Kelley McRae

Johnny Cash

"The last songs that made me cry were by a young New York singer, Kelley
McRae.  One was called "Time," and the other one "Break Us."               
                     - Wim Wenders

Brooklyn based Kelley McRae made her CD debut in 2006 with the album Never Be. The album received rave reviews, including four stars in Paste magazine and her performance on WNYC's 'Soundcheck' was named one of the year's best. The album also led her to reunite with an old friend, director Lear Debessonet, who called on her to write and perform the music for Brecht's "Saint Joan of the Stockyards" at the legendary NYC theater, PS 122. The show received a glowing review in the NY Times. These successes, along with the stand-out track "Johnny Cash," (featured on Lifetime’s hit show Army Wives) put her on the map — at least the Lower Manhattan music and theater map. With her 2008 sophomore release Highrises in Brooklyn, produced by Brian Deck (Iron and Wine, Modest Mouse, Josh Ritter, Counting Crows), she deserves more longitude: at least three more time zones.

This is an album that should be all over the map. Not because Kelley arrived in Brooklyn by way of Baltimore, Dallas, and Starkville, Mississippi, but because she, like everyone, makes a daily commute through joy, despair, gratitude, doubt, hope, fear, shame, and the rest. Big cities like New York have a way of uprooting us existentially and daring us to call them home. In many ways, Highrises in Brooklyn is Kelley's answer to that call. She chides Brooklyn's highrises in the album's title track, confesses co-dependence on late-night bars and diners in "Last Call Town" and "Long Walk Home," both rues and needs the BQE — the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the pop number "BQE." Another reason she's all over the map is that she lists as influences James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Betty Smith, Lucinda Williams, Anne Lamott, Johnny Cash, Cormac McCarthy, Otis Redding, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Patty Griffin, Marilynne Robinson, and Joni Mitchell. "None of them," she says, "is afraid of the darkness that's here." For her, these are people who "just dare you not to believe them." Kelley believes them and, in turn, dares herself.

When Kelley, a former visual artist and stage actress, was asked why she turned to song she said, "I found that I was much better at singing what I meant than saying what I meant." This comes through in every track of Highrises in Brooklyn, whether it's electronica (banjo and synthesized hand claps), gospel and blues, folk, synthesized pop, harmonies, and swaying rhythms, or simple, beautiful Americana. By pairing sound with emotion, by faithfully naming, through song, a heart that often looks like a NYC transit map, she elevates life over art. Some best speak truth in acting, some by painting, and some, like Kelley, through song.

Her song JOHNNY CASH was featured in Lifetime's ARMY WIVES, other songs have been in independent films from Sundance Film festival hit CHILDREN OF INVENTION to inclusion on the "LOGGERHEADS" soundtrack to the MTV show MAUI FEVER.