Cleaning Up With Lynn Carey Saylor
Award-winning artist Lynn Carey Saylor opens up to SoundSugar and discusses songwriting, tragedy, and making a positive change in the world through music.
Geoff Baker: On your website, LynnCareySaylor.com, you claim that songwriting is your primary passion. For how many years have you been writing songs? What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment or proudest moment with regard to songwriting?
Lynn Carey Saylor: I’ve been writing songs since I was around 14 or 15, and I first recorded something I wrote in a professional recording studio at 16. It was a song called “Rainbows,” and I think it’s still my dad’s favorite song of mine. It’s pretty funny because every time I play my parents a new song I’ve written, my dad will say something like, “That’s great, but I still love that ‘Rainbows’; it’s my favorite, you know!” The first 10 times he said that, I was frustrated because I wanted some confirmation from him that I was evolving as a songwriter over time, but then I just got used to the fact that I knew he was going to say that. I think the song just reminds him of when I was his little girl. Of course, I’m still his little girl and always will be, so it would be OK if he let go of that song and found a new favorite among the songs I’ve written!
With regard to my proudest moment in songwriting, two things come to mind.
The first was when I played “I Wasn’t A Friend” for the first time for my husband Skip, and it made him cry. He’s someone who doesn’t cry often or easily, so it stunned me that when I was playing the song on an acoustic guitar for him and I glanced up at him in the middle of it, I noticed tears welling up in his eyes. He had more than one friend killed by a drunk driver growing up, so it had a very big impact on him. It’s the ultimate “high” to see something you’ve written have that strong of an effect on someone emotionally, especially on someone whose opinion really matters to you.
Another proud moment was getting my CD “You Like It Clean” back from the manufacturer, opening one of the boxes, and seeing it for the first time. I felt a similar feeling the day I graduated from college. Both of those accomplishments were a long time in coming and represented a significant investment of time, effort, energy, and money. Both of them were also goals that, along the way at various points and for various reasons, I wondered if I’d ever complete and get to the finish line, so the feeling of “Awwwww, I’ve finally done it!” was quite exhilarating.
GB: You founded the website GuitarGirls.com in March of 2000 as a platform for female guitar players and artists to showcase their work. Do you find it is more difficult to be taken seriously as a guitarist because you are a woman? Are attitudes in the industry changing?
LCS: I’d have to say that for me personally, I don’t find it more difficult to be taken seriously as a female guitarist. But that’s mostly because I am not on a track of trying to compete with male “guitar hero” types; rather, I am a songwriter who plays and writes on guitar. I’m an artist not unlike Sheryl Crow, whom people see as a competent guitarist but who gets judged for being a songwriter primarily. Sheryl tends toward a more collaborative approach to her songwriting, however, whereas I am proud to have composed the songs on my album on my own. I did record one cover tune (Pat Benatar’s “We Belong”) for the album to pay tribute to one of the song’s writers who has the devastating illness ALS and who is a longtime acquaintance of my husband’s and mine, but the other 10 songs are entirely mine. The three guitar-related endorsement deals I have—with Dean Markley, SPG Guitars, and Goodsell Amps—came to me on the strength of the record I wrote more than for my guitar chops, and I feel respected and taken seriously for my efforts on the album, without question.
I do believe attitudes about female musicians in general are changing, but slowly.
Groups like Heart, with the fabulous Nancy Wilson on guitar, made many women, including me, realize that female guitarists could be rock stars, and more of them have been seen playing electric guitar in the years since Heart first burst onto the scene in the mid-to-late 1970s. Of course, there was a tradition of women finding success with acoustic-based sounds, such as Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Janis Ian, and several others, but the Wilson sisters were the first female-led, electric rock band that caught the attention of the American public at large, I think. The all-girl rock group The Runaways, an all-girl rock group that reached the peak of its popularity at roughly the same time that Heart enjoyed their first hits, had more success as a novelty act in places like Japan than on the American music charts. In the 1980s, Joan Jett (who was a member of The Runaways) certainly became an influence as a solo artist/female rock rhythm player following the huge success of “I Love Rock N’ Roll,” and The Runaways’ lead guitarist, Lita Ford, charted to a lesser degree with a solo record that featured a duet with Ozzy Osbourne. The 1980s also saw the rise of The Go-Go’s and The Bangles, which followed the all-girl model to major chart success, as well as of harder-edged all-girl bands like Vixen, but these bands achieved only moderate commercial success. In the nineties, it was mostly about female solo artists like Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, Shawn Colvin, and Sarah McLachlan—not all-female bands—but each of them made it on the strength of a specific song and not because of her guitar abilities. There are some really great female blues-based guitarists out there, like Susan Tedeschi for example, but the blues genre in general just doesn’t get that much mainstream commercial recognition, so those women (with the exception of Bonnie Raitt, who has had huge commercial success) largely go unnoticed by the general public. I find that unfortunate, and I have featured some of these amazing female guitarists in the past at my site, GuitarGirls.com, and will continue to do so in the future.
