INTERVIEW: Jamie McDell releases self-titled fourth album: "It's certainly the most honest and vulnerable I've ever been... I'm really proud of every little thing about it."

Interview: Jett Tattersall

New Zealand’s Jamie McDell creates the kind of music that is an all-encompassing experience to listen to. Expertly blurring the line between country, pop, soul and blues, her fourth album Jamie McDell sees her creating the most assured, confident, honest and moving music of her career.

After becoming one of New Zealand’s most popular singers in the early 2010s, winning the NZ Music Award for Best Pop Album in 2013 and scoring a string of hit singles and albums, McDell travelled to Nashville in 2017 seeking to connect more with the music that first sparked a love of music in her as a child - the likes of John Denver, Jimmy Buffett and James Taylor. In 2019 she relocated to Ontario and after finding herself sitting on the floor feeling overwhelmed and frustrated with a friend in a troubled relationship, she created the track ‘Botox’. It would be this track that powered a new direction of raw honesty in her music and set in motion the journey to Jamie McDell.

The album has a warm, emotional soundscape which feels authentic, stripped back and minimalist while still retaining intricate, complex and intriguing production. It has a foundation of country, leaning heavily into Americana, most evident on tracks such as the toe-tapping ‘Daddy Come Pick Me Up’ and the more gentle ‘Sailor’, which features gospel group The McCrary Sisters, but retains element of pop and soul making it completely accessible to everyone.

‘Limousine Running’ is a moody, atmospheric track which is reminiscent of the best 1980s alt-rock-pop with a glorious electric guitar solo, while ‘Worst Crime’, featuring Robert Ellis, is a soaring track which transcends genre, with its lyrics telling a story of crime interweaved with heartbreak: “Breaking your heart / Might've been the worst crime.”

With lyrical content dealing with abusive relationships, family dynamics, heartbreak and the pain of growing up to complement the stunning music, Jamie McDell is an engrossing listen which challenges, inspires and burrows into your soul. It is highly recommended and we recently sat down with Jamie to find out more about its creation.

Hi Jamie you wonderful woman of sound and melody, how are things with you?
Good! I'm in a bit of a heightened emotional time in life. I've recently got married and had a lovely week long honeymoon and now back and to the house and trying to get that all finished and the album is out, so it's just one of those busy times, but it's all wonderful stuff.

Let's talk about that album. It's your fourth studio album, but it's a different creature altogether. How are you feeling about it? How did you put it together?
Totally, it does feel like a different creature to me too. It's probably the first record I've released where I'm really proud of every little thing about it. It definitely sounds like me, and where I'm at in this stage of life. It's certainly the most honest and vulnerable I've ever been, which brings some kind of anxiety to the release. The sounds that it represents and some of the traditions that have been pulled from country and folk music, I'm just really excited to be sitting in in this realm and I feel a little bit more like I'm in amongst some of the music and artists I looked up to growing up.

Who were those artists that you did look up to when you were younger?
Jimmy Buffett and John Denver were really influential in my household. As I've grown older and discovered the likes of Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt, especially the Trio record they did, that definitely changed things for me. I've [developed] a broader understanding of what it means to be a female in country music and how exciting it is to share our perspectives.

That's such a beautiful thing to say. There are of course some wonderful female country artists, but it's very dominated by men and men’s storytelling. Quite often, even when the the women were singing, they just had this masculine energy to it. You had to be really big and really out there to be seen, which is why you had people like Dolly and Linda at the forefront. You record and spend a lot of time in the States, and you're from New Zealand. We often think folk, New Zealand country, America. Do you find that geographically that's how your music blends or is it just the sounds that you love?
It's such an interesting question, because I definitely struggled with the authenticity around me wanting to create country music and that it's not necessarily part of my culture, or even the stories that have surrounded my family. But there is a really interesting blend of just really wanting to pay tribute to music that revolves around storytelling and acoustic instruments, blended with my experience of living on the sea, and also getting to experience some of my parent’s life stories and struggles. I feel like we've reached some sort of my own country music that comes from my upbringing. It's what it's all about, country music is just storytelling. I'm grateful to have lots of harmony and natural sounds on the record, but the core of it just comes from telling real, everyday experiences. What's interesting about being a woman in this genre is there's so much that hasn't really been told yet or explored. So it's fun.

