Sally Stevens is a singer/lyricist/choral director who has worked in film, television, concert, commercials and sound recording in Hollywood since 1960. She sings the main titles for The Simpsons and Family Guy and her voice can be heard on hundreds of film and television scores. She has put together choirs for John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, and many others for film scores, and was choral director for The Oscars for 22 years. In the earlier years she toured with Ray Conniff, Nat King Cole and Burt Bachrach, and she has also written lyrics for Burt Bacharach, Don Ellis, Dominic Frontiere, Dave Grusin, and others.
Her short fiction, poetry and essays have been included in Mockingheart Review, The OffBeat, Raven’s Perch, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Los Angeles Press, The Voices Project, and Between the Lines Anthology: Fairy Tales & Folklore Re-imagined. I Sang That: A Memoir From Hollywood is available from Amazon.
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TRANSCRIPTION STARTS HERE:
Kat
Well, hello, Sally Stevens. It’s so wonderful to have you on the Pencils & Lipstick podcast. How are you doing?
Sally
I’m doing great, thank you. It’s delightful to be here.
Kat
Wonderful. Before we get into your book, I Sang That from the Sound of Music to Simpsons to South park and beyond. I’m very excited. Will you tell everyone just a little bit about who you are and where you’re from?
Sally
Sure. Well, I’m talking to you from Studio City, California, which is generally the area where I grew up and was born, I was born in LA. And I have worked in music, film score music, television, sound recordings, commercials, all of that, what we call session singing and some concert work for a long, long time here, and I’m still active. I don’t know how that has happened, but it happens.
Kat
They won’t let you go.
Sally
So I know I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had a wonderful long journey, and it’s rainy and lovely here. I’m looking out at my garden.
Kat
So I’m glad you guys are getting rain. You guys are always sort of needing rain. So you were born and raised in LA? So you’ve sort of been around the Hollywood, the American sort of, I guess, it was a big dream at some point, to be an actress and to be in the Hollywood scene.
Sally
Well, you know, both my parents and my stepfather were singers, they were all singers. And my mom, they both also worked in film, but in the 40s, late 30s, 40s. They were not vocal contractors. They were not influential in the session world. But I knew that there was such a thing as a session singer. And we are the people that are rarely credited. Unless we’re very lucky. But it’s not what I wanted to do originally was just what you described. I had dreams of being Lucille Ball. She was my icon when I was a kid, and I wanted to be a songwriter, singer, artist. And I started in that path a little bit, or very early on while I was still at UCLA. But I had a chance to do some session work through people that I would need along the way. And it was such a fascinating business and it was so competitive, that there was a lot of activity in those days, much more sadly than there is today. But if you didn’t show up for something, the contractor or the producer might find someone they liked better. So you just had to be there.
Kat
Wow.
Sally
So it was very intense in the 60s and 70s, I came across some of my old calendar books, state books from 65, 69, 72, when I was looking for specific information about the memoir. And there were days, most days we would work, like from nine in the morning till ten at night, six days a week.
Kat
Oh my gosh!
Sally
And they were not all big projects. You know, you do a demo for a commercial and get paid $43 or something. But it was all union work in those days. And it just one thing kind of led to another. So it’s been a very interesting journey.
Kat
So what’s interesting to me is that there is a lot of times, maybe it’s only in America, maybe it’s everywhere. Where we start out with a really big dream. And the majority of the big names are probably what attracts us. But underneath those big names are all the other people who work really hard to put together all of the arts. I’m kind of thinking of, as you said, the people who don’t get as much credit. So when did that become enough for you? Was it just working, working, working. Like, this is paying the bills, and one day I will be Lucille Ball? Or did you come to accept?
Sally
Well, I think I was pretty sure that I never was going to be Lucille Ball.
Kat
That little voice is so terrible in the back of our minds, like, no, actually, there’s only one.
