Actress Amy Irving Reveals Classic Swingin’ Jazz Vocals On Debut Album ‘Born In A Trunk’ (INTERVIEW)

You probably know her from the 1988 movie Crossing Delancey. Or Carrie. Or Honeysuckle Rose. The girl with all the curls and bright green eyes was a mainstay on stage and screen since the mid-1970s. She was in the stage version of Amadeus before the Academy Award-winning movie was made, and she was this close to being Princess Leia. The one thing Irving has done for most of her life is embodied characters and bring them to life. Even if you didn’t see her – she was the sultry singing voice of Jessica Rabbit – she made a presence. And now she has taken her life and put it into song via her debut album, Born In A Trunk.

Encouraged by her son, music manager Gabriel Barreto, Irving set about choosing songs that would encompass her life and career. Hooking her up with Goolis, a band he works with, the songs came vibrantly together. “It was so thrilling to step into another world,” Irving said upon the album’s announcement. “Jules David Bartkowski, aka Goolis, did all the arrangements for the songs I chose from my life’s work, liaisons, marriages, and family.” Ten songs make up Born In A Trunk and each one has a special meaning to the Oscar-nominated actress. “Why Don’t You Do Right” from Who Framed Roger Rabbit went from seductive to sassy; the Tom Waits classic “Old Boyfriends” referenced Arthur Miller’s stage production of Broken Glass and past loves; Death Cab For Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” proclaims the love her and her husband Ken Bowser have for each other; “Errol Flynn” conjures up memories of her father while “I’m Waiting Forever,” a song written for her by Willie Nelson during the Honeysuckle Rose days, features Nelson’s recognizable rasp. “This is my story,” proclaimed Irving.

Her story began in the theater. Both parents were actors and her father, Jules Irving, co-founded the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. At nine months, Irving made her stage debut in Rumpelstiltskin. The acting didn’t stop when the family moved to New York. She did theater as she landed parts in popular seventies TV shows. She was Sue in Stephen King’s Carrie opposite Sissy Spacek and John Travolta, and Gillian in The Fury with Kirk Douglas. She’s worked under renowned directors like Brian DePalma, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, and Steven Soderbergh. And she made her singing debut in Nelson’s Honeysuckle Rose as Lily, the daughter of his best friend, singing “Crazy” with just an acoustic guitar, causing Nelson’s character to do a double-take. If you didn’t realize Irving could sing then this part opened your eyes.

I spoke with the actress, who has Irish, Welsh, and Russian ancestry, recently about putting together her first album, the songs she included, not playing Princess Leia and having to sing for the first time in front of a few thousand people.

What makes New York your home? Why do you love it there so much?

Theater. I’m a theater girl and I have to have a theater fix regularly. And I just find the energy of New York exciting. I’ve always been a stage baby so I came back here after working in film for a while. I missed the theater too much and I came back. I wasn’t living there at first but I did a nine-month stint on Broadway in Amadeus. Once I was there doing theater, I couldn’t give it up so I just kept coming back and coming back until I finally moved here.

What is your first memory of music?

Well, my father had the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop and when we were all children, my brother, sister and I was all put on the stage in children’s theater musicals. So the first time I heard music was when I was singing along with it, doing various shows. Actually, the first show I was too young to sing in, Rumpelstiltskin; I was only nine months old. But most of the musicals have music that you would never have heard of because it was the Bay Area and it was original musicals and I don’t think they went beyond that company (laughs). 

Also, my father loved to sing and we had a tradition in the car when we were little. He loved Gilbert & Sullivan, so he’d be driving us to Lake Tahoe, cause he liked to gamble while we went to a cabin to swim, but he would sing something from HMS Pinafore and it was a routine. He’d go (singing), “My gallant crew,” and we’d go, “Good Morning.” Then he’d sing, “I hope you’re all quite well,” and we’d sing, “Quite well, and you Sir.” “I am in reasonable health.” And it went on like that. When he was in high school in the Bronx, he did a production of Mikado with someone called The Bubbles Silverman, who turned out to be Beverly Sills. So he had a good start in the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.

You have a new album and it’s nice to hear music that seems to genuinely come from the heart. Is that because these songs are all so close to you?

