It is unusual that a low-key but respected singer/songwriter would ever want to willingly sacrifice a burgeoning career for a job that involved working with chronically mentally ill patients. A change of heart and conscience normally comes after mainstream success, not before it. But US singer/songwriter Lucy Kaplansky didn't exactly see it that way.
A performer since she was a child, Lucy was initially heavily influenced by her father, a University of Chicago maths professor and semi-professional piano player who, then and now, writes songs with a pronounced scientific maths theme (his song about the prodigious benefits of Pi is a thigh-slapper). Sparked off by her love of Joni Mitchell, Kaplansky began to perform in Chicago bars she was officially too young to enter. Barely out of high school, she headed for New York and the Mecca of any songwriter worth their salt - Greenwich Village.
"It was an unusual time for people," says Lucy on a phone line from Wisconsin. "There was a folk club called Folk City, and the whole scene there started with people like The Roches and Steve Forbert. It was a place where everyone hung around together and were friends. People were, to some degree, rooting for each other. We were watching each other's progress, and every now and again somebody would explode out of there and become successful. Everyone was trying to become successful, and that eventually happened. Everybody hoped that they would become famous. Some people knew that would happen. Others who I won't name, who everyone thought would be huge, shot themselves in the foot too many times and didn't get anywhere."
The crunch in Kaplansky's life came via a crisis in conscience in the mid to late 1980s. She says that when she started performing in New York her career was going the way it's supposed to go if someone really wants a career in music - critical acclaim from numerous publications, including The New York Times, and respect from her contemporaries. A successful career seemed inevitable, but suddenly, compulsively, she changed her mind.
"I knew I wasn't happy, but I didn't really understand why. It turned out, however, that what I told myself wasn't true. It was true that I was unhappy, but it wasn't true that I didn't want to be a singer. That was a lie I was telling myself to make me run away from a lot of things connected with conflicts about performing and singing. Quite simply, I got too scared. I was surrounded by incredibly talented and exceptional people in Greenwich Village and I was afraid that I wasn't all that good. The best way to never find out if you're not good enough is to never do anything. So I ran away, and although I kept singing in my own mind I wasn't a solo singer."
"If I had really believed in myself I wouldn't have run away from things," she explains. "It wouldn't have been an issue. The rest of the problems? I don't even know if they would make sense. I've been spending time in my own psychotherapy trying to figure it out. I suppose fear of failure is another thing, as well as fear of success. I also have conflicts about feeling that I'm showing off, which makes being on stage somewhat problematic. Anyway, I decided to quit and to go back to school."
"School" was Yeshiva University, New York, where Kaplansky received a Doctorate in Psychology in 1992. She says that in retrospect she chose to be a therapist because she wanted to find out what was "wrong" with her. From 1992 until 971997 she worked at a New York hospital as well as opening up her own practice. Although the work was "interesting, challenging, satisfying, draining and exhausting," Kaplansky says she never felt passionate about it. Her patients - chronically mentally ill people who were also substance abusers - were mostly in her care on day programmes. Most of them were also homeless. Lucy calls them (in strict doctoral terms, needless to say) "the sickest people in New York".
"They are the men and women you see on the streets," she relates. "It was difficult in many ways, but so many of them got better and made lives for themselves and were so grateful. It was so moving at times. I really felt I had an impact on some of their lives. I loved them and loved working with them."
Did her time spent with the mentally ill prepare her for working full time in the music industry?
"Yes! It also prepared me for life in general. People in the music industry are no crazier than people anywhere else - well, maybe a little bit crazier, but I'm so much savvier now about how to cope with people and their problems. It has helped me immeasurably in my life, not only with musicians and promoters, but with people in general."
At the core at Lucy Kaplansky's songwriting is a world view based both on her own experiences and her observations of other people's lives. Her three albums to date, The Tide (1994), Flesh And Bone (1996) and Ten Year Night (1999), highlight an astute and inclusive awareness of the human condition that seems to have little to do with commercial dictates. When asked from where her songs originate, Lucy says they come from an unconscious, mysterious place, the location of which she cannot pinpoint, and the inspiration of which she doesn't for a second pretend to understand.
Lucy Kaplansky plays Sandino's Bar, Derry, December 15th, Errigal Inn, Belfast, December 16th, and The Cobblestone, Dublin on December 18th.