Sally
I wasn’t that brave. You have to put yourself out there and be funny and assume you’re not embarrassing yourself. I never really had that courage much later in my life. The first entry into the business while there were kind of two, and I write about this a little bit in the book. When I was at UCLA, there was a producer in New York named LeRoy Holmes who produced a do-op version of over the rainbow, which for some reason took off and started to be a big hit. And he had done it with a pickup group, which was just session singers in New York. So he needed to have a group that could go out and be the Baysiders. And that happened through a fellow student friend of mine, Jack Walker, Jackie Walker, and it was a group of three guys and myself, and we recorded the rest of the album, and then we did record hops, which in those days were events on I don’t even know what the spaces were. I know we were in El Segundo once, but it was where kids would come up, show up and dance to the DJ, and then they’d have usually a featured act, which sometimes would be us. And that was fun. And then a manager took me to see Herb Alpert. Are you familiar with Herb Alpert? Herb Alpert is a fabulous musician, producer, wonderful guy, who also has had many hits himself with the Tijuana Brass, and he started with M Records. And Lou Adler produced The Mamas and the Papas and all the big artists at one time. Before they had hits, they were partners in a little office above Sunset Strip, and they were looking for a young artist to sing a song that Herb had written. And somebody brought me in to meet with them, and they thought I would be okay. So he said, you have a song for the backside for the B-side. And so I went home and wrote one and brought it back, and he liked it better than his. He said, go write another one. But I had been writing songs all through high school. So he produced a single, two songs of mine, and it was released on Dot Records, and it got to number ten in Connecticut, but that’s as far as it got. But by that time, I had taken my first group job, and I was going on the road with Ray Conniff for his first celebrity tour. And I met people in that first little tour that were doing session work, and when I got back, I was called once in a while. And then we did my husband and I, who I met on that first tour, did a 47 one-nighter bus concert tour with Ray Conniff all across the country, and it was what took me out of my senior year at UCLA. But I learned so much about the business I wanted to be in.I just figured, okay, this is what I’m going to do.
Kat
Yeah. So you were writing music before that, like the music part and the lyrics?
Sally
Yeah, I have a bunch of song. About twelve years ago or ten years ago, I did a CD included about nine songs that I’d written and four other writers that I just loved, just to feed my soul. So I’ve always enjoyed writing. And along the way, I had these few, just a handful of really bucket list events where I had an opportunity to write lyrics for a film, score, or a project. I wrote lyrics for Bert Bacharach at one point, so I’ve had a chance to dabble in that along the way, but I haven’t had to rely on it as my living.
Kat
Okay, well, songwriting fascinates me. I know one other songwriter, and it’s incredible to me how you guys can hear music in your head and start putting words to it. I think it’s fascinating to me, probably because I can’t do it with beans. But is that something that you just always remember doing, or was there one specific thing in your childhood that sort of brought you into writing music and lyrics?
Sally
Well, I think the artists that were big artists when I was in high school were pretty much Peggy Lee and Sinatra. I can’t remember who all of the other artists were, but I always listened to music and loved music, and I think I was just drawn to sitting at the piano and writing it. And for me, writing a song happens at the piano, that the words and the music kind of come together. Writing a lyric for another composer is different, and it happens two ways. Like, the first film music that I got to write the lyrics for was a film called On Any Sunday, and it was sort of a documentary, a Bruce Brown documentary about motorcycling, of all things. But Steve McQueen was the attraction of the film. And I had ridden on a motorcycle once, when I was engaged to a vice cop in college, briefly, and I’d ridden a motorcycle with my brother who had one. I was on the back of it, but other than that, I didn’t know anything about motorcycle writing. But for some reason, I must have captured the vibe because the composer Dominic Frontiere had seen some of my songs and gave me the chance to write this. And they liked the lyric. And just coincidentally, that film has kind of become iconic in the motorcycle community. I’ve done about three interviews in the last couple of years, with people who just discovered who the singer was. We never got credit for the singing. I got credit for writing the lyrics. So that was a fun project. And that happened, I wrote the lyric, I think I wrote the lyric first and then Don Rot, I can’t really remember specifically, but most often the lyrics I’ve written for other people have been setting a lyric to a melody.
Kat
When you’re writing a song, I mean, they’re kind of like mini-stories, right? You kind of have to have a story arc in them.