I’m in the middle of rebuilding the website now and trying to decide which direction to take it in. I know the concept is a marketable one, and GuitarGirls.com is a great domain name, so it has intrinsic value. Plus, I want to continue to connect with talented female singer/songwriter/guitarists and female instrumental guitarists from around the world. It’s something I have always enjoyed doing and that I feel is important because female musicians have traditionally been underrepresented in the music industry. Unfortunately, as my time has become more limited now that I have an album to promote and support, I will probably have to bring in some new people to the site to collaborate with for it to be all it could and should be. Although I’m in this rebuilding phase at the moment with the site, I would like to extend an open invitation to female artists who play guitar to contact me at guitargirlsubmissions@gmail.com and send me links to pages where their music is posted if they’d like to be involved with the site in the future.
GB: In 2005, you won four independent online music awards (IOMAs), including three for your collaboration with Brian May, the inspirational “If We Believe.” What was it like to be recognized by your musician peers in this manner?
LCS: Thanks for calling my song “If We Believe” inspirational. That song was inspired by the 1992 riots here in Los Angeles, which was a very ugly time in this city’s history. I felt compelled to write something with a theme of racial tolerance after witnessing all that. It was a great honor, of course, to have been recognized in the four IOMA categories that I won. There were 15,000 votes for the collective awards, and I had more nominations than any other artist that year, so it felt like a significant achievement in my career.
GB: You are involved in many causes, and you have allowed your music and proceeds from its sale to be used to promote initiatives such as the Mercury Phoenix Trust. How do you find the energy to take on so many causes?
LCS: It’s not that difficult to find the energy when you are really passionate about something. Causes like AIDS, ALS, and drunk-driving awareness are things that I personally care a great deal about, so whatever I can do in terms of writing or lending a song, donating some of the proceeds of sales, or just talking about the causes doesn’t seem like a burden on my time or a drain on my energy. I feel I am a very fortunate person in the grand scheme of things, and I think that part of being appreciative of the fact that you have it pretty good in life is an obligation to give back to those who are less fortunate or who have suffered in some way.
GB: Your song “I Wasn’t a Friend” describes a tragedy involving drunk driving. Would you be willing to share with me the inspiration for that moving tune?
LCS: Many people assume that the song is completely autobiographical, and I suppose I’m flattered, because it must mean people find great sincerity in it. I welcome the opportunity to talk about where it actually springs from, as even an NBC-owned site got it wrong following a recent high-profile event I did for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Quoting them, they said my song was “based on actual events when she didn't take the keys from a friend who crashed after drinking and driving.” Well, they did get the theme of the song right, but the truth is that the song is fictional. I feel very fortunate to have never been in a situation where I knew a friend was drunk, I didn’t stop him or her from driving, and the friend came to harm because of my reticence to step in. I chose to write the song from a first-person perspective, as if it were based on a personal experience, because I knew it would have the most emotional impact that way.
I got the motivation to write a song like that because when I was a teenager, I witnessed a horrific head-on accident in which a drunk driver drifted into the oncoming lane and hit the car directly in front of mine. The impact was so great that it flipped the car upside down and instantly killed all four of the teenagers inside, who were all about the same age as me at the time. The drunk driver was able to walk away from the crash, as is often the case. I’ve always thought about the fact that if I’d left a couple seconds earlier that day, I could have been in the car ahead of theirs instead of behind it, and it could have just as easily been me who was hit and killed instead. Timing, as they say, is everything, and that day, I had luck on my side, and four others did not. I’m sure it was that experience, which is something I had nightmares about for years afterward, that inspired me to write a musical commentary on the subject of drunk driving. The song is simply an anecdotal way of saying that being a true friend means never letting anyone you love or care about get behind the wheel of a car after he or she has been drinking.
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