When Mindy Gledhill stepped into an old phone booth at an antique shop, she immediately knew what had to be done next. She purchased the vintage piece and transformed it into her recording box. Then, like a companion entering the TARDIS on Doctor Who, Gledhill traveled back in time.
“I thought it would be healing for me to turn that phone booth into an ISO booth for recording vocals, and call up my inner child and tell her all the things that I wish she would have known when she was younger,” Gledhill tells American Songwriter. “I lined it with acoustic foam, turned it into my vocal booth, and started writing and recording songs to little me.”
The result of Gledhill’s thrift store find was a collection of songs chronicling her life then and now, The Phone Booth Sessions, Vol. 1, a follow-up to her 2019 release Rabbit Hole.
A moodier opening overture “Pleased to Meet Me” leads into the track of the same name, a compassionate ballad where Gledhill gets first reacquainted with her younger self—I’d be pleased to meet me / I’d stop and say hello / Kiss my forehead sweetly / Gently hold me close—and more longing to chat with her younger analog child years on “Talk to You.” More childhood memories and imaginations, drift by “The Edge of the World” and “Little Miss Moon Boots” and into stories of self-realizations and lost connections in “Charming,” “Dial Tone Duet,” and “Long Lost Lullaby” which closes the album with a reprise after a penultimate cover of a 1990s alt-classic Gledhill remembers listening to while driving with her older siblings.
The Utah-based singer and songwriter recently spoke to American Songwriter about her first volume of inner child work, the making of Vol. 2, working with her son on two tracks, and covering the Cranberries’ 1993 hit “Dreams.”
American Songwriter: Let’s go back to when you came across the phone booth that inspired the new album.
Mindy Gledhill: The concept of this album came together in one of those flashes of inspiration. I was going through some turmoil in my personal life and sought out a therapist to help me. She said, ‘What I think would help you is inner child work,’ and I didn’t know what that was, but she said ‘Next week, when you come, bring me a bag of objects that you find around your house that remind you of childhood, and we’ll just talk about each one.’ So I brought this bag of objects, and as we examined each one, I started to see each of these things as a potential song.
This exercise reminded me of one I have used as a songwriter called “object writing” where you take an object and use your five senses to make word lists and answer questions like “What does this object sound like? What does it taste like? What does it smell like? What does it look like? And I thought it could be therapeutic for me to write songs about my inner child. Coincidentally, on my drive home from the therapist’s office that day, I stopped at an antique store, one of my favorite adult adventures.
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AS: How did you go from stepping into this phone booth to writing an entire album?
MG: There was always a theme of time traveling in movies like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures. Essentially, it was a bit of time travel. And the inner child is the key to so much freedom and creativity because children don’t judge their art. They know they create so beautifully and freely. I think the theory with inner child work is that so many of our neural pathways in our formative years are developing, and when we get some incorrect messages or poor parenting, those pathways are formed in those ways. So the idea is that you can go back and re-parent yourself. You can go back and visualize. For me, I’ve done it all through songwriting and visualizing all of these things that you should have heard, or messages you should have learned the first time, and starting to reprogram the neural pathways and how you talk to yourself, improve the inner dialogue.
AS: When writing the songs for The Phone Booth Sessions, Vol. 1, what did you want to tell your inner child?
MG: As children, a lot of the time, we learn to please the adults around us to earn their love. Some of the messages I think came to me during the writing process started on the first track “Pleased to Meet Me.” It was this realization that I needed to get to know myself. I needed to reprogram my brain to learn that it’s a pleasure to be with myself, to know myself. “Pleased to Meet Me” answers the question: “If you could go back and meet little you what would you want them to feel and know?”
I’d say “It’s a pleasure to know you little one. You’re not a burden. You’re you are a delight.”
AS: Sonically, how did you want the album to feel?
MG: It’s tender and pulls at your heartstrings, and the combination of instruments helps evoke those feelings, too. There’s lots of orchestration, paired with unexpected instruments like the vibraphone and more ‘80s guitar—because I’m an ‘80s child—and a few uptempo songs that connect with the wildness, the wonderfully wild aspects of being a child.
AS: Amid all this inner child work, and writing, you also covered the Cranberries’ “Dreams.”
MG: I was trying to think of a song that would be on the soundtrack if my childhood were a movie. What would be the song that played during the credits, and did that one come to mind? It’s [“Dreams”] a feel-good memory song. I didn’t want this album to be all sad. There were a lot of beautiful childhood memories, and I also wanted to honor those. My older teenage sisters would drive me to junior high in the morning before they went to high school and would play the Cranberries, so I have lots of memories of the Cranberries with the windows rolled down in California.
