Rebecca McCartney returns to the city where she was raised by a family of musicians and nerds, now with her own sound and much to say. She grew up immersed in NYC’s classical music world and her early songwriting eventually led to the release of an indie-folk record under the duo name Garden Party (2020) with her close friend, Jakob Leventhal. Now, after a college career studying jazz and playing in an R&B band, McCartney is preparing to release her genre-bending debut EP, How You Feel. Calling on her eclectic musical influences and experiences, the upcoming record generates an edgy, ethereal sound that celebrates McCartney’s buttery vocals and absorbing lyrical insights.
Tell us about the story of your act
I’ve been singing and writing songs for…. A long time. Since I was really young. I grew up in a bunch of different musical spheres, my mom is a classical clarinetist so I spent a lot of time growing up in that world, and I started singing in an intense youth chorus where I learned lots of hardcore music theory and got a taste of what it’s like to perform all the time. Then as I got older, I was studying piano and guitar, and listening to lots of varying genres of music. I started singing with bands in high school, and then in college I studied jazz and fronted an R&B band. During that time I kept in touch with another musician friend from high school, and we co-wrote and released an indie-folk album called Garden Party write at the start of the pandemic. All of these different arms of my music life came together when I started working on the songs for my upcoming EP, How You Feel, which I just released the first song for. In “Remember Less” you can pick out a bunch of those genre influences, from a jazzy groove to some folky guitar lines. I think my story as an artist really embraces this sort of limbo that I feel, stuck between a bunch of different genres and labels, but really happy to be in that place. I love the freedom that I have now as an independent artist to explore a bunch of different sound worlds and styles, and even though I’ve been working on my music for so many years, I feel like I’m just getting started. In a good way.
What is the message behind your art?
I tend to use songwriting as a method for processing my emotions and leaning into the tensions in the world around me. When people hear my music, I want them to feel like it’s okay to live in their own worlds of conflicting and complex emotions — none of us really have this thing figured out. So inviting that state of limbo and allowing people to just live in the music as they hear it is at the core of the art I release. But there’s also this element of community-building that is super important to me when I think about music and art: I live to work with other people and learn from others’ backgrounds and experiences. Doing music alone has never felt right for me. That desire for music being an active community space carries through all aspects of the process of creating for me, from the writing to recording to performing to listening.
What are some sources of inspiration for your lyrics and storytelling?
Most of my songs come from a kind of imaginative-reflective place of me thinking about my relationships and other people in my life. I feel really lucky to have the great friends and people around me that I do, and they make it easy to feel ~inspired.~
Who is an artist that you look up to more than others today?
I’m a huge fan of Peter CottonTale, the Chicago-based producer/engineer. He released this album during quarantine called CATCH that I’ve probably listened to a thousand times. It feels like a really good party, and I think that’s kinda the way it was made… Peter CottonTale runs RCM Studios in Chicago and pulled together a ton of his colleagues and friends from across a few different genres to collaborate on this record, so each song gives you this insane gift of hearing all these different voices and sounds that you know from other songs and records. You get these all-stars like Kirk Franklin from the gospel world, Jamila Woods and Yebba from the R&B scene, PJ Morton and Chance the Rapper, it’s just endless. And so alive.
All time favorite record?
This changes all the time — but Norah Jones’ 2002 Come Away With Me will always be a favorite. I think she was 23 when she released that record, and it’s brilliant. So mellow and emotive. My parents also used to put this on when my brother and I were going to bed when we were young, so I have a lot of calm nostalgia attached to the sounds of the album. I’ve come back to it with a new perspective now, though, as I’ve gotten deeper into my own jazz singer world. Norah Jones has such a timeless voice, and these songs bridge classic jazz with modern songwriting so beautifully.