Yeah, my son Gabriel Barreto is a music manager and he manages this band Goolis, who is the band on the album, and he convinced me to do an album with them, just because he liked my singing and he thought we would hit it off and we really did and they let me choose whatever I wanted to sing. So my husband Ken Bowser and I thought about, what do I want to sing? (laughs) And Ken said, “You know, sing from your career, sing from your life, sing from your marriages, sing from your heartbreaks.” So we went through the various films that I did and the theater that I’ve done and we chose appropriately.

We chose the song from Carrie [“I Never Dreamed Someone Like You”], which really also talks about what it’s like to start your career as well as be out there dancing for the first time at the prom. It’s related to starting out in the business. Then I went on to do the film that I loved the most that nobody’s ever seen called Voices. It was a film that was a very obscure film, a love story, but I played a deaf woman who taught deaf children and Jimmy Webb did all the music for us and one of the songs he wrote for me to do a sign language dance for my students was “Children’s Song.” 

So Jules David Bartkowski, aka Goolis, took all these songs and he did his own arrangements on them and kind of took them into a different world, so “Children’s Song” became a little bit more of a Dixieland song. “Why Don’t You Do Right,” which I sang as Jessica Rabbit, became a New Orleans sound. “How Insensitive” was in Bossa Nova, the film I did with Gabriel’s father. “I’ll Follow You Into The Dark” is my husband and my’s song. He played it for me when we were dating and I would follow him into the dark – that’s how much I love him. “Queen Of The Castle” is from Rumpelstiltskin, my stage debut at nine months, then thirty years later my brother did a movie of it. We all went off to Israel, Max [Irving’s son with Steven Spielberg] was nine months old at the time, my firstborn, and we all went over and did it again with my mom but this time I played my mom’s role and she played the evil queen and that song was co-written by my brother so we threw that in. And then Willie Nelson wrote me a song called “I’m Waiting Forever For You” and he sang it on the album with me, which was really a treat. The thing about these ten songs is I’m the only common denominator.

With “Old Boyfriends” you kept the Tom Waits smokiness but made it your own.

I listened to Crystal Gayle do it so many times, I hope I didn’t steal a lot from her (laughs). She does a beautiful rendition of it. But “Old Boyfriends” was basically while I was prepping a Broadway play that Arthur Miller wrote at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. Max and Gabriel were young and every day we got obsessed with the One From The Heart soundtrack by Tom Waits. Me because of the music and the songs, and my kids because there’s fun sound effects in it, like there’s a train whistle and there’s a baseball bat rolling down the street, then there’s a coin toss. They would listen for that stuff. I related to “Old Boyfriends” and that’s why that’s on the album.

So now you’re a singer, right?

I’m so new to this, you know. This is not what I geared up to be, ever. It wasn’t a dream come true for me cause I never would dream like that. As I stand up onstage and perform these songs now, it IS a dream (laughs). It’s just the coolest feeling, I got to tell you. But really what I did, when I chose the songs, I really just let Jules do whatever he wanted. He’s the arranger and it was his band and I just kind of went along with whatever he wanted. Now that we’re presenting it all and I have stories to tell and it’s not so much about Amy and Goolis, it’s about Amy’s show and Goolis backs me up. They’ve kind of stepped back and they’re my incredible support but I also love to show them off because I’m such a fan of theirs. I’ve given them my encore (laughs).

I understand that you had stage fright. Is this easier when you get up and sing and tell a story? Does it make it more theater?

You know, it’s interesting, I do have stage fright and usually it takes me a few preview audiences to stop shaking and I thought getting up and singing as myself was probably the most terrifying thing I could ever do. I mean, the one thing when you get up on the stage is you’re hiding behind a character and if the character does something that nobody likes, it’s the character doing it. But if you’re yourself, it’s a very vulnerable position. But I also enjoy it when I’m doing a play and I become at one with the character, which doesn’t happen every night. Some nights you have a good night and some nights you just really connect to that character, and that’s just one of the most incredible highs you can feel. 

When I got up and I did this show as myself, I’m already at one with my character so it just takes it that much further, you know. I was terrified at first. I did some out-of-town tryouts to get past that and I think I’m just having such a good time and I’m not alone out there because I have an eleven-piece band (laughs). There are backup singers and there are horns, just so much support, and the people themselves are the most delicious people who are just holding me up and I’m feeling like incredibly lucky. 

