.
We’re responsible for sitting down and closing the door and turning off the phone, but we don’t know where the hell it comes from. It lasted 10 years and then it stopped’…That’s about all the analysis I need, to be frank. He said in Chronicles he doesn’t know where it came from - ‘I don’t know how it began. They come out of nowhere,” Collins adds about the process. “Prairie Dream” draws on her father’s roots with the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho and “City of Awakening” is Collins’ love letter to her longtime home of New York City. “So Alive” paints a lyrical picture of Greenwich Village during the 1960s folk explosion, while her sometimes wayward youth informs tracks such as “Grand Canyon,” “Hell on Wheels,” “Arizona” and “When I Was a Girl in Colorado,” which was written just before Spellbound‘s final recording session. The 12 songs on Spellbound (plus a new version of “The Blizzard” from 1990’s Fires of Eden) cut a personal path for Collins, who dedicated the album to early influences Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. That gave the album - Collins’ 29th studio release overall - a head start, and she reached into the trove of 365 poems to pull out lyrics for what became “Shipwrecked Mariner” and “Wild With the Mist.” When the pandemic hit, she says, “my job was to sit down at the piano and write a poem that day or try to finish the ones that were sitting there - if anything spoke to me as a song, write it. During 2016 Collins assigned herself the task of writing a poem every day for 90 days, which at her husband Louis Nelson’s suggestion became a full year.
Collins started work on Spellbound in 2019, though much of the “cooking” began three years earlier.
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