Academy Award winner Mary Steenburgen’s beautifully unusual transition from an actress to successful songwriter began 10 years ago after she woke up from a minor arm surgery.
Steenburgen, now 66-years-old, says he mind was spinning after the operation.
She said: ‘I felt strange as soon as the anesthesia started to wear off.’
‘The best way I can describe it is that it just felt like my brain was only music, and that everything anybody said to me became musical. All of my thoughts became musical. Every street sign became musical. I couldn’t get my mind into any other mode,’ she told Indie Wire in an interview.
Mary Steemburgen (pictured) revealed in an interview with IndieWire that her ‘thoughts became musical’ after she woke up from a minor arm surgery in 2009
Unsurprisingly, the sudden mental rewiring left Steenburgen upset and the months following the surgery were somewhat debilitating.
‘I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t have acted. I couldn’t have learned any lines,’ she said. ‘My husband [actor Ted Danson] and I were kind of frightened about it.’
Charlie McDowell, Steenburgen’s filmmaker son, also remembers that time as rough and unexpected.
He said: ‘If your mom comes to you after surgery and says that her head is now full of music, I think it’s totally fair to think that she’s gone crazy and has major psychological problems.’
‘All of the sudden she was referencing these obscure indie bands and picking up random instruments — I’m not gonna lie, the accordion playing drives me. When I say all this out loud it sounds insane. It was definitely a change.’
At the time, Steenburgen admits that she had no real interest into pursuing a music career. Acting was more than enough.
Pictured: Steenburgen (middle) and her husband Ted Danson (left) at the November 2019 County Music Awards
Steenburgen said: ‘I had been somebody who really liked music, but I had never been obsessed with it. I was obsessed with acting, and that felt like a big enough subject for me.’
But the musical thoughts didn’t stop, prompting Steenburgen to take a new approach to her new gift and face it head on.
‘I called a very talented friend of mine on Martha’s Vineyard and I said: “Look, if I come over every day and sing what I hear in my head, could you help me make them into songs?”‘
According to Indie Wire, she wrote hundreds songs that summer before sending her best twelve renditions to a music lawyer under her mother’s name.
‘He wanted to work with “Nellie Wall,” but then I showed up instead,’ Steenburgen said.
Before being signed to Universal Music Publishing Group, Steenburgen (pictured) wrote hundreds of songs with the help of a friend
Then, Steenburgen was signed to Universal as a songwriter and flew to Nashville, where she would ultimately buy a house.
The next decade was spent honing her craft, despite getting off to a rocky start that left Steenburgen in tears.
She said: ‘It was terrifying. The first session I did was a total disaster, and I literally went back to my hotel room in tears, cried my eyes out, and thought “Why would anyone be so stupid at age 54 to think they could do something so new?”‘
‘I was back at it by the next morning. I just told myself: “I’m going to go right up and sing the bleeping song if it kills me!”‘
‘Glasgow (“No Place Like Home”)’ is featured in the 2018 film Wild Rose and sung by Jessie Buckley (pictured)
That work ethic, according to McDowell, is what helped Steenburgen continue to thrive in the music industry.
‘It could have been really easy for Mary Steenburgen to just put her name on something and get a pass on many of the usual steps in some new creative thing, but she didn’t do that,’ he said.
‘She put in the time to learn the craft, and I respect that. And I have to admit, she’s gotten really good at the accordion.’
Of all her writing credits, her most recent song ‘Glasgow (“No Place Like Home”)’ has earned the most critical fanfare and is a strong contender to be nominated – and win – Best Original Song at the 2020 Academy Awards.
The song was featured as the final performance of actress Jessie Buckley in the 2018 musical drama Wild Rose.
Steenburgen: ‘Music is in my genes thanks to the women in my family, and I just think I was somehow granted access to it’
Tom Harper, a British filmmaker known for work on the BBC drama War & Peace, directed Wild Rose and explained that pinning down the perfect song for the protagonist, Rose-Lynn Harlan, to sing was difficult.
‘The script just said something along the lines of, “Rose-Lynn sings an incredible song and it conveys everything that she wants to express to her mom and kids and everyone’s uplifted. The end,”‘ Harper said.
‘I had faith that we could figure it out, but it was really worrying.’
But when he heard Steenburgen’s song, co-written with Caitlyn Smith and Kate York, it all clicked into place.
He said: ‘It grabbed me by the heart the moment I heard it. It just connected.’
Pictured: Steenburgen (left) and Buckley (right) talking about their work in Wild Rose in June 2019
The new path Steenburgen has forged into her career is one that is woven into her bloodline, but has not overtaken her love of acting.
‘Steenburgen said: ‘Music is in my genes thanks to the women in my family, and I just think I was somehow granted access to it. It was so overwhelming for me in the beginning because I didn’t grow up with having that voice in my head, like Kate and Caitlyn did.’
If ‘Glasgow (“No Place Like Home”)’ does go on to perform up to critics award-winning predictions, it could be Steenburgen’s second Oscar since 1980.
She won Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lynda West Dummar in Melvin and Howard.
‘I didn’t fall out of love with acting when this happened,” Steenburgen said, “and I still haven’t. But there’s so much more capability in our brains than we probably realize, and agreeing to diminishment and shutting down doors is a choice that we all make for ourselves. It turns out you don’t really have to do that.’