 "Photo: Clara Ganey | The Spectator")
As soon as she sits down at a candle-lit table in the dim, dark oak-paneled Ballard Eagles lounge Sunday night, songwriter Robin Lane starts nervously picking her fingernails. “Hang on a second—I, I need to get something,” she says, shaking stringy, dirty blonde bangs out of her eyes.
Lane, the former scruffy frontwoman of the 1980s band The Chartbusters, scurries across the thick maroon carpet to the other side of the room. When she returns, she’s lightly strumming an acoustic guitar with painted flowers etched into the wood. It’s clear she’s in her element now.
Though she’s done her fair share of traveling over the years—from a San Francisco apartment where she helped band members of Electric Flag shoot heroin into their veins, to east coast recording studios where she spent long hours hammering out the melodies for song lyrics written by female prisoners in state penitentiaries—her guitar has always remained a faithful companion on her hip.
Today Lane is the creative director and co-founder of Songbird Sings, a non-profit that offers songwriting, recording and storytelling workshops to victims of trauma. “There is this thing in our culture,” she says, “that when something awful happens, you don’t talk about it. You bury it.”
Songwriting, she says, helps workshop participants excavate these painful experiences.
“People start to see that they hold the key to their own healing,” she says. “Perhaps even more so than a therapist.”
A survivor of childhood neglect, sexual violence and partner abuse herself, life has served Lane her fair share of pain. She began facilitating songwriting sessions for abused women and at-risk youth in 2001 through her Massachusetts-based “A Woman’s Voice” program.
Carla DeSantis, the founder of Rockgrl Magazine—and the other half of Songbird Sings—held an exclusive question and answer session with Lane titled “Love-Ins and Looney Bins” Sunday night at the Ballard Eagles. Perched on a barstool, Lane bravely shared fragments of her life.
She disclosed tales of her Los Angeles youth spent scavenging coconut-covered marshmallows from her neighbor’s kitchen. Her mother—a successful model and chronic dieter—never brought home groceries.
Lane revealed joyrides that led to a troubled relationship with Neil Young, revisited her tumultuous marriage to Andy Summers—the guitarist for the Police—and even dipped into her “total psychotic break,” in which she tried to swallow her tongue during a Thorazine-induced hallucination.
She also delved into her singing and songwriting career.
“I was scared stiff,” she remembers, when she was a young, female artist emerging on the Los Angeles folk-rock scene. “I couldn’t sing in front of other people. But in my heart I knew that it was me.”
Armed with musical influences like Laura Niro, Julie London, and Ella Fitzgerald, Lane mustered the strength to work through the trepidation and self-doubt that colored her early song writing.
She moved to Cambridge, Mass. and formed The Chartbusters, a 1980s grunge band that overthrew the local Boston music scene with a swift a coup d’état of throaty vocals and new age punk-y, yet melodic, sounds.
The Chartbusters enjoyed great success: they toured all over the nation and one of their videos landed a slot in the first hour of MTV.
But Lane hardly recounts her reign as a female rock princess touring in the 1970s and 1980s as a glamorous rock and roll fantasy .
“It was fun, but it was hellish at the same time,” she says. “I could never go on stage with another woman. It was so unbelievably sexist.”
When Lane discovered she was pregnant with her daughter in 1982, she says she encountered even more stinging sexism in the music industry.
“I would hear things like ‘oh, she’s done for,’” she says. “Once you had a baby, that was it in those days.”
Lane lost her manager, her publisher, and her contract with Warner Brothers Records when she chose to have her daughter. Today Lane focuses her energy on Songbird Sings, a program that her and DeSantis hope to expand in coming years. “A Woman’s Voice” will remain the hallmark program of Song Bird Sings, however DeSantis and Lane also plan to provide workshops to war veterans and other victims of trauma.
A second goal of Songbird Sings, Lane says, is to “teach the teachers.”
Her and DeSantis will provide tutorials to other women aiming to be songwriting workshop leaders.
And while Lane may no longer pack local Boston venues, she still books in-house concerts and performs at private shows.
She says she never knows when an opportunity to collaboratively write a song will arise.
Sure enough, as she guides the audience at “Love-Ins and Looney-Bins” through a condensed songwriting exercise, she pauses.
“Hey, where’s my freakin’ tape recorder?” she asks the small crowd gathered around her in a horseshoe of leather-backed chairs, humming their original lyrics. “This is sounding pretty good.”
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