Meaning that if you’re producing a movie, sometimes that takes years. And creatively, songwriting is such an intimate process that became so satisfying that I felt like I had found a creative home for myself that I could do and not have to wait on other people to do it. I feel like I’ve said this before, but I feel like I’ve exhausted the canon of a warm, kind, nurturing mother, sister, wife, daughter, you know? There’s only so many ways that character can be written and you get tired of it. WILSON: When I started songwriting, it felt so wildly creative to me in a way that I had not been able to experience as an actor because I kept playing the same roles over and over again. I still get goose bumps on that.ĪP: You've been putting out albums since 2012, but what made you decide to pursue songwriting and singing on top of your acting career? I mean, you just hear it in his voice and there’s no, “ooh,” it’s just “kiss.” And then "fire" is like an exclamation point, like, I can’t take it anymore! That I just loved. Normally it goes, “and when we kiss, ooh, fire.” Right? He brought in to the word “kiss” every ounce of desire, longing, desperation, frustration. He came in and he had this way of singing "fire" that was unlike any thing I’d ever heard. WILSON: When Elvis Costello sang on ”Fire," the Bruce Springsteen song, I was so blown away. And I think he was intrigued by singing in a more intimate way.ĪP: Did you and Matt give the duet partners creative freedom to sing their own way? No one ever asks me to sing like this.” Because his audience has an expectation of his incredible instrument and voice. And it was so cool because he said, “Thank you for asking me to do this.
So he reached out to Willie, and I reached out to Jackson Browne because we had done that song live before together, and we really enjoyed doing that song together, “Let It Be Me.” Josh Groban, I had met, didn’t really know that well, but I could hear his voice on that, on "Songbird." I could just hear it. But Matt Rawlings, my co-producer, had produced and won Grammys with Willie Nelson’s Gershwin album and his Sinatra album. WILSON: I didn’t know a lot of people, had maybe met some people in passing. So we just put everything that we loved in there and as we started thinking about, all right, but what are these songs saying? Because some songs are just great songs, but is there really an opportunity for a duet here?"ĪP: How many of these singers did you know well already and how many were like a cold call? My co-producer is Matt Rawlings, an amazing pianist, arranger, orchestrator. So in the initial - let’s call them the bag of songs - there were so many and we just threw in everything that we loved. So I thought, ‘All right, then what makes this different and what makes it fresh?’ And when I started thinking about my mom and those connections and well, maybe this is people talking to each other, maybe there’s a conversation here that could be had.
I wanted to stay connected to that emotional reaction I had when I heard them when I was younger.
I didn’t want to reinvent the melody or reinvent the tempo. And when songs are great the way these are, I didn’t want to mess with them too much. WILSON: Well, I love these songs and I revere the songwriters who wrote them and the original artists who recorded them. Why did you want to transform them in that way? Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.ĪP: Most of these songs were not originally recorded as duets. She talked to The Associated Press about creating a conversation with her duet partners, working with artists who she loved and bridging her love of music and acting.
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