In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Bridge bianCa deleon Sleep, babe, until the moon slips away I’m hopin’ all your dreamin’ comes true —TVZ, “Lover’s Lullaby,” from No Deeper Blue B ianca DeLeon, born near Corpus Christi, Texas, met Townes Van Zandt while he was playing the Houston folk club circuit “somewhere around 1966.” She says they formed a “deep, lasting connection that remains central to her life” today.1 DeLeon included a version of Van Zandt’s “Waitin’ Around to Die” on her album Bianca DeLeon. Courtesy www.biancamusic.com BIAnCA Deleon 123 Outlaws & Lovers (2001), which she followed with Live: From Hell to Helsinki (2003) and The Long Slow Decline of Carmelita (2004). DeLeon lives in Van Zandt’s former Clarksville neighborhood in Austin, Texas, one of the more gentrified areas of the rapidly growing capital city. “There’s a spiritual side to [songwriting],” DeLeon says, “but I’m not even sure that that matters. Townes would say the songs come from the sky,andIunderstandthat,becauseIwritemostofmysongsinmysleep. I dream songs. I wrote this one song, because I dreamed that I was in this club in Detroit that I used to hang out in years ago. I was sitting at a table and someone came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder and nodded their head to the stage. I saw this big band getting up on the stage and I said, ‘Oh, my break’s over.’ “So I got on stage to sing this one song, and at the end of the song I realized, ‘Oh, I don’t have a guitar, I’m only singing into the mike.’ I realized right then that I was in a dream and that I should wake up and write that in a song. That happens all the time. I thought everybody did it until I started asking other people, and I guess that’s what would happen to Townes sometimes—they’d come in a dream. “Townes wrote one song for me, wrote it in front of me—‘If I Needed You.’ He wrote the first verse or two and then flew me to Nashville. I still have the ticket he sent me to go to Nashville. It’s [dated] February 19, 1972. We were in the living room at Guy and Susanna’s at Chapel and Mission, and he said, ‘Now that you’re here, I can finish the song.’ That was it. It was amazing. He finished it the next day in a couple minutes.”2 ...

Share