Plus this is a project I’m doing with my son. Gabriel and I are just having the best time connecting on this other level, as adults working together, and he’s doing an amazing job. He’s started an Instagram and he’s getting out to the world everything so I don’t have to, cause that’s not my thing (laughs). But he’s working his butt off and we’re just having an amazing joy together. Plus, Ken and I have never worked together but he’s a writer as well as a documentary filmmaker and he helped me with my patter and helped me choose and why I’m choosing it and he’s been pretty much directing me in the show. I’m home rehearsing by myself – Gabriel arranged all the backup sounds from the album with my voice taken out so I could keep working – and Ken set up a little studio area in our barn where I can get on a microphone and blast the music and perform.

It’s my understanding that the first time you sang on film was in Honeysuckle Rose.  You sang “Crazy” early in the movie but you also had concert scenes. Were you not nervous about that because you were in character?

Oh trust me, I was nervous! (laughs) I think our first day of shooting was in front of like 50,000 people and I was pretending to play the guitar. Grady Martin was the sound of my guitar but I had to sing with Willie and it was pretty terrifying (laughs). But we rehearsed a lot and Willie took good care of me.

And Emmylou Harris comes out

Oh my God! I’m on the stage with Emmylou Harris! (laughs) She was another heroine of mine. It was kind of an out-of-body experience at that point. I wasn’t trying to be a singer, I was a guitar player in that, so I wasn’t putting a lot of pressure on myself and I wasn’t soloing so much so it wasn’t as terrifying as what I’m doing now (laughs).

For you, what is the connective emotion that ties these ten songs together on Born In A Trunk?

That’s a good question. I think what’s really important is to stay connected and learn. I just feel like getting out and saying a line like, “We all have to stick together,” especially right now after we’ve all been so isolated, I found that it was really about connecting with people and learning.

Is there a particular line amongst this group that really touches your heart the most?

Well, sometimes it’s very hard for me to get through “Errol Flynn” because my father died young and to me that’s my song about my dad. Amanda McBroom wrote it about her father but it’s my story too. There’s a moment she sees him on The Late Show: “He’s younger than I am now,” and that’s the one that gets me.

What about a song for your mom, Priscilla Pointer? You worked together on stage and in movies. If not on this album, do you have a song for her?

She’s kind of all through the stories because we did Carrie together. Part of doing Carrie was to be able to say I worked with my mom, the first of six films we did together. Plus I talk a lot about her for Honeysuckle Rose because I was offered Honeysuckle Rose at my dad’s memorial service and I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to leave my mom and that’s when they said, “Well bring her on down and she can play Slim Pickens wife!” And that’s what she did (laughs). And then we were all down there doing the “Cotton-Eye Joe” together (laughs). “Queen Of The Castle,” my mom was the queen in that. She’s all through this. 

You have played so many different kinds of roles. Was there one role in particular that took the longest for you to grasp and embody the character?

You know, I was doing Tom Stoppard’s The Coast Of Utopia at Lincoln Center with Billy Crudup and Ethan Hawke and it was a nine hour play in three parts, each part was three hours long. We would do Part I and Part II on Wednesdays and Saturdays and then on one day a week we would do a marathon starting at eleven in the morning, finishing at eleven at night, with breaks for meals, which was pretty damn thrilling. Everybody who came to those, they were the happiest, believe it or not. Everybody had like three different roles, for each part you had a different role.

The reason I said yes was for the role in the second part. The first part, it was a woman who was a little bit more of a dingbat than I’ve ever played before and I had to be playing beneath your intelligence and it’s one of the hardest things to do. Luckily, Jack O’Brien was our director and he gave me all sorts of little hints on how to do it. He said, “When you walk into the room, act like you haven’t got your glasses on and you can’t quite see everything clearly, so you’re squinting a little bit. So you’ve got that thing about not quite understanding look on your face.” He was constantly giving me a little help and eventually I got there.

You did Amadeus before the movie was made. Did you want to follow it to the film role?

Oh, I tested for it and I was very disappointed not to get it. The director, Milos Forman, always told me, “You would have been wonderful.” Well, yeah, too late now, you’ve already made the movie (laughs)

If you would have gotten the role of Princess Leia, do you think you would have liked taking it as far as they have now or would one film had been enough?

