Album Review - A Few Small Repairs by Shawn Colvin (1996)

One of my favorite albums came out two weeks before my first birthday. While I moistened food with my own drool, Shawn Colvin was putting out her seminal divorce album A Few Small Repairs, featuring the iconic 90s radio hit “Sunny Came Home”. “Sunny” was a career-defining hit for Colvin, and even as she released new music consistently over the next two decades, she still tells stories at her live shows about being called “Sunny” at the bar.

Repairs was Colvin’s fourth album and by far the most recognized of her work to that point—she was nominated for the Grammy for Best Pop Album and won Song of the Year for “Sunny”, only to have her speech interrupted by the now much more famous “Wootang is for the children” rant by Ol’ Dirty Bastard live on air. Which leads me into my own question: how is that Repairs, a mostly melancholy concept record from a freshly 40-year-old divorcee struggling to maintain her sobriety, spoke to me so deeply during my own childhood? As early as elementary school, I remember playing the cassette that my dad had recorded for his pickup: the too-quiet intro, the satisfying click that signaled a side change, the hyperactive whirring of the tape deck. The songs were often sad but soothing, Colvin’s low alto hitting its full richness on tracks backed with spare driving base lines and working their way up to angry guitar accompaniment and at times giddy and chaotic harmonica.

Repairs showcases a full display of human emotion, beginning with the light, pop-y “Sunny” before guiding us to the peak of justified rage in “Get Out of This House”, where the bass riff chases the man who’s wronged us out of a space reclaimed as our own. From here, we descend into “Facts About Jimmy”, a song about the hollowness of finding that your coping mechanisms no longer shield you from the pain of the world. “Jimmy” cheats on his estranged wife with a woman whose emotional needs he can’t possibly fulfill, but as the song dolefully reassures us, there is somebody for everyone—even if that somebody is destined to hurt us:

I used to get drunk to get my spark

And it used to work just fine

It made me wretched but it gave me heart

I miss Jimmy like I miss my wine

At thirteen, I’d never had a breakup or a sip of wine, but I did know what it was like to find that the things that used to make you happy simply didn’t anymore. While I was putting away childish things, I was also mourning them, tearing holes in each and every one of my security blankets.

But we can’t stay here for long, and Colvin knows it. In “You and the Mona Lisa” and “Trouble”, we feel the push and pull of the decision to leave: “I should walk away right now/I’ll be here, so never mind, I’ll be the one to fall”, she writes. After all, “Trouble is just a place to sing.”

The decision to leave is made but leaves us full of regret in “I Want It Back”, leading to bare contemplations of what could have been if “If I Were Brave”:

But I have this funny ache and it's burning in my chest

And it spreads just like a fire inside my body

Is it something God left out in my spirit or my flesh

Would I be saved if I were brave and had a baby?

What is more true to the pubescent experience than feeling like something is fundamentally wrong with you? Or wishing, maybe more than anything, that you were just a little bit braver?

From here, “Witchita Skyline” and “84,000 Different Delusions” take us on a soul-searching trip through back road Americana, where there’s nothing around the bend but more sky and the lies we tell ourselves to make it through.

This is where reality bends and breaks: Colvin can’t yet see over the horizon. We don’t know, in the cocoon, what we’ll become after we dissolve. We can only guess in fragments, bits of dialogue and imagery that swirl in the hopeful twang of brightly reverb-ed guitar. “Suicide Alley” wrestles with this opaque future:

You thought you were dreaming

You could wake up dead

And you'll never know what's real

All this damage is runnin' loose in your head

And it really matters to me

“New Thing Now” embraces the uncertainty, winking at all the possibilities of starting fresh:

This is your new thing now

And now you're turning grinning

But maybe no one's listening

And you might lose it all my darling, yes you might

The final track, “Nothin’ On Me”, ends the album on a decidedly high note. The swinging instrumental refrain and Colvin’s punchy delivery return us to the spirit of “Sunny”, assuring us that things are, in fact, going to be ok. This song delights me for multiple reasons, the most prominent of which being that the old-track tape that my dad used to record the album had run out of space before it could capture this epilogue. As a kid, I thought the album ended on “New Thing Now”, a tentatively hopeful but stripped-down endnote that never rebuilt back to “Sunny”’s energy. When I first played the album on Spotify, “Nothin’ On Me” felt like the final piece to the record I didn’t even know I needed.

My working theory is that despite Steve Hochman’s assertion that breakup albums by women were played out by the mid 90s (a hot and fresh take that I’m sure he applies equally to men), Repairs is not just about leaving a relationship. It’s about leaving versions of yourself and the future you imagined for yourself behind in favor of strange and painful metamorphosis. While “Sunny Came Home” might be the OG “girl who is going to be ok” soundtrack, the rest of the album is a methodical and at times surreal journey to how we got there. The cover artwork by Colvin’s friend Julie Speed exemplifies this vulnerable determination to tear it all down—a three-eyed woman holds a lit match, the prairie fire she started barely visible on the horizon.