Sally
Yeah. It’s funny, most of the songs that I’ve written were heartbreaking love songs, except for one, that I can remember. But there were a couple of words, but they always came out of an actual emotion that I was living through at the moment. The songs that were written for projects obviously have to be shaped around those projects.
Kat
Sure. But you’ve sort of made, like, mini-stories or written mini-stories throughout the years. But is I saying that is that your first book? Like, full book that you’ve written?
Sally
It is. Actually, I put together a couple of collections of poetry, about ten or twelve, no longer 13, 12, 13 years ago, of poems that I had written. And this was with a local publisher, here in the Los Angeles area that did self publishing. And I just did it because I wanted to be able to gift it to family and friends. I didn’t even market it, but this is actually the first. And I have had short stories in fiction, flash fiction, and a personal essay and some poetry land in literary journals and in a couple of hard copy collections. But this is the first book that I read.
Kat
Did you find it a very different process, or did you find it how did you find that between short fiction or short writing?
Sally
Well, the short fiction, I’m terrible about submitting stuff. My passion for writing, I finally gave myself the gift of pursuing it in a more serious way, by going to the University of Iowa writing workshops, and I went through that.
Kat
When did you go there? That’s like everyone’s dream. It’s my dream.
Sally
What I did was I accidentally applied to the Writers Program, the MFA, because I was writing a note to inquire about the Writing Summer Writing Festival workshop, which you don’t have to submit to, get into. And then I got a response back and they said, please send blah, blah, blah poems. And so I did, and I got a letter from oh, what is that amazing man, Frank Conroy? The man that ran the writing program for a while there, that I was accepted into the program, but that wasn’t what I was trying to do, because I couldn’t stay away from LA long enough to do that. But I did finally get into the writing workshop. Then I went back every summer for 20 summers. These last couple of years would have been my 21st and 22nd summer if they hadn’t been canceled because of that.
Kat
Terrible thing called Corona.
Sally
Yes. And while I was there, that’s when I would just go for a couple of weeks and be a writer, and I didn’t have to think about session scheduling or anything. And a lot of the courses that I took were generative. So I would work with writing work prompts and stuff. And most of the short stuff that I’ve sent off came primarily out of those workshops. Some of it, the poetry was just my own. But the best talk that I ever saw there, they had what they call the eleven’s lectures in the morning, and each week one of the instructors who was doing a leading workshop would give a presentation. And one morning this gentleman walked out with a cardboard box that was about 2ft long and a foot wide, and it was jammed with envelopes. And he said, until you get this many rejection notes back, you haven’t even tried. And I have not. I’m terrible about submitting, so I get discouraged if I sit down and say, okay, I’m going to send these three songs out to a few places and I don’t hear back. Or I get a response, we loved your writing, but it doesn’t work here. So the book was something that I was determined and I’m so grateful for the encouragement of friends and family. You know, when you do those workshops, you get to know people and what they do. And so often when folks learn that I’d worked in the music business so long, they say, oh, you’ve got to write a book. So it was in the back of my head. And I had written chapters along the way that were maybe part of a memoir workshop or something, but the pandemic period of time, when things just locked down, it was a wonderful time for me to go through all the material that I had and try to organize it and expand it and add. And I had two wonderful writers that I’m so grateful for. One was Gordon Meninga, who headed the writing program at CO College, but he also taught workshops in the summer at the University of Iowa. And he was so encouraging, always. He was the one that encouraged me to send off my first submission, and I got a note back the next day, that it had been accepted, I was grateful to him. So he looked through the memoir and made a few suggestions. And then another wonderful writer, Laura Munson, who’s had two very successful books. I did a workshop with her in Montana, and we kind of started talking about the memoir when I was at the point of wrapping it up. I sent it to her, and she sent me back comments, and she encouraged me to put more of being in the moment in the book, in conversations and stuff, which sometimes when you’re writing, you kind of get into, this happened and then this happened and then that happened. So that was very helpful.
Kat
Yeah. You always sort of need someone to give you feedback on it, right?
Sally
Absolutely.