Lead single ‘Not Ready Yet’ is incredible, we've heard these elements of what does it mean to be a woman before, but I've never really heard it with that country sound?
I personally feel that way too. Not to discount all the paving of the way that artists like Dolly and Loretta Lynn did, but somewhere along the way, there became too much of a channel that female country artists had to fit into. I wonder if it’s their ability to rely on platforms other than radio that have opened up the conversation a bit more, which I think is so exciting. I've been really inspired by some Australian artists, Julia Jacklin, Courtney Barnett, and Stella Donnelly. Just hearing other woman speak about what I would have thought was the unspeakable just kind of kicks you into gear and gets you to celebrate what it's all about to be a human.  

Was ‘Not Ready Yet’ always going to be the lead single?
I don't know if this is a common thing, but I write ballads more than I write upbeat, single-y sounding happy music. So usually, for me, I'm just like, ‘this one's a little bit lighter than the others, surely that will work better as a single’. For quite a while I've been trying to write something that had a bit of The Chicks feel to it, so when came up with the groove for ‘Not Ready Yet’, had a little bit of that fiddle going and the harmonies me and [producer] Nash and I would just say, ‘yeah, I think we're getting there!’.

It's such a place everyone has, this idea of heartache because we like to wallow in the emotion. And you know, not many people can make too much of a living singing about joy all the time!
It’s always a bit of a challenge. I love the songs that are about something really deep that at the same time you can dance around to them or listen to them on a sunny car drive. That's achieving something great, but it takes a little more work than the sad bedroom songs!

Take it from the bedroom and then just add a beat to it! I want to talk about your songwriting and your vocals, they are such a delight. You've always sung, but where did that desire to make it your own to create your own songs come from?
I've always had that. I don't know if it came from being quite a self centred child! I first started learning the guitar when I was maybe 14, and I really don't remember spending too much time on covers or anything like that, I was pretty much straight into ‘what am I feeling? What do I need to tell people?’ I had a pretty dramatic view of the world as well, so it was pretty easy to come into my own lyricism. As I've gotten older, naturally, you start to have more of a world view and other responsibilities and people you care about, I actually have been writing less, and I put that down to, hopefully, not being so focused on myself all the time.

What's beautiful about your YouTube channel is we can see it from beginning. You’ve got the most gorgeous, New Zealand country adolescence, but at the same time getting hit by a ton of ‘I'm 16 and these are my feelings.’ I love that they're there, I think it's important that they've stayed there.
I do I look back at some of those YouTube videos and I'm like, ‘Who is that?!’ 

But do you not think in a world where everything has to be delivered, so polished that it's really important to remember that adolescence is adolescence? To have an artist such as yourself to grow up before our eyes, it's really comforting for the listener.
Totally, that’s such an interesting one that I'm battling with a little bit at the moment. I've gone through phases of do I need to wipe all the stuff that I have on YouTube? What is that showing people? And then I come down to what you're saying - no, this whole thing has been a journey, everyone is on their own path and it's cool to be able to see where I've come from.

