#18: February 2006

Interview: Carole Rowley

By Michael Daecher ⋅ February 5, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

by Charles R. Smith Jr. 

My
family used to go camping and had an autoharp, it’s like a zither- a guitar
where you don’t have to do anything- and we would take it camping and my
parents loved all the folk songs from England and we’d sit around the campfire
and all the neighbors would come over. I remember being 4 years old figuring
out how to sing with vibrato and that was it! By the time I was nine I wanted
to be Julie Andrews and that’s where it (my love of music) all started.

  Both parents are British. Mom is from
Gloucestershire and dad is from Wales. I was born in New Haven, Connecticut and
lived there 9 years then moved to Boston and eventually went to Berklee college
(of music) in Boston. I played music all through high school, playing bands and
all that but I wanted to be a photojournalist because I wanted to write and
travel but I took a year off and worked in a club singing every night in Boston
that was across the street from Berklee. I wondered how tough the exam was, if
I could ever get in. I literally walked in and asked what does it take to get
in- I’m a big fan- and I couldn’t believe they just let me in. I actually lived
for a time in Europe while in Boston then moved there after I graduated
college. I had been going to England when we were kids, but I had met a French
guy (in Boston) and we were dating and when he went back I went to visit him
for three weeks and I stayed because I loved Europe.

I
started at the jazz clubs in Paris. At one point I was doing a lot of session
work and touring work and I was always working for other artists or doing my
own thing in the jazz clubs but I wanted to write- I wanted to have my own
voice- so I started writing and got some interest from record companies in
London so I moved to London. And then it was actually the writing that took me
from London as well because I had an offer for a publishing contract with
Warners in L.A., so even though I had my place in London, I was flying back and
forth between New York and LA. I lived for a year in LA and I lived in NY six
months here, six months there. So it was LA to NY then back to London to do
more of the road music thing. I collaborated with Peter Gabriel on his label
and then got really burnt out so I sold everything, my studio, my apartment,
everything, and I went and traveled throughout

Africa

.

At
the end of my contract with Warners I just felt like I had to go do my own
thing and I worked with African artists for years in Europe- there’s a large
African population in Paris- and for some reason I just got hooked in with that
and I started seeing different dialects. I’d been to North Africa before- but
this time I went back to Africa…Uganda. I really went to find why I did music
in the first place again ‘cause I was confused with not being able to make a
living- a good enough living- doing my own stuff independently and not wanting
to go back into the music world as I knew it. So I said let’s sell everything
and go back to your roots- not that my roots are from Africa (laughter)- but
that’s the music that really…when I hear the call to prayer…it just goes
right to my gut. I feel like…there’s something…it just speaks to me.  So the first place I went was to Uganda. Then
I went to Madagascar. Then I went to Botswana to do a safari kind of
thing. Zimbabwe, then Zambia. Zanzibar,
Tanzania, South Africa, Namibia. I ended up buying this place in South Africa
and right after, I found out that I’d lost all the money that I’d made on my
apartment on the stock market. So I took every little penny I had left and
bought a little apartment in Cape Town because I thought if I’m gonna retire
anywhere in the world, if I want some thing that I can have…Cape
Town…paradise.

The
last time I worked in Paris I worked with these kids on a reality TV show- the
equivalent of American Idol in France- and I’d been living in France off and
on, but when I went back, this was like two years ago, I just felt like Paris
had changed, France had changed, the music industry had changed, I had changed
and much as I love France, I felt like I no longer wanted to be there and I no
longer had to be in London. I really wanted to come back here and be closer to
my parents, you know, ‘cause they’re getting older. They live in Florida and
it’s closer (to New York). I started looking up around Columbia county because
I have a lot of friends with places in the city and homes up there and I house
sit for some friends who had a house up there and I figured out that’s what I
wanted to do and then I went through this kind of crisis period. I was in New
Mexico and then 9-11 happened and I ended up just traveling for three weeks,
doing all the national parks, not coming back to New York City and I came back
wondering what I was coming back to New York for.

I
went and volunteered down at ground zero for six months in the chapel down
there and -because I was on the road touring all the time I always had issues
with my back and so I went and studied shia-tzu because I was fascinated by all
the meridians and stuff- and I would work on people on the road. So when I came
after 9-11, I went down and volunteered to do massage at ground zero. I’m
really into natural healing and I’m a real proponent of all that stuff- and I
got to use it and also the psychological aspects of hands-on healing of people
and listening to their body and listening to them was really important down
there and after that, I thought…I wanna study, I wanna study this stuff. I
became so fascinated with it I actually went and studied in San Diego and then I
went up and studied in the Berkshires. So I was up there, I got into looking at
everything about living up there and I realized it was too far from the city
and I would go crazy- my boyfriend was in L.A. and it was like ridiculous
trying to figure it out – so anyway I ended up looking around and Beacon was
really…first of all artistically I thought it was kind of exciting what was
going on and I had friends in Cold Spring and Garrison but honestly…it’s just
like affordable and I felt like it was a turning point where a lot could be
happening and it’d be nice to ride that wave and to be up here. There’s hiking
and kayaking and all that and I LOVE to hike so I had to have that, and there’s
the river and the sailing- I learned how to sail in Cape Town. I wanted to be
here. And the city- getting on the train and going into the city- I finally
realized that Beacon really sort of had everything I wanted in an affordable
package. The other places were too far or weren’t affordable. So I settled by
default. I must admit I have really itchy feet all the time- I wanna go back to
Europe- but I am finding that I have the silence and space to go into myself
and since I’ve moved here I have started a different…trajectory, in the sense
that I’m doing writing classes. I found that living in the city I never had the
clear space around me where I could just focus. But every once in a while I
have to go back and get an overdose. I actually lived for about a month in the
city while I was having work done on my house and it was fantastic; I had
friends over from Europe and they were there for a month and my friend had a
gallery opening and it was incredible and by the end I was so absolutely
exhausted and depleted and I felt like my life wasn’t my own anymore. So that’s
what this place is for me, it’s a place to kind of… go hiking, get up…live
in a neighborhood; I’ve never lived in a neighborhood like this, I’ve always
lived in cities. And even though in London I lived in a beautiful neighborhood,
it wasn’t the same…as a Beacon neighborhood.

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