Stephanie McKay Biography

Stephanie McKay Biography

Tell It Like It Is is an especially apposite title for Stephanie McKay’s forthcoming album.

For one thing, it reflects the New York-based vocalist and songwriter’s penchant for penning lyrics that reflect a lively interest in her surroundings and the events in her life. But then, anyone who knows Stephanie would expect that.

On another level it refers to the conclusion of the artist’s search on her second solo album for the sound she hears in her head when it comes to revealing her true musical nature: a gloriously live and funky vibe that wraps up classic soul, seventies funk-rock and old-school hip-hop influences into one vibrant outpouring.

But the album’s title also indirectly points to the way Stephanie’s rise and development as a career artist has been fuelled by the personal recommendations of her peers, as she’s been looking to take the next step upwards. Put simply, the people on the inside have known how good Stephanie McKay is for years - and they’ve been more than willing to tell us so.

For instance, back in the days when Steph was playing guitar in her own band on the NYC club circuit, it was no less than hot producer/songwriter Mark Batson’s notion to co-opt her for Kelis’s world tour, an eight month jaunt that took Stephanie to London. And it was while filming with Kelis for Jools Holland’s Later... TV show that Steph met Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, who, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, New York performance poet and vocalist Carl Hancock Rux, had tripped down from Bristol to check her out.

This meeting led to Steph’s 2003 debut album, McKay, produced by Barrow for Go Beat/Polydor, a project that provoked a mountain of critical approval across the media.

This fruitful word-of-mouth support directly contributed to the creation of Tell It Like It Is. For while McKay was released only in Europe, its undeniably high qualities came to the notice, via a member of staff, of Astralwerks Records’ boss Errol Kolosine, who immediately offered Stephanie a contract to begin work on her second album for the EMI offshoot. What’s more, she was given full charge of its direction.

Thus the most important thing to do was to find herself musically. Says Steph: "I really wanted to find out who I was, outside of the success of another group. I needed to find my own voice, think about what I loved about music, and put that onto my record."

The title track came to her first, a pulsating, forthright depiction of life outside her Harlem window that vocally evokes the spirits of Gwen McCrae and Jean Knight while punching home its message via a post-hip-hop, psychedelic funk beat, courtesy Robert ’Chicken’ Burke. Burke came to Steph’s attention via his co-production of the album by Drugs, a band featuring Stephanie alongside Parliament/Funkadelic alumni.

The track is also co-written and arranged by Pismo of Oakland, CA. Its inspiration has two sources, says Stephanie: "The first verse, about the teenage mother, is based on my niece. She came to me at age 16 and told me she was having a baby. To be honest, I was devastated. I had so many dreams for her. So that part is really innocence lost. The second verse is about a fatal shooting I witnessed.

I went out to buy some bread at the store where I live in East Harlem and I saw this bunch of guys arguing. All of a sudden they started shooting. I ran down into the subway and when I came out there were two boys, 19 and 20, lying on the ground. You hear it on the news all the time, but there it was in front of my eyes. I knew then that the album would have a social message, more than anything I’d done before."

It set the tone for the album: Money, which follows - another ’Chicken’ Burke production - rolls and grooves like old-school Norman Whitfield, as Steph emotes on the pressures placed upon us by the pursuit of the mean green.

The moving This Letter came right out of the pages of her daily newspaper, when Steph happened upon a column filled with letters written by the mothers, wives, sisters and girlfriends of soldiers fighting in Iraq. [Trace magazine called it, "Motown meets Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders."]

On the outrageously funky Kinky Mckay and Burke team up with Steph’s close friend, the brilliant New York saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart, to create a horn-fired groove so slippery it would have made D’Angelo proud, had he been able to borrow it for Voodoo.

D’Angelo, in fact, provides another link in the chain of people willing to step up to the plate for Steph: Schwarz-Bart played sax on D’Angelo’s Voodoo world tour, which is where he met soul vocalist supreme Anthony Hamilton, who in turn contributes his wonderful voice to Tell It Like It Is on a gorgeous, heart-broken duet with Stephanie, entitled Where Did Our Love Go?

