On first meeting her, the reasons for Sylvia Hutton’s efficacy as a life and career coach reveal themselves quickly. In addition to being a Grammy-Award nominated singer-songwriter, she displays a warmth, forthrightness and charm that immediately puts you at ease. We’re doing a video interview about her much-anticipated concept album Nature Child – A Dreamer’s Journey, which is due out on 22/2/22 – also known as Twos Day. As she speaks from her Nashville, Tennessee home, I’m struck by the captivating voice which made her an acclaimed Country music artist – and by the self-observation which draws me in and invites a deeper, franker conversation.
As a solo recording artist with RCA Records, Hutton had a series of chart-topping hits between 1979 and 1987. She became one of the most celebrated women in country music by releasing five albums with a dozen Number One and Top Ten hits, selling over four million records, and winning multiple awards, including the Academy of Country Music’s Female Vocalist of the Year and Billboard’s #1 Country Female Artist. In fact, the seed for Nature Child was planted by the concerts that she performed back in the 80s. “Masses of children came to my shows, which was totally a surprise – and I loved it!” she enthuses. “Some nights, there’d be ten deep children up at the front of the stage, singing every word along with songs like ‘Nobody’ and ‘Snapshot’ that were kind of bouncy little tunes. But the lyrics weren’t really what you’d want to be singing to little bitty kids!”
When she finally got off the road after that heavy period of full-time touring, she set out to write some music that she would want to sing to those kids: “That’s the inspiration for this record.”
Half of the songs on Nature Child were written between 1988 and 1990. Having tried many times to finish the record in the years since, Hutton explains that “it just didn’t want to happen. I can see clearly now that this is the perfect time for it to come out: in the midst of a world that has been dealing with a pandemic going into three years now. …What better time for us to have a record out that is dealing with – and asking people – to dare to dream?” She concedes that “it’s a real tough time to dream”. But it’s also more essential than ever: “on some level, we create our world that we live in all the time. Why can’t we create a different world than we’re living in right now?”
Hutton describes the process of recording Nature Child as “miraculous”. She began in 2019, got into earnest recording in early 2020. “And then boom! The pandemic hit,” she laughs. She and the creative team took a short break until they could get vaccinated. They wore masks in the studio. And during the recording, she and co-producer John Mock (the “musical soulmate” with whom she has collaborated since 1991) wrote several new songs that are included on the album. But again, the inspiration they kept “going back to was those kids, and longing to have something of substance and meaning to sing to them”.
She also drew on her own experience growing up in a town where there was no real live music or business of music. From her earliest memories, Hutton’s musical training consisted of simply singing: “just singing like you eat, sleep, drink water. I mean, just singing all the time.” In her hometown of Kokomo, Indiana, she remembers shutting herself off in her bedroom and singing along with the radio for “hours and hours daily. I just lived in a dream world of imagining what it was I wanted to create.” Almost from birth, “it was second nature to me,” she explains.
Although she moved to Nashville right after her high-school graduation, it would be four-and-a-half years before she could live the dream that had consumed her imagination since childhood. During this period, she recalls how “of course, adult thinking comes in, and fear comes in –- because I worried a lot. ‘What do people think about me? Do they think I’m a good singer?’ All of that.” She made it through, and “thank goodness, all that stuff has fallen away in the ensuing years.” And this is “another good reason for the timing of this record: that I could get out of the way of the music. I could just be the storyteller without it being about me, even though every writer draws on their own experience.”
Hutton also credits Gerald Arthur, the voice teacher with whom she maintained a weekly standing appointment for over 30 years, with teaching her how to control her voice so it doesn’t overpower the lyric. Under his tutelage, she learned how to think about and connect with a song’s storytelling, rather than as an extension of self. “I have no interest in celebrity. I really just don’t.” she stresses. She had the skill, the selfless storyteller’s focus, and the earnest desire to sing to those children, “so it was a perfect time to do this record on so many levels.”
With the album complete, she marvels at the universality of the songs. 34 years on, they have not dated. They have a “timeless quality to them which I didn’t plan on. Often as creators, if we’re really allowing it, something comes through you. If you allow yourself to be open, you become a channel for things. In so many ways, I feel like I’ve just been the scribe and the singer on this whole record. More than any other record I’ve done, this one is about the music.”
Despite having a sustained decade of chart-topping success as a recording artist, Hutton’s career path since has been circuitous and unexpected – something she discusses at length and without bitterness. From the pre-Internet mid- to late-Nineties, when she recorded her first independent record on her Red Pony Records label, she could not make anything happen with it. She wore herself out knocking on doors, trying to get someone interested – only to find every door was shut. “Nobody was interested in talking to me. I was in my 30s, and I was too old for the music business. I even had a record executive say to me, ‘you know we’re signing people in their teens. We’re not signing people in their 30s’. So I felt like I just hit a wall. And I finally sat down and said, ‘Okay, I surrender’.”
Until then, Hutton had never considered doing anything but music. And in the face of this repeated rejection, she told herself that she was going to open herself up, rather than shut herself off. She was philosophical: “If it’s meant for me to just leave music behind and do something else, I’m open”. It was around this time that Hutton first learned about life and career coaching. She was intrigued. Acquiring the skill set to help people find their own answers “just resonated with me. It was a way to be a true help to people… not just giving them information, but leading them into a conversation that brought them into their own answers”. Emboldened by this realization, Hutton trained to become a certified coach at the Hudson Institute in Santa Barbara, California. Although it was challenging, she found that she loved it. “I persevered and got my certification as a coach and began coaching.”
“What’s so weird is: in the middle of this training, I get a call out of the blue from a man I don’t even know, a record producer, who asks, ‘Do you want to record a Christmas record?’.” Though caught unawares, she replied without hesitation, “’Yeah, I’ve always wanted to record a Christmas record, but never had the opportunity’. Long story short: I’ve been recording ever since!” She smiles and shakes her head at the recollection: “It’s funny. I thought I was giving up music for good, which made me really sad. But I actually broadened out into who I am in the world.”
Life coaching, which also connects to storytelling, has proven to be a boon for her creative process. She credits coaching as an avenue to a “practice of presence” that she could not fully enter before. “The power is in this moment,” she asserts. “We human beings are so practised in thinking, thinking, thinking. And becoming identified with what we think. We all do it,” she nods – and she clearly includes herself here. “It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? To just be present and listen, and let go of any judgments, and just be with people. Yes, it’s simple. Yet it’s hard. I was amazed that when you really create an intention to be fully here – and just be – there’s no pressure. I don’t have to do anything. I just am. And beautiful things happen.”
If she ever needed it, Nature Child is proof of the beautiful things that can result from being open and truly present. The evocative songs are so gorgeously performed as to invite immediate replay. Even the album’s striking cover bears contemplation: it depicts Hutton at the threshold of an unknown land, reaching out her hand to a little girl. Is the girl one of those young fans at her concerts so many years ago? Or is it her Kokomo childhood self, dreaming of a future career in music? These possibilities even evoke the first meeting of a starstruck 16-year-old Hutton with legend Dolly Parton at the Little Nashville Opry in Indiana. When the teenaged Hutton told her musical hero about her dream of a music career, Parton told her, “Well, honey, I want to tell you this. If anybody tells you you can’t do it, you just don’t listen. You can do it if you set your mind to it. You can do it!”
And so she did. And so she has again. As the pandemic bends towards a new status quo, Nature Child – A Dreamer’s Journey is an achingly beautiful – and impossibly timely – realization of dreams developed over decades and released into the world with a sense of serene presence, optimistic possibility and wonder at things yet to come.
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2022