AS: How did working with several producers—Porter Chapman, Bly Wallentine, Colin Foy, Joe Corcoran, Daniel Tashian, David Kahne, Liam Herbert, and Scott Shepard—and serving as executive producer again make this feel different from the rest?
MG: This is the first project where I took the reins on the production and the collaborators. I was guiding the process a lot more than I ever have. I’ve always been an independent artist. I’ve always been the executive producer, but this was a different process where I was more involved, less going into the studio and letting the producer call the shots. I called the shots saying, “This is what I want to do, and we’re gonna schedule all these people, and then I’m gonna play these instruments.” That felt healing for my inner child because I think part of my work is to have confidence in showing up and taking the reins on my own life and not leaving it to other people or other outside authority figures to tell me how it needs to go.
I had more freedom to say, “This is what I want, and we’re going to do what it takes until it sounds this way. Sometimes it takes time to trust yourself your decisions and your taste. I think too many artists go into studios with producers who have lots of street credit or who have this track history, and they give away too much power and autonomy to what the producer wants instead of what they want.
AS: You also worked with your oldest son Jackson, who co-produced and co-wrote “Little Miss Moon Boots” and “The Edge of the World.”
MG: One of the cool things about having him write and be one of the producers on the album is that it brought up these unexpected conversations between us about his childhood and things that he has needed to heal from. So I feel like it’s been this beautiful journey in healing generational pain and generational trauma that a lot of family members don’t ever confront. I didn’t think about how that might be a byproduct of this journey, in this process, but I’m so grateful for it.
AS: Can we dive into “The Edge of the World” and where this was in your childhood?
MG: “The Edge of the World” answers the question, “If you could meet your inner child in a safe place, just in your mind, where would that be?” And for me, my safe place to go and meet my inner child is called the edge of the world. It’s a real place from my childhood. I grew up on the north coast of California, and one of my older high school siblings would take me along with them and all their friends to this place called the edge of the world. It’s a cliff that has a big drop-off, and we would go there because it was up in the mountains, and watch the stars at night. It’s one of those memories that is a safe memory for me because I felt included and accepted and special to someone older, an older sibling, which is so valuable as a child.
There was also this beautiful metaphor of being out there in the dark under the stars, with this expanse, this drop-off, where you don’t know what’s out there, and ironically feel safe on the edge of something like that. To me, it was a metaphor for life. Sometimes our biggest transformational opportunities, are at the edge of everything we know, and we have to take this leap of faith and trust what lies ahead.
AS: At this stage in your career, how has songwriting shifted for you?
MG: With anything that you do for an extended period the hope is that you get better at it. And I do feel like this is some of my richest songwriting. This has a lot of depth and intention behind it. I think with a lot of my earlier stuff, I was always earnest about it, and less experienced, and less able to emote things of depth.
For many Nashville writers, it’s their job to show up and write every day. I’m not that kind of writer. I write when something wells up inside of me and it has to come out, and I don’t feel like I have a choice as to when or how that happens. It’s how I’ve always processed the world. I think in my experiences, there’s this energy that builds up inside of me, and I can’t contain it anymore until I put it out into an album or into music.
AS: And now that you’ve gotten back in touch with your younger self, where has it left you as an artist, a songwriter?
MG: I had romanticized this fantasy that I’ll do this inner child work and I’ll make this album, and I’ll be all healed from my problems. I would definitely say I’ve done a lot of healing, and the unexpected ironies of doing this are the acceptance and realization that there are some things that will always hurt in life and that maybe you can’t always heal, but there is an acceptance that there is a healing that happens. It’s okay, that some things may always hurt. And I think letting go of this fantasy that it’s all going to be better at some point has actually been more healing than anything else.
Volume Two is more about the teenage years, which I think had different levels of hurt. Witnessing ourselves at every level of development in our life story is really powerful. And witnessing ourselves in a compassionate way is really powerful. Compassion. That’s the keyword.
Not one of us leaves childhood unscathed. And witnessing that little girl, spending time with her, and taking the time to really grieve certain painful experiences isn’t something I took time for in the past. That has been a healing part of this journey. It’s hard to go back and revisit painful memories, but the more we avoid them and push them away, the further we keep ourselves from moving on and healing.
Photos: Clifford Clark
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