lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: three hits

1992-05: rites of passage, epic records press release:

" 'three hits' was inspired by the poems of frank stanford. a music writer friend of mine sent me a book of his poetry, 'the light the dead see', and i went crazy over it - it changed my life a little. i was reading some autobiographical notes on stanford and learned that he'd committed suicide in the early '80s at age 30 - he shot himself three times in the heart. that image really stuck with me. so i used images from his poems and his life: that he was adopted, that he left his wife behind. i started this song on electric guitar, a gibson melody maker with a gun-metal blue finish."

----------

1992-06-07: indigo girls bring literature to songwriting, the st. louis post-dispatch:

q: you make direct references to virginia woolf on "rites of passage." you also cite a poet named frank stanford as an influence on your song "three hits." how does a poem or a novel bear on your songwriting?

a: i get a lot of ideas from what i read - more from what i read than from what i hear. i'm not going to listen to a song and be as inspired because it's the same medium i'm working in. for some reason, that doesn't work with me. the books really get me going.

when something i read moves me, it first of all helps me to finish a song i'm writing, even if the song has nothing to do with the book. what i'm doing is reacting on an emotional level to what i've read and writing whatever comes into my head.