That’s a really dangerous question (laughs). There’s this talk show in downtown New York, a live talk show with an audience where there’s this comedian who pretends to be George Lucas and it’s been going on for years and it’s like an improv comedy thing, or whatever, that my son Gabriel has somehow convinced me to do. So I am going to be talking to George Lucas about this (laughs), who told me that I was second runner-up, which doesn’t get you very far (laughs). But I think at that time I was still going back and forth and enjoying both theater and film. And they don’t do one film after the other, you get a little break in-between, so I could still do theater. But I can’t imagine not wanting to be a part of that. But Carrie Fisher was perfect. And if I had done that then I wouldn’t have been in Carrie and I really liked being in Carrie. Then I went on to do Brian DePalma’s next film The Fury and he taught me a lot and became a friend. So I think there’s reasons for everything.

And to be quite honest, becoming that famous is a little uncomfortable for me. Star Wars was huge. When Brian and George did the screen tests together, they picked people together. Brian offered me Carrie but then he said, “Let me help you with the screen test for Star Wars cause this is going to be a much bigger film for you.” That was very generous and he was trying to help me figure out what a C-3PO is and R2D2 (laughs). It really was like having to read a script in a foreign language.

What was the first song you obsessed over as a kid?

I remember my brother used to play “Duke Of Earl” all the time. We used to go around (singing) “Duke, Duke, Duke.” Mom played a lot of the show tunes. I loved the score for Man Of La Mancha, that was a big one in the house. There was just so much music in the house all the time between us learning our songs for the children’s theater shows we were doing as well as the show tunes Mom was playing. Then David, my brother, with his “Wild Thing” and “Duke Of Earl.” (laughs)

Who was the first real rock star you ever met?

It could have been Ringo Starr. He was doing a TV movie with my friend Rupert Everett and we all had lunch together. I think that was the first time I met him, the big giant rock & roll star (laughs). I was at Fillmore West when I was a young teen and I went to see either Johnny Winter or BB King and while I was there, Charles Manson tried to recruit me to go to Death Valley with him.

Did you know who he was?

I did not. There was this man with crazy eyes and he called himself the devil and went on and on about this place in Death Valley. Then when I started to learn about him, I realized, oh my God, that was him. I didn’t realize it at the time until I learned all the stories and everything and that he was known to call himself the devil. You can’t forget that face. Definitely not my type (laughs).

Tell us about your year coming up. 

I’m going out to Los Angeles cause Peter Riegert and I were invited to present Crossing Delancey at TCM’s festival, the 50^th anniversary of Warner Brothers, and they’re doing a big to-do. Then I’m going to come back and do some more shows. I’ve been invited to Levitt Pavilion in Westport, Connecticut, which I will go to, and then we’re going to look at possibly doing some more shows. Also, I think we’re going to do an album with Willie. He fell in love with Goolis; he just loves what Goolis did with his song. He thinks they’re so talented and he said, “How bout if you pick ten songs and let Goolis do all the arrangements and record it and then me and Trigger can be on it too.” So we’ll see. 

Would you do another album of songs like these? Did this whet your appetite to do it again?

You know, I’m going to do it as long as I’m having a good time. I think what happens when you change your career strategy, having done film and theater and then you switch gears, there is a freedom in that and I’m allowed to be ignorant about a lot of the stuff. I don’t have to know everything and I can just kind of make my mistakes. If someone says, “You shouldn’t be looking at him there,” I can say, “Well, I don’t know the rules so I’m going to look at him there.” (laughs) I like that and once you’re in it a while then you start to learn what you can and can’t do and I don’t want to get to that stage. I just want to do what comes straight out of me. I’m looking to stick to the truth and I think being a Hollywood actress you end up having to fake it a lot; you have to fake it in front of the press, you have to lie about your life. It’s just kind of a world that I didn’t feel comfortable in and I want to be real again and I want to be myself and I have no interest in putting up a façade anymore.

I do feel there are people with incredible vocal talent and I don’t think I have the vocal talent some of the great singers have. But because I’m an actor, I can put a song across and I can feel that’s the gift I have now. I can use my acting chops to be able to present these songs so they resonate.

Portrait by Gabriel Barreto