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    Concert Preview: Andy McKee at Rumba Café

    When I was 25, I woke up one day and convinced myself I should learn to play the guitar.

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    You see, it was 2001. John Mayer was on every radio station imaginable singing about his quarter-life crisis (I could relate…), Jack Johnson had become the new sensitive, swoon-worthy troubadour of the moment, and you couldn’t find an open mic night or coffee house around where someone wasn’t channeling Dave Matthews’ convulsive strum-and-shuffle routine. I had no illusions of grandeur that I’d become a virtuoso; I just wanted to see if I could pluck a few chords and maybe figure out the tune to Mayer’s “Neon”. And, who was I to complain if my new six-string made me a little more date-able in the process?

    With that motivation, I jumped in my car and drove straight to Mojo Music in downtown Bellingham, Washington, walked into the store, and left with a brand-new instrument in hand. Despite my good intentions, my short fingers and short attention span didn’t take long to work against me. That guitar became the largest – and the most expensive – ornament I owned until I finally sold it to a friend a couple of years later.

    Thankfully, there are actual artists like Topeka, Kansas native Andy McKee in the world who can compensate for all of the wannabes and quitters like myself who’ve tossed their guitars in a corner because their playing sounds like snapping rubber bands. McKee isn’t your average guitarist, however – he is, in fact, a guitar revolutionist. Using a fingerstyle technique, he leverages the entirety of his instrument as he picks, plucks and drums out songs with the momentum of a full band. His impressive method has made him a YouTube tour-de-force over the past decade; one of his early compositions, 2006’s “Drifting”, has exceeded 54 million views since it was originally posted.

    McKee’s prodigal talent hasn’t been lost on some of the most influential and prolific artists in the industry; in 2012 he was paid the supreme compliment of being asked to play with Prince on his Welcome 2 Australia tour. We just happened to connect by phone on the day after Prince’s passing last week. Although I was a bit hesitant to ask about that experience while the news was still so fresh, I was intrigued to know how he’d been impacted by it. “You know, getting spend time with him and just seeing his work ethic and how very much on top of things he was really sort of inspiring and eye-opening. He just seemed to radiate music – like, all the time – he was completely involved with it at every moment. I found that inspiring because there are times when I’m on the road and I kind of start to feel tired, and I just don’t want to play that much. But it’s like ‘man! I need to play some more and get some new tunes’, you know – just sort of thinking about his relentless work ethic. It was just a huge honor, too, to be able to do that tour with him. I never would’ve guessed in a billion years that he would ever know who I am. But getting this email a few years ago about getting to tour with him was just really out-of-the-blue and something I’ll cherish forever. His management emailed my management – and we really didn’t even think it was real at first. We thought it was a joke somebody had sent in this email. But it all panned out – it was real. I really just couldn’t believe it. Yeah – really something else, man.”

    McKee is currently in the middle of a twenty-five city tour to support his most recent album, Live Book – his first live release since his recorded debut in 2001. He’ll make a stop on Saturday, April 30 at Rumba Café.

    How has your tour been going so far?

    “Not too bad! I’ve been pretty busy since the start of the year, really. I kicked it off in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and then went to France. I just got back to the States a few weeks ago; went down to Texas to play some shows there and now we’re up here (Londonderry, NH). So it’s all going good, yeah.”

    What was the reception to your shows like overseas?

    “Really good, man. For some reason Germany, in particular, seems to be a really great country for me to go to. They just seem really keen to support live music. And, I’m not this big rock band or anything – just an acoustic guitar player – but I get really good audiences out there, so it’s been a lot of fun to tour.”

    You started playing the guitar at a very young age. What prompted you to first pick it up – because you’re broadly self-taught, right?

    “Yeah, pretty much self-taught. I had been into rock music – and even heavy metal – from an early age, kind of like eight, nine, ten years old is when I started to listen to all that. I never really thought about playing an instrument, particularly the guitar, until I was twelve years old and I’d heard an electric guitarist named Eric Johnson on the radio who was doing instrumental electric guitar stuff. He was using the guitar sort of as a replacement for a vocal line – and I was just really moved by how emotive his playing was and how much it seemed like he was saying just with his guitar, with music, without any lyrics. So, he was the guy that made me want to get a guitar – and when I was thirteen I got my first (electric) guitar and really focused on trying to learn my favorite Metallica songs and things like that for awhile. I had a about a year, I guess, of private lessons where I was kind of learning the notes and different chords and things like that. And sometimes my teacher would show me (Metallica’s) “Master of Puppets” or something like that. I went off on my own after that to learn things by ear and really got into the acoustic guitar when I was sixteen years old, and I heard a guitarist named Preston Reed and he made me sort of want to check out the acoustic. Shortly after that I discovered Michael Hedges, and he became my biggest musical influence, you could say. I just fell in love with the acoustic because it seemed there were so many possibilities, you know, like playing it percussively or playing fingerstyle rather than with a pick where you could sort of accompany yourself with chords and melody and rhythmic ideas all at the same time.”

    Do you remember which song you first played using the fingerstyle method?