Kat
Especially something so personal. You have, I’m sure, many more stories than what’s in this book. So did you find it difficult to sort of choose what to put in there? Because I’ve heard from many memoirists that that’s their hardest thing.
Sally
It was hard. And I keep thinking, I remember stories that I didn’t remember to put in the book and sometimes I have to scratch my head and say, wait a minute, did I put that in the book? But yes, there are stories that will pop into my brain and I don’t like, maybe I better write part two sometimes.
Kat
So you spent really, the lockdown putting words on paper and getting this together. I mean, just two years and it came out. I mean, it’s published in October, so it only took two years.
Sally
Well, a lot of it was already written, Kat. I had done some workshops along the way and I’d saved a chapter or two, I had everything in my computer. So I would run across things and think, OK, I’m going to develop this chapter. And then I talk about the same thing in several chapters that I found. So it was a matter of trying to, I didn’t always succeed, but trying to get that material only just in that one chapter. I found myself, I’m sure that this is true for a lot of people, you reach the later years, and if they’ve done something in their life that they love and for the last 25 years of my life, up until about two years ago, I was single, I still live alone. My work and my singer community really became my family, kind of. And when things started to change, as they do, especially in this business, I’m remarkably lucky to have lasted as long as I did. But I would see posts on Facebook for projects where someone else had contracted the choir, for a composer that I’d worked with a lot, and it was painful and it was like not being invited to the party. We didn’t used to do that in the early days, we were very careful not to talk about other jobs among our colleagues, you know, and now it’s just out there. So it was hard. And when the pandemic started, you didn’t see that every day because it couldn’t happen. And it gave me a chance to kind of step back a little bit and say, oh, my god, I have so much to be grateful for, I’ve had my turn. And it was a wonderful time to focus on the book, but I found myself writing a little bit in the beginning about those feelings of, is it over? Is it wound down and how do I feel about it? That is expressed in a couple of the early chapters in the book, and then I go back and start with childhood and work my way forward.
Kat
Yeah, both of the industries that we work in, I think creative industries change and I think they’re changing even quicker these days.
Sally
Technology is doing it all and social media.
Kat
Right. So this is really a memoir about your life. You wouldn’t say that, it’s called a memoir, but it’s not at all sort of showing people how to get into the business, as you would say.
Sally
No. And, you know, I’ll tell you why it’s not in that way. It’s more of a history of the business and how it has changed over the last 50 years. I get calls and outreaches today still from young people that want to get into the business. And I can tell them who the busy contractors are and make suggestions and tell them how important the union is, which it really is. It makes the difference of survival for a long time and it brings you the benefits. And you don’t have to negotiate your own contracts. They’re just out there. So I can help in that way. I heard recently that TikTok is where a lot of recording artists are getting started and discovered. Okay, so very different.
Kat
That is very different. The world is changing. I think it’s really important for people to write their memoirs or write their experiences because the world, like my kids’ world, is going to be so starkly different from the 1967. They asked me questions, and to them I can see in their eyes, like, how very far away that feels for them. They were born after September 11, so they celebrate that and they’re kind of like, that’s very distant for me. We all have very vivid memories of that day, of course. And so their life is going to be so different and the technology is going to be different, the job opportunities are going to be different. And it’s important to realize not so long ago, it wasn’t the same, there was no TikTok, the work was different.
Sally
Yes, the world was different and long before you, but we studied history when we were going through school and everything. And history was progressing at a slower pace over the centuries. But now it’s just like I mean, there’s so much that we’ve got to do something about it. We better wake up about the environment and the world peace challenges and all of it that is causing so much grief. I pray to God that the younger generation is more on top of it than my generation has been.
Kat
Unfortunately, they’re on TikToks. We have more faith in them. So how did you transition from singing? So we left off sort of like your touring and then the title of your book is I Sang That from the Sound of Music to the Simpsons to South Park. I mean, I know the Simpsons and South Park. I know the Sound of Music because I grew up funny compared to everybody else. But how were those transitions in your life? Because those are very starkly different.
