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Shannon McNally


Shannon McNally's Ghost Music
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McNally arrived in Los Angeles just as Fiona Apple's record was debuting, in the immediate wake of female stars like Alanis Morrisette and Sheryl Crow. Capitol thought they had another canary in the cage, suggesting that McNally record with Morrisette's band, but McNally had her own ideas.

"I went through all these songwriters and producers and decided one by one that they were all assholes. I was clear minded about wanting to get this record made and I did but it took four years. I thought I'm just gonna do what I want to do and not even tell anybody. Alanis was huge, Jewel was huge, Sarah McLaughlin was huge. They wanted me to be like that so bad and I hated all of it, I thought it was all trite and shrill, horrible shit. I hated it. They wanted me to record finished tracks so I was constantly forced to prove myself. They never once proved anything to me, or gave me enough money to do it properly. We managed to get through the demo process. I had gone through the whole L.A. carousel, everybody who had worked with Sheryl Crow, which was a lot of people, all of whom were assholes and all of whom took credit for her success. It was amazing. I'm not a big fan but I can see that Sheryl Crow is the brains behind Sheryl Crow."

McNally held out for the musicians she wanted, including drummer Jim Keltner, and made a solid but overproduced debut, Jukebox Sparrows. The label dressed her up as a sex kitten and put her on the road for eight months before abandoning the project.

"The record came out on Elvis' birthday, and they pulled the plug on it on the anniversary of his death," she recalled. "So I immediately got on a plane, went to L.A.  and said 'Now that you've killed this one I wanted to go make another one.' I already had the demos, I knew how to do it at this point. But this was three record company presidents later, Andy Slater was president, I gave him a whole bunch of demos, got a new A&R guy and started the process which took from September to June to get everything OK'd and agree on a producer and have them release the budget. I cut the record, turned it in, two months later they called back and said 'Change this, do that.' I said 'Take it or leave it' and they said you can have $250,000 to do three songs with our bozo, or you can have half that to make the record with Charlie Sexton."

McNally had already determined that she wanted Sexton, then a member of Bob Dylan's band, to produce the album. Once she moved permanently to New Orleans in 2002, McNally set about making Geronimo in earnest, traveling back and forth between New Orleans and Austin doing prep work, then recording in June 2003 in Lafayette. Capitol rejected the finished product and McNally asked for her release that August. She eventually signed with another EMI affiliate, Back Porch Records.

"I had to stay at EMI because Capitol wouldn't negotiate with anybody that wasn't part of the company," she explained. "When I saw that J.J. Cale put out a live record on Back Porch I thought that would be a good label for me. By that time I had figured out that it was a waste of time trying to tell people in the record industry that an apple was an apple so I thought Back Porch, that's where I want to go. Some place called Back Porch. I was sick of the front porch. Sure enough they liked the record and they made me an offer."

Geronimo is an impressive album that places McNally in the tradition of musicians like Bob Dylan and the Band. The Dylan influence is close to the surface: Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier played together with Dylan for a decade, and McNally seems perfectly comfortable referencing musical passages, words and even phrasing clearly inspired by Dylan. One of the most powerful songs on the record, "Leave Your Bags," is an answer song to Dylan's "Shelter From the Storm."

"I wrote that after two things happened to me in the same week," said McNally. "The first was I was out in Amagansett visiting my aunt and we went to see Rick Danko at Stephen Talkhouse. I'd never seen him before. He was at the end and he was in really bad shape. He did 'Long Black Veil' that night and it made me wonder what the woman in the Long Black Veil, what did she think? Here he died so gallantly not wanting to fuck up her life but I thought she didn't get off easy, she's got to live with that, she's got to visit his bones every night when the cold wind blows. That sucks. I wondered what she thinks. So I started to write this song, I was gonna name him and call it 'Ezekiel John Brown' because you never hear his name in the song and it was gonna be her perspective.

"Somebody gave me a copy of Blood On the Tracks the same week. I had heard a lot of those songs, but I don't know that I'd ever heard 'Shelter From the Storm.' I was listening to it and again I wondered what the woman in that song thinks. Why don't we give her a name? I wonder who she is. So that all became 'Leave Your Bags By the Door'."

Another song, "Weathervane," is a powerful metaphor for the creative process. "That's sort of how I experience it," she said. "A creativity that passes from one person to the other person. There's just kind of this group of people I keep coming back to that really help that channel, help me channel certain energy. When I think of that song I think of George Harrison, J.J. Cale and Bob Dylan."  continue

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