They say you don't get second chances in the music biz, but don't tell that to Lucy Kaplansky. While still in her teens, the Midwest native made a beeline for the Big Apple, aiming to establish herself on the revitalized Village folk scene. Before long Kaplansky was chumming with up-and-comers Shawn Colvin, John Gorka, Suzanne Vega, and Richard Shindell during the early-'80s Fast Folk movement. With label reps descending on lower Manhattan by the score, Kaplansky seemed destined for a robust career.
Instead, she chose a different path. In 1983, Kaplansky suddenly put down the guitar, picked up the books, and, within a few years, became a practicing New York-based clinical psychologist. By then her Fast Folk buddies were fast becoming stars — Vega scoring a pair of late-'80s hits and Colvin nailing a deal with Columbia on her way to becoming a Grammy Award-winning sensation. Gradually, Kaplansky began making her way back into music, lending her vocal services to recordings by Nanci Griffith, John Gorka, and others. When Colvin approached her with an offer to produce an album's worth of songs, Kaplansky took the bait, and with 1994's Red House debut, Tide, Kaplansky was once again a practicing road warrior.
“When you're a singer-songwriter, you don't just tour for new albums — you're touring all the time,” says Kaplansky on the heels of her fourth LP, Every Single Day. “I play gigs every week, no matter what. Right now I just happen to have a new album to promote, which means I'm a little busier than usual.”
For Kaplansky, Every Single Day already bears a significant footnote. “It came out at midnight, September 11,” she notes, sighing. “My whole life had been focused around the making of this album, preparing it for release, and so forth. But after nine or ten that morning, I literally didn't even think about it for several days, which is unheard of for a recording artist. It was just the Fates, I guess.”
Kaplansky buttressed the subtle acoustic side of Every Single Day with a handful of beefier tracks such as “No More Excuses” and “Nowhere,” the latter featuring the crafty tremolo bends of six-string buddy Duke Levine. “We had more time in the studio this time around, which meant adding layers of guitars,” says Kaplansky, who recorded Every Single Day at producer Ben Wittman's Seventh Avenue studios. “So it certainly has a more complex sound.”
Despite the studio embellishments, for the most part, Kaplansky keeps it bare-bones in concert, performing solo or with an electric-guitar-playing sidekick. “If I could be touring with a band all the time, obviously I would,” says Kaplansky, who travels with a late-model Martin SP000-16 equipped with a Crown sound-hole mic and Fishman pickup combination, a Fishman Acoustic Blender, and a Schubb capo. “On the other hand, having a great guitarist onstage, for me, is almost like having a band; it's so much richer and so much more fun playing off somebody. I've been working with a guy named Ben Butler, who is just fearless. He'll just dive into something he's never heard before, which I love. That can mean all the difference in the world during a show.”
Would she like more mainstream success? Kaplansky says people who say otherwise need their heads examined. “Of course I'd like to take it farther,” she says, “but with a major? I'm not sure. I love my label; they put real resources behind me, they're never going to drop me, and I can make records exactly the way I want. That seems like a pretty good deal to me.”