Sally
Well, they happened over a period of time. The first film score that I worked on was How the West Was Won. And it was the first cinerama film, I think, and that was 1961. Our business is a community kind of networking. Not that you consciously go out and network, but if you’re singing in a group and you’re standing next to somebody and that person sings really well and reads the music really well, someone might ask you, gee, you know, what a good alto? And you recommend that person. And that happened for me. People would recommend me, and I’d have a chance to fill in maybe once in a while for one singer in particular who was really more of my mother’s generation. But she was still singing beautifully, loulie Jean Norman was her name. She’s sang the da-da-da-da-da, and once in a while, if she couldn’t make a session, people began to call me because I had made a similar sound. So that kind of work grew. In the 60s, Variety television was going on, and I worked on the Danny Kaye Show for three seasons.
Kat
I love Danny Kaye!
Sally
Oh he was amazing, I got some great stories about him. And Red Skelton and then the Smothers Brothers and I had gone to high school with the Smothers Brothers, but they’d moved before we all got out of high school. In the late 60s into the 70s, commercial work began to move more out to California. It had been primarily in New York and Chicago. But all of a sudden we were getting a lot of commercial work, and that was wonderful. And then the film work grew and I never wanted to well, you know, talking about the different styles. The Sound of Music, I think, was that in the early 70s or late 60s? It was late 60s.
Kat
I think it’s late 60s, yeah.
Sally
That was traditional, wonderful music. And the twelve singing nuns were off camera. We recorded at RCA Studios. We sang for the people who were on camera. And then the Simpsons. I had done some film work for Danny Kaye. Along the way, I contracted some of his early films, the vocals for Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice. So when he got the opportunity to write this little main title for some little video thing that Fox was doing, we did it. You never know whether those things are going to go or not. And that main title has been airing for 33 years now.
Kat
I was just going to say it. Hasn’t it been like 30 years?
Sally
And for many years, for the first 28 years on the show, actually, for me, 30 years, I was the vocal contractor. So when there was a little funny song for the Village People to sing or something, I got to do it. Or if they needed a little sound alike for their end credits, I got to do some solo stuff for them. It was a wonderful connection. And I did the same thing with Family Guy. We sang the main title for that and it’s been airing now, I think 13 years. The music business kind of evolved and the style of music evolved and the new opportunities evolved. But what session singers are known for is their musical skill, their sight reading skill, their ability to adapt to different styles of music. So you kind of move along with it, you know, if you’re fortunate. And I never wanted to do vocal contracting, which is the person that knows the community and hires the singers, puts together choirs for composers or projects. I never wanted to do that because it felt so political to me and I thought if I did that, the other contractors wouldn’t want to work with me and well, that was not the case. And about 20 years into the singing business, I did start to do some contracting. I’m sure it’s kept me going so long.
Kat
It sounds like session singers get to experiment a lot and get to see different things. As you said, you’re kind of known for being able to adapt, whereas, like, if you become the Lauren Bacall or you become the big name, you really have to embrace that one brand, right? Where your life sounds like fun, like you get to sort of dabble in different things.
Sally
Kat, you’re so right. And I’ve often thought about that. I thought, okay, if you become a record artist in the 60s, you would have had a five-year career most likely. And in this journey, my gosh, I’ve gotten to work with some of the most amazing people in the world. I’ve contracted choirs for John Williams, who is just incredible. I was the choral director for the Oscars for about 20 years. I had worked on the show for other singer contractors in earlier years and a couple of shows more recently. But that was fabulous because I got to be a part of putting the show together. They would do all the songs that were nominated from films and scores and they were often of many different styles. We did a song from South Park on camera one year when the song Lame Canada was nominated. And that wonderful gentleman that just passed away not too long ago, the wonderful comedian that was in Mork and Mindy, Rob Williams.
Kat
I can see his face and I can’t remember his name.
Sally
Anyway, he did the lead role on camera, was fun. Robin Williams!