Absolutely. Diaries are only there to be embarrassed about ourselves later! You have been in that musical stratosphere since you were 16, you’ve basically been living that dream from the get go. How have you balanced that with a sense of normalcy in your life?
I've had some really humbling moments, to be honest. When I started releasing music, I had a fairy tale situation, my songs just got picked up by radio right away, they spread everywhere, there was awards, there was cash flying, and it was like, ‘this is awesome, why doesn’t everyone do this?!’ And then I had to grapple with wanting to create a sound that wasn't going to lend itself so well commercially, to follow a different genre, and also to work the industry a little bit more independently. That took some hard hits, there was a lot of things that I've put out there that either didn't work, or I wasn't proud of them. I made heaps of mistakes. I've definitely been able to keep my feet on the ground. I'm lucky that I was able to see what it looks like to be part of a successful release, and to get experience in the music industry so young to have the confidence that I might be able to try and build this myself in a slightly different way. It's always going to be hard, but it's definitely been extremely satisfying being in a place where every ounce of the music I'm releasing is absolutely what I want to be doing. I'm excited to play it, there's no reserve there.

That must be incredible. To start experimenting and moving yourself into a different sound and perhaps move away from commercial success, because you started on such a high, the fall would have been quite big, but also the the pushing yourself to keep ‘falling’, continually pushing your integrity, must be something else?
That's a good way to put it. It’s also trying to figure out what success is to you. What you value and what you're trying to put out there and what you believe in, you really have to hold on to those things so much. Don't get me wrong, in the last year, even with the pandemic, I found myself picking up nannying jobs and trying to get this record out, I was like ‘should I keep doing this?’ And then when you just sit down with the album you've created you're like, ‘yes, absolutely.’

Yes, cause it's going to make you proud, it's going to make you happy. I want to talk to you about the closing track on the album, ‘Boy into a Man’. Lyrically, I just adore this song. ‘Maybe I'm just a woman and I'll never understand / How to change a boy into a man’. I mean, chills! Can you talk to me about this track?
I'm interested in how people respond to this track. When I wrote it, I wasn't necessarily speaking to men in general, I had a really specific person in mind that I was referring to. An interesting dynamic within his family where those milestones of getting married or moving out, or having children, are signifiers of where you are in life, whether you’ve succeeded or not, or whether you've done well or not. In this circumstance, that's been the real shame for this person, because there’s so much more to who they are, and they hold so much insecurity. They've definitely struggled to find value in the other things they've been doing in their life.

It's such a beautiful closer, and again, it's comes from such a personal experience. Do you find it easier to navigate your songwriting kind of cloaked in the idea of someone else? Or are you now actually enjoying putting it all out there, and you're finding it comes to you quite easily?
Definitely. That personal, raw, ‘tell it how it is and how it happened’ literal style of songwriting, I don't know if it comes to me easier, but it definitely excites me more. That's when I'm like, ‘how did I even say that?’ It’s always a surprise what comes out of my mouth! I'm prouder of those moments, I don't know if that’s just because they feel brave. I’m more proud of that than I am if I come up with some awesome metaphor, or a pun or something.

The country music industry in Australia is very big and welcoming, it seems to be this massive friendship circle particularly when it comes to live performances, there's always seems to be so much heart in the sharing and the supporting of others. Do you find that in the industry in New Zealand, and also the States?
Yeah, I don't know what it is, maybe it’s because you're already in a vulnerable state when you're talking about stories of your family or what you've been through. In New Zealand, because we have such a small community looking to celebrate this style of music, even smaller in terms of females, there’s just been so many wonderful women that I've been able to reach out to and figure out how to do this and how to put this together and get advice. That's why I love getting to know the Nashville community and especially [producer] Nash Chambers and his family. They really embody that, they really try to build a community and celebrate everyone’s story.

Jamie, lastly, before I have to leave you, your album is out now, what else is coming up you?  
I don't know if you’re getting this answer a lot, but it's a little uncertain and hard to say! Obviously, I would just love to go out and play this record, it'll just be a matter of when it’s safe to do. I'd love to get back over to the States but I'll just have to be a little bit patient with that. I'm really excited to get this album out. I almost feel like I've kind of closed a chapter so I can really sink into the next writing phase.

Jamie McDell is out now via ABC Music. You can buy and download here.

To keep up with all things Jamie McDell you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.