Always Been There by Michael Streissguth

Author:Michael Streissguth [Streissguth, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction, Music
ISBN: 0306819171
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2009-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

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ALWAYS BEEN THERE

Rosanne with (l to r) Loretta Lynn, Reba McEntire, and Holly Dunn in 1987.

• “I’m reluctant about getting caught up in the mechanism,”

she told the Orlando Sentinel in 1986. “There’s a certain myth of stardom and a certain formula of stardom I don’t buy. I really believe in an individual approach to life, so I just follow my instincts, and my instincts tell me it’s not good to be away from small children for lengthy tours. My dad wasn’t around too much when I was a kid, and I just don’t want to do that to my kids. So I don’t.”

• “I just don’t enjoy touring that much,” she admitted to the Boston Globe one year later. “My tours have been short and sporadic. It’s just not something I wanted to commit to. It’s not a formula I felt I had to follow.”

• “Well, you know, there’s a formula in Nashville about how you should make records, how you should relate to your audience, how much you should tour,” she reiterated to Alanna Nash in the early 1980s. “The whole thing is a package deal.

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Miss the Mississippi and You

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They might as well turn it into a handbook and give it to you as you enter the business. And I just don’t buy it! I don’t buy it at all! I think there’s an individual way to approach life and success. . . . But I don’t think that I have to tour to sell records. I just don’t. Maybe I’d be selling five times as many if I did tour, but I don’t know that, so it doesn’t irk me.”

In fact, one can also see in those articles that in and around various album release dates over the years she could be counted on to be in a state of expectant motherhood. Hard to mount a tour with a child in the womb. And hard to gather and maintain an audience from the foot of a baby’s crib.

Her manager, Danny Kahn, accepts and understands Rosanne’s limited touring, acknowledging, however, that she could cultivate larger audiences and tally up bigger record sales if she hit the road more often. He’s philosophical about his artist: “She does what she needs to do and sometimes even a little bit more. Touring—it’s a long conversation—but it’s a relative thing based on how an artist perceives her own life. There are many artists that live for the stage and performing and that audience feedback and have given everything over to that life on the road, even raising families on the road or not. While other artists—and I have to say Rosanne would be one of those other artists—try to find a way to do it to satisfy both obligations and enjoyment of performing in balance with the rest of private and professional life that doesn’t involve touring. For her, the rest of that life is pretty dense and involved, so it’s quite easy for her to be very busy but not tour nearly as much as most artists.

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