Kat
Robin Williams! Oh my gosh. Trying hard to figure out. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like you get to do a lot of work with different names and knowing a lot of people this collaboration behind the scenes. I’m sure there’s a way to be grateful for every life we have, right? But I don’t think you missed out on fun by not becoming that famous person in the 60s, and a lot of them ended tragically. But you kept going and you wrote us a book. I mean, you have some really interesting stories. You have gone from the 60s, which was a time in America where women were treated a certain way, right? You have those experiences. I mean, one of your first stories is being told to, “go get married.” You could rip that person apart on Twitter these days. They could get canceled.
Sally
Please don’t let me get you off track, because I want to hear what your questions and thoughts are. But it was so funny, this is not in the book, but my husband and I were married on the second Conniff tour. I was 20 years old when we got married, and I got pregnant right away with my daughter. I was 21 when she was born, but I went to a session with him. He was also a singer, a very excellent singer, and he wanted to be another Andy Williams, but that never happened. But we were at a session where he was singing a demo of a song for a songwriter, and I was with him, and the wife of the songwriter said, oh, did you used to be a singer? And I was 21 years old. So when you transition from the wife and mother, it was over in those days, in terms of what they thought.
Kat
So you did all of this being a mother as well. That sounds like a lot.
Sally
It was. My daughter is the one who suffered because of that, because my husband and I were divorced. Her father and I were divorced when she was about four, and that was about the time when things were really starting to get busy for me. I was doing a lot of record sessions. She didn’t have brothers or sisters, so she was alone much of the time with caregivers. I had wonderful caregivers for her, we were lucky, but it was hard. And she told me in her adult life that she felt invisible when she was little, and it’s hard to make up for that. There’s not much you can do after the fact.
Kat
Well, I think that’s the burden mothers carry. Like, whether we stay at home or we go to work, it feels like it’s never enough. And we definitely make our mistakes. I have daughters as well, been told they have not waited to tell adulthood to tell me. But what I find interesting too is you are a singer, you’re a musician, and yet part of the thing that seems to have filled you creatively is to do entirely different creative outlet, which is writing. And I know you write songs, so that’s kind of writing, but then because I advocate a lot for writers to go out of their writing closet, as I call it, because most of us have like a corner in our house, and to indulge in something that’s creative, that’s not writing. Did you specifically seek out something that would fulfill you or maybe give you rest? And you found that in writing. What are your thoughts on that?
Sally
Well, I really had both passions, Kat, very early in life. I was writing poems as soon as I was old enough to write. And I can remember going around the corner to the gentleman that lived in the neighborhood where the lady that was looking after me when I was really little lived. And he would staple together these little paper things, little books, and then I would go home and write the book. And so I’ve always loved writing. I’ve always loved poetry. I even found while I was digging through these date books and stuff, I found a journal with stories, that I’d written when I was about ten. And one was called something like St. Peter and Petrol. And Petrol was the representative from below, the Devil, and letting people into heaven. And they had a big conversation about what they did.
Kat
It sounds like the oil industry.
Sally
Early insight. I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve always written poems for years. And when I traveled with Burt Bacharach, I would carry a journal because I was uncomfortable sitting in restaurants by myself. So if I sat there writing, it looked like, oh, she’s doing something. And I’ve always kept journals, I’ve always written poems, I’ve always written down my dreams. And I also have another writing project, by the way, that I actually started in 1985 as self defense with the psychiatrist that I was seeing who was crazier than I was. And that’s a novella length piece. That’s basically the interaction between Mrs. Billingsley and her therapist. But there’s some magical realism in it, and it was a way of expressing my mental journeys along the way. So it’s always been a part of what I did. But until I sent those first submissions off, which probably was 13 or 14 years ago, I never really tried to do anything with the writing. And when I started in my work life, I had sort of a series of five-year plans. I said, okay, the first five years I’m going to try to do on camera stuff if I can. I’ll audition for commercials, I’ll do whatever. And then when I’m 24 and I’m too old to be back onto the off-camera stuff and I’ll do session singing and then five years later. But writing was way down the road because I figured if you were gray haired and stuff when you. So it’s not something that I really ever focused on, but I think that your suggestion to your followers of finding other creative endeavors is great, because it gives you a fresh view of what you’re doing, kind of. And then you can transition. I think it’s great. I wish I were better at explaining how they relate. But, you know, another passion of mine that I started to develop in my late 50s was photography. And I took some workshops, and for my 60th birthday, I gave myself three presents. One was to go to New York and do a cabaret symposium, because I hadn’t done that much live performing with my own name. The second was to do a photography workshop in the Loire Valley, which I’d taken some classes prior to. And the third was to start the Iowa Writing workshops in Iowa. So all of those have sort of mixed together. I’ve done some photographic exhibits where I’ve used the captions for the film, for the photos, where they were lines from some of the poetry, from the poetry. And the photographs, I did a series of photographs of film composers at work in the studio. And it was not a day when I was there to sing, I was just there to photograph them. And those have been exhibited in the Motion Picture Arts, inside the business building here in several other places. So they’ve all crisscrossed kind of the material that they dealt with. But I think each artistic pursuit that you have, kind of broadens your whole view of things.
