Article Library

Some gigs are just too good to pass up.

That seems to be the case for a special appearance by Michelle Shocked at Chautaugua Auditorium on Saturday. Even though she is in the post-production process of recording her new album, Shocked couldn’t resist coming to Boulder when she found out who she would be playing with.

“My real motivation for doing it is not because I’m on tour or because I need the money or anything. It’s because Norman and Nancy Blake were invited as well and I’m such a big fan of theirs,” Shocked said recently by phone from Los Angeles.

The Blakes are highly respected acoustic musicians who Shocked became familiar with going to folk and flatpicking music festivals as a youngster. Shocked now is playing with her heroes, both on stage and in the studio.

“I met them before, but I met them again about two months ago when I was touring around the United States in a Winnebago recording for my next album,” Shocked said. “We stopped by their house in Rising Fawn and recorded a song together.”

The song Shocked recorded with the Blakes was “Blackberry Blossom,” and the album, not set for release until later this year, is to be called Arkansas Traveler. Not only is the album to be a collaboration between Shocked and musicians such as the Blakes, Taj Mahal, and, she hopes, Merle Haggard and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, but it’s also to be a collaboration between Shocked’s keen modern eye and the sounds of tradition.

“What I’ve done on a lot of the music is I’ve taken old fiddle tunes and I’ve put my own lyrics to it,” [sic] she said. “Some might say that’s gilding the lily, but nobody else was going to do it, so I guess I had to.”

Shocked rose to musical prominence out of the annual folk festival in Kerrville, Texas.

An Englishman named Pete Lawrence discovered Shocked at the festival in 1986 and turned some on-the-spot recordings on a Sony Walkman into a surprise independent hit album in England. The Texas Campfire Tapes album revealed Shocked’s fresh, original talent, her songwriting crystal clear and resonant, and her performance spunky and open.

Shocked then teamed up with producer and guitarist Pete Anderson to record two successful studio albums: 1988’s Short Sharp Shocked yielded the hit “Anchorage,” and 1989’s Captain Swing,” was an upbeat, rocking collection featuring “On the Greener Side.”

Although she remains active in social causes locally in her new home of Los Angeles, where she is set to be married in December, Shocked is shying away from the role of public spokesperson on social issues, one which she embraced when Short Sharp Shocked broke into the national charts. Although she will be talking on environmental issues on an upcoming edition of Nick Forester’s environmental radio program “E-Town,” she sees her job as a musician in a different light these days.

“I came on a philosophy that seems to work for me. I mean, you can preach to the converted or you can entertain the troops,” she said. “Lately I’ve been saying like Emma Goldman: ‘If I can’t dance, you can keep your revolution’ kind of thing. You know, let people know that political correctness isn’t much different than despair and so relax, let your hair down a little and really enjoy what you’re trying to do.”

WHAT’S WHAT
What: Michelle Shocked with Norman and Nancy Blake
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Chautauqua Auditorium, below Baseline at Ninth Street, Boulder
Tickets: $17
Phone: 440-7666 or 290-TIXS