Tell us about your latest release and how it came about
I was writing songs in my college house in Minnesota, you know, all the time. My friend Jakob has been bugging me since we released our Garden Party record two years ago, saying that he wants to produce some solo stuff for me, and I was just putting it off and putting it off until I felt like I had material I felt really good about. But what started as songs with my voice and lil Strat in Minnesota totally grew and changed once I got to the studio with Jakob. We spent about a week tracking these 5 songs of mine (which will all be released this fall as a part of the EP I mentioned earlier) and working them into full band instrumentations. I hired a fantastic drummer out of Nashville, Jason Berger, and then had the incredible gift of getting Dan Knobler (also in Nashville) to master the tracks after Jakob mixed them. I guess that’s all on the technical side, but the song itself, “Remember Less,” came about because I was heading back to college from my home in New York, and leaving behind a relationship. When I got back to school I was thinking about this guy all the time, but not talking to him. So I started processing that through this song, wondering if he was thinking about me, too.
You seem to be fusing several musical genres. What inspires your sound?
Earlier I talked about all those genres I grew up in, and I think now my sound has come around to embracing all those various influences, and sits somewhere in between R&B, indie rock, jazz, and singer/songwriter. That sort of can’t-pin-it-down sound comes from hearing a lot of artists who embrace fusion and refuse to be confined to one category for their music, like Esperanza Spalding with jazz and soul and funk, and Charlotte Day Wilson with R&B and singer/songwriter styles. I think each of the songs on this upcoming EP, How You Feel, have a different genre they sound closest to, which makes them really fun to play and means that all kinds of listeners can connect to whatever they hear and like.
What excites you the most about what you do?
I love collaborating with other musicians, whether it’s writing together, playing in a band, producing. Doing all that stuff alone is really not my thing, but being an independent musician can be kind of lonely sometimes and put you in a spot where you’re expected to be making all these things for yourself. So I love every opportunity I get to play with other people — then music just becomes like hanging out with a good friend.-
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
I want to be touring for a few months a year, but still feel really grounded in New York, which is my hometown and my base. I want to have a really solid band, too, which I’m working on putting together now… so if you know any drummers……. But for real, I’d love to create a space for musicians to come together and work in the future, sort of like a co-op that serves as a community gathering space and collaborative environment for indie musicians alongside community organizers. That’s something I’ve been wanting to find in the city, but haven’t yet, so I’d love to build one.
Your style is very original and elaborate. How do you take care of your aesthetics?
I like comfy things that feel like home but are also vibrant. I do a lot of vintage and used clothing shopping. Frequently in my mom’s closet.
What was the most daunting moment in your career so far?
Ooh great question — when I started doing music production, I felt really wary of the way that my stuff was coming out, and was afraid of sharing it with people. I kinda wanted to stick to the singing and playing instruments and let someone else handle all the tech-y engineering and producing. Then through Covid I had to handle all aspects of a project I was working on, from the writing to the recording to the production, everything. I was lucky (thanks to my college) to be in a really well outfitted recording studio, but I was the only one allowed in there at a time, so I’m like sitting in front of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment with… very little idea of how to use anything, and very high chances of breaking something if I patched a cable the wrong way or turned a dial up too high. And I really had to figure it out as I was going. Made a ton of mistakes, but I didn’t break anything. I was just really inefficient. But I produced some work I was really proud of.
What is the best advice you’ve ever gotten?
I think about the saying “Everything is everything” a lot, which I guess is age-old but I always hear it in Lauryn Hill’s voice because of that song. It might not be advice, but it really helps me think through the way that social issues and people are connected in the world, which in turn helps to ground me and keeps my fire going.
Where do you think the next game changer will be in the music industry and entertainment scene?
I think listeners are moving towards building less conventional, less commercial connections with the artists they love, which makes me think that house concerts and other intimate venues will steadily become more popular than big stadium shows, where the audience feels like a real part of a community. Or maybe tech innovations will allow for big shows to feel smaller and more intimate. Whatever it is, I think we’re just now entering into a really new phase of unconventional venues popping up after so many had to close because of Covid. Who knows where we’ll land!