Kat
Yeah, I find it very encouraging. You’re not the first one who I’ve talked to that has sort of started a new passion later in life. And I think we’re still so obsessed in America with youth, with the 20-year olds, and it’s great to encourage them in their life, but we are living a long time. And I think a lot of our fears are, like, at 50, we’re too old. At 24, we were too old. So of course we’re too old at 50, or at 40. And I work with several writers who have to battle that a lot, that they’re too old to do this. No, you actually know something.
Sally
Oh, my gosh, I’m amazed to hear that, because it makes perfect sense, I guess, if you’re pursuing a major publisher, they want to know you’re going to be able to write the best selling novels for the next 30 years, and so they don’t want you to start at 50. But I never thought about writing, as restrictive in terms of age. And yet I’m so grateful for Google, because now when I sit down and try to write something, I’m scratching my head for word. It used to happen a few years ago. So I’m very grateful that I can find my way into remembering this name or that name.
Kat
Yeah, me, too. I was trying to write for this whole other project. I’m like, I just watched this movie, and I can’t remember this name, this person. It’s everyone, but I think it’s really important to know that life doesn’t end at 24, or 40, or 50, or 60. Like, we can pursue new things, our curiosity. We’re not too old to be curious, every time.
Sally
Absolutely. That’s so, so important to remember. The more things we learn a little bit about, the more curious we get about I want to know more about it.
Kat
Right? I think we should all do a cabaret at 60.
Sally
There you go. No, I was just going to tell you something tragic and funny. I mean, I have found some recordings that I did and a ton of lead sheets and stuff from my early songwriting. And I found a couple of demos that I cannot swear that I wrote. I think I wrote the lyric, but I can’t remember whether it was a Tom Snow, was a writer that once said one of my poems to music so beautifully. And it was not written like a lyric. It was written like a poem about my sister in our childhood. And he just wrote it gorgeously. Didn’t change a word. And this one may be another one of his songs, because I know I’m not playing the piano on this demo, but it’s so I don’t want to put it out there as something I wrote and then find out, oh, my god, I didn’t write this. But it’s a vindictive song of that, it’s called, Baby Was a Dancer. And the story, danced into his heart, quickly he romanced her, he had well rehearsed his part and so the story goes, and he finally gets tired of her, but she goes away.
Sally
And then he wishes she hadn’t gone away. And that’s a song that was an unusual topic in the 70s or so. I don’t remember what made me think of that. Something that you were about to ask, probably.
Kat
I can’t remember either, but that’s alright. You have these demos, though, you have these agendas that you’ve talked about in your journals. How important was that to have those references as you were writing this book?
Sally
Well, I think, I hadn’t really thought about them as being part of the process until I found myself wondering, no, wait a minute. What artists were we singing with in the 60s or whatever? And then that’s what made me dive into the boxes in the garage. And I didn’t realize that I had all of these calendars. The unfortunate thing was that in those days I was just showing up and singing. So I would have the name of the studio, and the name of the contractor, and the time of the session, but not always the project or the artist. And then I would write when the check came in, I would make a note of the amount that we were paid, which was stunningly small, like $3.97 after taxes. But they were very, very useful when I realized that they were there. And it helped me understand. I read some of the journals about my travel years with Bert and with Ray Conniff, and those were helpful to read, to just remind me of how it felt there at the moment. Yeah. I think journaling is great, even if it just helps you get through the day or the moment.
