Shawn Colvin Band - The Carbondale Sessions (1975)

01. All Along the Watchtower
02. Cactus Tree
03. Can't find My Way Home
04. Miracle Mail
05. So Begins The Task
06. The Hostage
07. Something Fine
08. Whenever
09. You Back to Me



Carbondale, Illinois, is a small college town about 350 miles south of Chicago. I lived there and attended Southern Illinois University until 1981. As a singer/song writer, I was lucky to personally know Shawn Colvin and her band mates Jimmy Bruno and Dennis Conroy. I think Shawn was 17 years old when I first met her. She was the "home town" darling to all her fans in Carbondale. We all played the coffee houses (Gatsby's, The American Tap, etc.). When I or Shawn had a gig, the other would show up and usually be asked up on the stage to sing harmonies. We all knew back then that Shawn was special. She was a damn good guitar player and boy could she sing. At the time, I was lucky enough to own some decent recording equipment (Teac 3340 4-track tape deck). I invited Shawn and the band over to my house (I was living at a place called Wides Village at the time, with two room mates). We set up in the living room. With 4 separate tracks, I was able to isolate Shawn's guitar, her vocals, Jimmy's bass, and Dennis Conroy's tablas. Everything was recorded live. No EQ was done, this is pretty much how they sounded. Obviously, these tapes are very old and spent a lot of years in my Texas-hot attic. A few years ago my brother loaned me a Teac, like the one I used to own. At that time I was able to digitize the tapes to my Mac.

At this point in Shawn's career, to my knowledge, she hadn't started writing her own material yet. She did have a great song writer in the band. Jimmy Bruno, who was also her boyfriend at the time, was an excellent song writer. Two of the songs in this collection are written by him, Whenever, which is sung by Jimmy, and You Back to Me, sung by Shawn. Shawn sang a lot of Bruno originals. Jimmy was an accomplished solo musician as well. But most of the songs she performed were cover songs. And with that great voice and stage presence, it didn't matter if they were all originals or not, everyone loved all the songs she performed.

I am making these songs available to all of her fans. Please use these for your own personal listening pleasure. Find out more about Shawn at her website ShawnColvin.com. Jim Bruno has recently released a new CD that sounds great. Please support him by purchasing his CD from his website at Jim Bruno Music, or from the iTunes music store

Included in the archive are 12 photographs taken at an outdoor concert in Carbondale (Giant City) in April 1975.

All songs are encoded at 320K from the original 4-track tape recorded at 15 ips.

Download: The Shawn Colvin Band