    “Actually the first tune I wrote in that style was ‘Drifting’, which was a big viral video hit for me about ten years ago – it took off on YouTube. I wrote that tune when I was either eighteen or nineteen years old. I was really inspired by the playing of Preston Reed to sort of take that approach – playing over the top of the guitar neck with my left hand and incorporating drum effects on the guitar body…It’s kind of funny, I haven’t written too many other tunes in that style – I think I have maybe three? But that was the first one I wrote – and it was quite awhile ago now (laughs).”

    I know you use different guitar tunings to vary the sound you produce with your instrument. For those of us who are acoustically unenlightened, could you explain what those entail and what impact they have on your playing?

    “Yeah, absolutely. Well that’s sort of an integral part of my approach to playing the guitar and something that drew me, again, to Michael Hedges and even  Joni Mitchell and David Crosby and a lot of players who were using altered tuning. The guitar is normally in one set tuning that everyone plays in, and sometimes there’ll be really minor variations where you’ll drop the pitch of the low string down a whole step – they call that ‘drop D’ tuning. It makes perfect sense and it’s a great tuning – and the reason why it’s sort of the standard one: a lot of chords are easy to play on it and the scale shapes all make a lot of sense. But I was drawn to the altered tunings because it was kind of like throwing away all the sort of physical aspects of the guitar you’ve memorized – these chord shapes you know in standard tuning like ‘C’ and ‘G’ and ‘D’ and ‘A’. Everyone’s played those five hundred million times – and you’ve heard them five hundred million times. So for me, it was kind of like really appealing to hear these guitars that were put in new tunings – and they had these unusual chord voicings that were completely impossible on a normally-tuned guitar. And I liked that as a creative approach, too, because it felt like I had a whole new palette to play with on the guitar neck.”

    You’ve occasionally played an unusual instrument called the harp-guitar. What exactly is that?

    “They’ve been around for hundreds of years, actually, going back to Europe – they’ve just never been that popular. There’s a thing called the “Harp-guitar Gathering” now – you could sort of call it a mini festival, I guess. It’s been going for a little while now – I don’t know, maybe fifteen years, I think. About ten to fifteen of us get together (laughing) to do a concert and we give talks on the harp-guitar. I haven’t actually been to it in awhile – I was at the first few. Anyhow, there have been harp-guitars with just one extra string sitting above the guitar neck – and all it takes to qualify is just one extra string that isn’t attached to the fret board that you just pluck open. So there have been models like that throughout history. The one that I have has six extra strings that are lower in pitch than the guitar side – they’re called sub-bass strings. They extend out over the guitar and they’re sort of an added appendage of the guitar, I guess you could almost say, because it has the upper bout that the harp strings run over. You can incorporate these extra low strings into your guitar playing. The first time I heard (one) was on Michael Hedges’ album – I was really impressed with the sound of it and when I got one, I think it was back in 2003, I just kind of went to town and started having fun with it…It’s always fun to take it on the road just as a visual thing – people are like ‘what in the world is that elephant guitar?’ Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. There are a lot of different possibilities on the harp-guitar.”

    You just released your new album today, and you’ve chosen to put out a live record. What motivated you to go in that direction?

    “There were a couple of reasons why I chose to go with a live (album). One of them is that, really, my tunes evolving over time and the dynamics of the pieces change, or some of the rhythmic elements change, the melody might change a bit, too. So, some of the tunes I wrote ten or more years ago are really quite different now, and I wanted to be able to share these newer versions of the tunes with people. And then also, I wanted to try capture that live sort of magic a little bit – it’s always so different when you’re doing an actual gig rather than when you’re sitting in a studio trying to get this perfect, immaculate recording. Actually one of my big influences, Leo Kottke, said that recording music was like embalming it. That’s kind of stuck with me – music is this living thing that’s always changing and evolving over the years – so I wanted to capture that live setting you get at a concert and put it on a record. I think we did pretty good on it and I’m really happy to get this live album out.”

    You’ll be on the road for the foreseeable future. What are you planning once that winds down – is it new music, new collaborations? What’s next?

    “Yeah, I’m going to be touring with this new live album I guess through the end of this year. Early next year, though, I’m going to take some time off to work on my next release. It’ll be a full-length album of new music – and there are some people I’m thinking about collaborating with on it. I’ll probably have a tribute to Prince on there; when I was out on the road with him I’d open the shows with an acoustic version of “Purple Rain” – so I’m trying to get that all worked up to put it back on the new album. It’ll mostly be more of my acoustic stuff…and some harp-guitar music and some baritone stuff and all that.”

    Andy McKee will appear at Rumba Café, 2507 Summit Street in SoHud, on Saturday, April 30 at 9:00 pm. Tickets are $20.00 ($22.00 for attendees under the age of 21) and can be purchased here. His new album ‘Live Book’ can be purchased by visiting his website. You can also follow him on Twitter or find him on Facebook.

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    Grant Walters
    Grant Waltershttps://columbusunderground.com
    Grant is a freelance writer for Columbus Underground who primarily focuses on music and comedy. He's a Canadian transplant, born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and schooled in Vancouver, British Columbia. Grant is also the co-author of two internationally acclaimed books: "Decades: The Bee Gees in the 1960s" and "Decades: The Bee Gees in the 1970s." He has also penned numerous articles and artist interviews for the nationally recognized site, Albumism.
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