Kat
So true. I’m a very big advocate of journaling. I’m not sure anyone will read my journals ever, but so how much of it when you’re writing your memoir, because there’s in the writing world, at least, there’s a lot of advice that people give writers, and you should sit down and you should write. But I’m a big advocate of getting up and thinking, before you go back to writing, probably because that’s my process. So how much do you think, for you, was sitting down and writing actual words out, versus trying to remember, reminiscing, reading things? How sort of was that process?
Sally
Well, in this particular project, the book, I can remember being seated at the computer writing something and then getting up and going into the other room to look for a particular journal, a particular year. So it was kind of all mixed together. I have beaten myself up always for not being disciplined like some writers arem, they would get up and they sit from seven to ten in the morning, and no matter what happens, that’s where they are. I’ve never been able to do that. I’ve mostly been propelled by whatever I’m thinking about or whatever. But I did try, and it was very helpful to be in touch with Laura and with Gordon, my writer mentor kind of colleagues. I was getting some feedback from them. I was getting, if this works, this doesn’t. So that caused me to go dive back in, which I am not very good about doing. I’m not good at editing. Once it’s on the page, it’s kind of there in stone. But I was able to really go back and expand and add the conversation that happened there or add how I felt about that moment. So that was very helpful, just to broaden what you were writing about, as you are encouraged to do so, I guess.
Kat
So did you do that sort of sending them parts of the book, or did you send them the whole book?
Sally
I sent the whole book. And both of them sent back comments chapter-to-chapter. This worked really well, love this chapter, I want to know more about blah blah here. So, it was so helpful.
Kat
Yes, feedback is very important. I say this all the time.
Sally
Yeah, it really is. And as wonderful as Zoom is, and it’s enabled the world to keep going during these last two years. For me, even, I serve on a lot of boards, and committees, and stuff with the unions, and even for those, as well as for the feedback from the writing, it’s a different thing to be in a room with people and get the feel, the vibe of what they’re thinking by the look on their face, or finger tapping, or whatever it is. I’m looking forward to being back in those workshops again. I’ve done a couple of Zoom workshops, and, you know, it’s better than stepping away from it all together.
Kat
Will you go back this next summer, if all things have settled?
Sally
Yeah, I would, mostly because I’d like to do a book reading at the Prairie Lights bookstore there in Iowa City.
Kat
Oh. Maybe I should go to Iowa. Got to go that way.
Sally
This is a wonderful little city, because it’s so renowned as a writer’s haven. It’s got plaques, brass or iron plaques in the sidewalks for the two main streets of excerpts from novels and author’s name and stuff. It’s just and there’s a house there that Kurt Vonnegut lived in, available for rent. It began to feel like my hometown because I go back and spend sometimes two or three weeks there a summer. I would like to go back just to be there.
Kat
I think I’m going to have to convince my husband to give me more allowance, everybody support the show and send me to Iowa. I’m just kidding. So your book is called well, your first of several books, right? Because we’re going to get that novella. I need to read that novella. That sounds very Virginia Wolf, like we need that out in the world. So the book is called I Sang That from the Sound of Music to Simpsons, to South Park and beyond a memoir from Hollywood by Sally Stevens. And we’ll have the links in the show notes. Is there any way to hear, do you have any audio with this?
Sally
I don’t yet, but I’m hoping to do that. I’d like to do it myself. I’ve done enough voiceover work that I think I could do it. I think that books, when the author reads them, you get a slightly deeper take on them.
Kat
Oh, well, we’re looking forward to that as well. We’ll have the links in the show notes that you guys can read, and then you can follow Sally and meet her in Iowa in 2023. Thank you so much, Sally, for coming on the Pencils & Lipstick.
Sally
Thank you so much, Kat, for inviting me. It’s really been fun. Thank you.