Quick Q and A with Cosy Sheridan
 by Kathy S-B  ·  7 April 2007

I love this description written about you by a music critic: “Cosy Sheridan is a Buddhist monk in a 12-step program trapped in the body of a singer-songwriter.” How accurate do you think that description is?

Well, it’s probably more pithy than strictly accurate. I’m not a Buddhist monk, nor even a practicing Buddhist, nor am I in a 12-step program. However, I think the spirit of the sentence is pretty close to the mark. I certainly strive to live some of both philosophies.

“The Pomegranate Seed” is a powerful work. Do you get feedback from women, young and old alike, who are grappling with issues related to their bodies? Hearing these songs must be very healing for them.

Yes, I get a lot of feedback from “The Pomegranate Seed” — both from the CD and from the live show. Some of them are really pretty amazing. There is a young woman who writes to me from the hospital in California where she is hospitalized with anorexia. Someone sent her a copy of the CD and she writes to me about how she is trying to remember to feel her rage — that is an important thing for many women. It’s a generous thing for her to share her experience, and to share with me how my music has helped her.

I get emails from women at colleges where I’ve done the show — and they clearly felt that I was telling their story, and it moved them. For them to see that their story is moving — that it is tragic — is really important: they start to value their own journey and to see that their experience is valid, no matter whether our culture reflects it back to them accurately or not. And all of this, of course, is tremendously rewarding to me. I wrote much of The Pomegrante Seed because I felt a tremendous amount of regret. It has been an amazing and wonderful journey for me to learn how I can use those experiences to help other women — the regret turns to some life-wisdom that I can pass on to others.

Tell us about the songs that you wrote for best-selling author, Robert Fulghum. How did that project come about? The history of the book is fascinating — not finding a publisher here in the U.S. and getting the book published in Czech and soon in other European languages. Were the songs packaged with the book? (For those reading this blog, check out: www.robertfulghum.com.)

Robert was really generous — he lives part of the year in Moab, and enjoys my music. A couple of years ago he asked me if I would like to try to write songs for a character in a book he was writing. I had never tried that before, but it came at a time where I needed a new challenge; it was kind of synergistic. The character was a young woman who writes songs as a creative/personal outlet. I really enjoyed it.

The songs were recorded to sound as if the woman is singing them at her kitchen table. It’s quite informal sounding — more informal than anything I’ve ever recorded. And, yes, the CD is packaged with the book.

You’ve been at this singer-songwriter life for a while now — it’s not an easy life. What’s the best part of it and what’s the worst?

The best part is the concerts and the songwriting and the gift of doing something I really love. The worst part is the travel.

I was inspired to ask this question by reading a comment in your biography in which a reviewer said that she would definitely invite you to an all-girl dinner party if she wanted to laugh and cry from hor oeuvres to the chocolate pudding for dessert. Well, what if you were giving a big dinner party and could invite some famous folks (dead or alive), who would YOU invite?

Oh good question! Putting aside the definition of “famous”, and besides all of my wonderfully talented musician friends: I would invite Randy Newman. And that might be it. I like small parties.