Say What You Feel, meanwhile, which Stephanie co-wrote with Australia’s DJ Katalyst, has Lynn Collins-fronting-The-JB’s written right through it like a stick of rock. In contrast, the album’s closer is an imaginative cover of Willy Mason’s hit Oxygen, transformed by McKay, Burke and Schwarz-Bart into a bluesy, minor-key builder that, by the time the organ fires up, is on its way right back to church. It’s an uplifting finish to a great album.

The story of Tell It Like It Is then took one final twist. A couple of tracks were released by Astralwerks in 2006 as part of a US-only EP designed to introduce America to the McKay talent. Unfortunately, soon thereafter parent company EMI decided to turn Astralwerks into an alternative rock label - and so Stephanie wisely decided to up and take her marvellous completed album over to Muthas Of Invention, who are now more than delighted to be able to release one of the finest, most soulful and intelligent albums you’ll hear all year.

In the meantime, Stephanie has kept right on moving.

Just as she did in the past - when, for example, she backed up her solo projects by touring with Talib Kweli and Mos Def, played at the Bluenote Club with special guest Meshell Ndegeocello, recorded two albums with Brooklyn Funk Essentials and contributed vocals to Roy Hargove’s RH Factor: Hard Groove album - Steph has spent the past few months leading up to Tell It Like It Is release in typically productive manner.

Her collaboration with DJ Katalyst has now grown from a couple of national tours in Australia to a fully fledged team-up that’s not only provided each artist with tracks for their current albums - Katalyst’s What’s Happening is just out on BBE Records - but has now accumulated an entire album’s worth of material for future use, perhaps as a yet-to-be-named duo. [She describes their sound as "currently somewhere between Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and Gnarls Barkley".]

Say What You Feel, from the new album, was recently picked up by the producers of US TV medical drama Grey’s Anatomy to feature on the soundtrack to an episode.

Seems like talent, hard work and artistic integrity can sometimes turn things your way after all.

"Tell It Like It Is is the most personal piece of work I’ve done by far," says Stephanie of her album. "The things I sing about, my reflections on life are really about my own life and my perception of the world I see around me. It used to be that albums from the past, particularly soul albums, would tackle life’s issues and problems - as well as the fun - in this way. It’s what I grew up on. So it’s nice to put some of that feeling back on my own work."

As is usually the case with artists, after winning over the masses in their home territory, they try their hand in other markets. But what you don’t always see, is the reverse.

With powerful urban poetics, which effortlessly combines soul, hip-hop, funk and rock, Bronx, NY native Stephanie McKay has managed to garner the praise from the UK. Known through worldwide touring with the Brooklyn Funk Essentials and having performed with the likes of Kelis, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Tricky, in 2003 Stephanie McKay teamed up with producer Geoff Barrow of Portishead for her debut CD.

Released in the UK, the release immediately garnered the praise of music critics. The Guardian raved that Stephanie McKay’s debut was "resurrecting the passion and pride of politically conscious and eternally lovelorn ladies of late-1960s, early 1970s soul, McKay shines bright," while MOJO boasted Stephanie McKay is "extraordinarily eclectic" and her album was a coherent artistic statement and worth investigating."

Set to release a full length album titled Tell It Like It Is in early 2007 via Astralwerks, the label recently released a self-titled EP, marking her US debut. Containing 5 songs, the EP includes both tracks from her forthcoming release as well as tracks from her first album, giving American audiences a taste what UK fans have been praising about for some time.

Under the blood-red moon of All Hallows Eve, thousands of musicians, industry vets, and frantic fans wandered the New York City streets like zombies, bound by an insatiable lust for the sweet manna of music. We too were on a search for blood, dipping in and out of the shadows to chronicle the meanderings of the night’s most dynamic and criminally despicable creatures. Some slayed; some fell prey to the demons of mediocrity. Others proved that a good trick can be a hell of a treat.

Now, here’s a proper way to start off the festivities. Stephanie McKay saunters onto the cozy Hiro Ballroom stage backed by a young’n four-piece group and eases into a brief set of nickelbag funk and soul.

Admittedly, such a cramped space and quiet slot seems unworthy of a veteran Bronx-born singer who has collaborated with New York luminaries like Brooklyn Funk Essentials, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Carl Hancock Rux, and recorded her first album McKay under the guidance of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. Regardless, she transforms the liquid funk from her upcoming album into earthy Bill Withers comfort food and Gil Scott-Heron-style observational brew. Nothing mind-blowing, but it’s familiar in all the right ways.