Shannon McArdle returns with A Touch of Class
Shannon McArdle’s return to the recording world with A Touch of Class could be a life-changer for the singer-songwriter from Brooklyn, but she’s not too sure she’s ready to go down that road.
“No, I need my retirement and I have dogs now that require a lot of attention,” she laughs. “I’m Brooklyn forever and I’ll play a show on the weekend, and if I’m feeling really naughty, maybe on a school night or maybe a little tour over summer vacation.”
That’s a woman in command talking, and not just in a musical sense. Currently a high school English teacher, McArdle isn’t chasing what she may back in the days of her band, The Mendoza Line, or even when she released her critically acclaimed solo debut, The Summer of the Whore, ten years ago. Sure, it’s still about the music, but not necessarily everything that comes with it.
“I can’t stop writing, for one, and I’m not going to stop until I have nothing left in me,” she said. “But I think it’s also a nice connection to friends that I’ve had for 20 years and a connection to people that if I were just teaching high school, I would never see them. So it’s sort of a way of reminding myself that you do something else, you’re kind of interesting, you make music. And if for no other reason, it’s to tell my students, ‘I’m a musician, you can Google me.’ (Laughs) So it’s to impress the kids, mostly. But it really is to stay connected to people that I’ve collaborated with since I moved to New York, and I can’t imagine not having that connection.”
It’s a liberating situation to be in, one made even more so by her choice to self-publish A Touch of Class after her deal with Bar/None records was finished. Of course, liberating doesn’t mean easy, by McArdle has navigated those waters and is still standing.
“There was no sense of how things work anymore,” she said of the time following the release of 2012’s Dream of Axes. “I know that sounds silly, but when my last record came out I was still on Bar/None, and it’s kind of nice to have someone to take care of press and everything for you. (Laughs) And there were physical CDs back then. I’m getting some this time, but it’s a self-release and it’s really scary and I think I bothered a lot of my friends in saying, ‘Can you do this for me? I don’t know how to do this and I don’t want to learn.’ So I sort of passed the buck to Ray Ketchem, who I worked with in Mendoza Line and who did a number of our recordings and I asked him to sort of get it together. I haven’t been on my own, but it still felt like it at times because I didn’t know the answer to anything. And still don’t because I haven’t learned much other than who will be willing to do it for me for a certain amount of money.”
McArdle laughs, her dry wit clearly the glue that not only keeps her sane in the music business, but that also informs her music. So take this ability to tell it like it is and add in the hooks, and McArdle’s plans to keep things low-key may have to change. But that’s a topic for another day. For now, inquiring minds want to know what happens when she tells her students to Google her and Summer of the Whore comes up?
“I taught ninth graders for about six or seven years and so I was fielding that question with 14-year-olds as opposed to 17 and 18-year-olds,” McArdle said. “Parent-teacher conferences would come around and it was amazing. Mothers and fathers would say, ‘I heard some of your music; my daughter let me listen to it,’ and there wasn’t one word of judgment.”
Even in New York City, that’s surprising, but McArdle will take it as a happy surprise.
“I think I was nervous about crossing that threshold and moving into high school, and if my music career would get in the way or would people judge me, and it hasn’t happened, not once,” she said. “Everyone is very supportive.”
As for A Touch of Class coming out ten years after her solo debut, that was another accident.
“I should have had it out in 2015, but as time just kept going, I thought, ‘Oh gosh, I’m never gonna get this out.’ But then I thought, ‘Oh, it’s gonna come out in 2017,’ and then I got scared and thought, ‘Well, this will be perfect; it can come out ten years after Summer of the Whore. So it was a mistake.”
That seminal release put McArdle on the map, and while the raw nature of the material, which covered her divorce from Mendoza Line’s Timothy Bracy, would presumably be difficult to go back to, time has healed a lot of those wounds.
“At this point it’s been over ten years, and it seems like it wasn’t even me in a way,” she said. “Sometimes I look back at old Mendoza Line articles or interviews and there’s not even sadness. It’s, ‘Wow, I’m still doing this.’”
Some would say she’s doing it better than ever, even if McArdle’s mom thinks this is her musical swan song.
“My mother says I’m finished,” she said. “She’s like, ‘Shan, you’ve come full circle. Your first solo record was Summer of the Whore, and now you’ve got A Touch of Class.’ I reminded her that I’m not done making music.”
That’s good news for all of us.
For more information on Shannon McArdle, click here
Shannon McArdle plays Union Hall in Brooklyn tonight, August 24. For more information, click here
