of meaningful art — is inspiring to all.
What you hold in your hands is a guidebook to an enchanted life lived every day, and an everyday life lived in an enchanted way. It is further proof that Liona Boyd is an uncommonly unique woman.
HP Newquist
Author, founder of the National Guitar Museum
Introduction
I have never been in the habit of consulting psychics. Still, one time — it must have been over thirty years ago — I set off with one of my girlfriends to find a woman we hoped could predict our futures. Before arriving I lightheartedly recounted the story of the elderly British lady who had stopped my mother as she was pushing me in my baby stroller along Kensington High Street in London. Apparently she had exclaimed that I was going to grow up to become famous and travel all over the world. My mother has always been a skeptic when it comes to anything concerning clairvoyance, but she often reminded me of this amusing incident as I flew off on my concert tours.
When my girlfriend and I arrived at the psychic’s home, the woman babbled on about future romances and marriage, all of which I immediately dismissed. She also insisted that my life was going to be dominated by words — that writing would become my passion. I was convinced that she must have misread her tarot cards because at that time my entire life was focused on classical music.
I admit that as a child in England I had discovered the magical effect of combining words and music; I used to entertain myself composing little ditties while on a homemade swing that my father had constructed under our pear tree. When I attended Adamsrill Primary School in England, I won first prize for “best story” in the “infants class” and still have the treasured little book signed by my schoolteacher. Later in my school days, some of my poems and stories were selected for the annual yearbooks published by the various schools I attended on both sides of the Atlantic.
As an adult, I wrote several articles for guitar magazines and also scribbled out a few poems and country-style songs during my peregrinations around the world. But it was when I started to pen my 1998 autobiography, In My Own Key: My Life in Love and Music, that I was reminded how much I loved the actual writing process and chronicling my life stories … and what amazing adventures I had to tell!
Others have enjoyed my tales, too. Robert Bateman kindly wrote of my first book, “Liona’s music, talent, and courage have woven a magic carpet that has floated through some of the most interesting corridors of our century.” If you have not done so already, I encourage you, dear readers, to pick up that first book in order to better understand all the experiences that have led me to this continuing journey that I am about to share with you.
You see, miraculously the psychic’s predictions about words have finally come true. For over a decade, besides composing melodies and performing with my guitar, I have become obsessed with capturing stories and emotions in song lyrics. Every word has to be just perfect. At times the process has driven me to distraction and kept me up at night. How right that woman was to somehow foresee that writing songs and playing with poetic words, as well as the guitar, would become my passion.
“No Remedy for Love” is the title of a rather sardonic love song I composed, after hearing far too many disillusioned contemporaries of mine share their often bitter experiences with love. But as you are about to discover in these pages, it happily does not reflect my personal conclusions on the subject. It is also the title of my 2017 album. The four words are a partial quotation of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, “There is no remedy for love but to love more.” Taken in a different context, they also seemed a fitting title for this new autobiography, which picks up my story from 1998, when I was a world-renowned classical guitarist, happily married, and living a luxurious life based in Beverly Hills, California.
Although it might not be quite as adventure packed as my first, this book is perhaps more revealing of my thoughts and feelings, since it was written in a period when I was forced to look back and reflect upon my life and the choices that I made. It chronicles my inner struggles to reinvent myself as a singer and songwriter after a devastating setback with musician’s focal dystonia, a condition that affects hand dexterity; the effect of all of this on my relationship with my husband, and how it ended up being the catalyst for my divorce; my subsequent spiritual quests; my three duo partners; my search for love; and my whirlwind days of moving seven times on my own and living by myself in Miami, Connecticut, Santa Monica, Toronto, and Palm Beach.
As the famous Greek poet Cavafy once wrote:
“Pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge, that the summer mornings are many.” I have certainly chosen a voyage full of adventure and full of discovery, and I have a feeling that my voyage is far from over. I have also learned that many blessings and opportunities to love and to be loved are there for the taking. Perhaps after reading my story of determination and reinvention, you might even conclude, as I did, that Thoreau’s words still ring true and that “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
Liona
1
Memories in San Marco
I am seated at one of the outdoor tables in the Caffè Florian at dusk in Venice’s famed San Marco Square. The pigeons are still on their mission to search for fallen breadcrumbs, and a small orchestra, with its accordion, violin, bass, and clarinet soloists, has been serenading Florian’s customers with soulful renditions of the theme from Cinema Paradiso and a lively “Allegro” by Antonio Vivaldi.
It seems as though every piece is taking me back in time to a still-fresh memory from my life of travel and music. The musicians start to play Marcello’s “Adagio,” the same beautiful melody I had recorded in 1979 in London with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, years before he had been knighted. I remember carefully writing out the score and making sure I had wound some well-worn bass strings onto my Ramírez guitar so that my fingers would not make too many squeaks while changing fretboard positions. It seems a lifetime ago.
Now the orchestra breaks into Armando Manzanero’s “Ésta Tarde Ví Llover,” and I am back in my beloved San Miguel de Allende, slow dancing with my Mexican teenage boyfriends, in the late sixties. Édith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” instantly evokes my penniless student years in Paris; then “Someday My Prince Will Come” leads my mind to wander to the studio sessions in Nashville when I recorded an instrumental version of that song with the legendary country guitarist Chet Atkins. Would my own prince ever come, I wondered, or am I now destined to navigate life’s journey on my own?
It is July, and I have chosen to come to the most romantic of all cities as a birthday treat to myself. Strangely, I do not miss having a companion this particular week and am happy simply living out of one small carry-on tote in my little hotel on a narrow street called Calle degli Specchieri. I have a ticket tomorrow to the famed opera house La Fenice, where I am going to hear a Beethoven symphony, and this morning, after the clanging seven a.m. bells from San Marco’s cathedral awakened me, I called in at the famous open-air market where I touched a velvety octopus and bought a kilo of wild strawberries.
I spent yesterday exploring the Giudecca, having been transported over the blue waters to the island by the Cipriani Hotel’s private launch that I breezed onto as though I were one of their guests. Once moored at the dock, I accepted the outstretched hand offered by a handsome Italian attendant, made my way along the pathway, and settled into the cushiony softness of a couch overlooking the bay, where I was soon sipping a delectable fresh peach cocktail. Later I made sure that one of the ripe peaches, growing in their private orchard, somehow found its way into my handbag. Ah, I had not really changed since 1972 when, along with a fellow student of Maestro Alexandre Lagoya, I had taken the overnight train to this magical city and mischievously swept into our knapsack an orange from a distracted merchant. Was I still that same girl, bubbling with wanderlust and ambition that had taken me around the world? How had I survived all my international adventures, my gypsy lifestyle, my trail of broken hearts, and my recent roller coaster years struggling to reinvent my career?
Today I had lunch in the Hotel Rialto, where thirty years ago