I was fortunate to attend the NAMM Convention, this past weekend, with Jessica Huebner and Liona Boyd.  Liona Boyd is multi-award winning, internationally known classical guitarist.  It was really something to listen to her stories as we all spent the day together.

NAMM is always kind of overwhelming – but this year was pretty special because of the great company.  I also bumped into some musician friends whom I hadn’t seen in years.

I was honored to be asked, by Paul Zollo, to play at his photography opening Angeleno Portraits at the Talking Stick in Venice, CA this past Sunday.  Paul brings the same great sensitivity and clarity, that he uses in his songwriting and writing, to his portrait photography.  The opening boasted an amazing array of talent – culminating in a performance by Paul Zollo with the accomplished members of his band – Earl Grey, Billy Salisbury, Chad Watson, Bob Malone, Edoardo Tancredi, and John O’Kennedy.  The exhibit will be there through the end of January.

I didn’t know Paul until a little over a year ago.  I met him at the Songwriters’ Co-Op at the Pig’n Whistle in Hollywood.  He read excerpts from his inimitable Songwriters on Songwriting and he was there to provide his insights to each of the songwriters who performed a song that night.  He offered some very kind words about my work and later, via email, we struck up a correspondence.  I’m pleased to say that he’ s become a wonderful ally – and we’ve forged the beginnings of a friendship.  It’s quite something to meet someone who has been a “hero” and then to be able to call him a friend.

One of the high points of last year was receiving a review, from Paul, for Trust the Sky. It felt like the review of a lifetime, to me, and I am forever grateful that he wove such words together in talking about that body of work.

I’m including a link to Paul’s online music ezine /blog bluerailroad.com. [see the Blogroll]  I’ll also include the review below.

Many thanks to you, Paul Zollo, for your support and great words of encouragement – both written and spoken.  _______________________________________________                                         Trust the Sky – paula mcmath                                                        Review by Paul Zollo                                                                         bluerailroad.com

She writes the kind of songs people say nobody writes anymore. The kind of songs written by the greatest of the great singer-songwriters –  songs with uniquely poetic lyrics wed to gorgeous  melodies, songs in which both the words and the music are equally inventive and inspired. In great songs, it’s not the words or the music that matter most, but the way in which they connect. In her songs the melodies and lyrics glide together with the immaculate dynamism of figure skaters. The haunting “Trust The Sky,” for example, is a song of quiet zen acceptance, of learning to trust the universe. Its tune is ripe with unexpectedly delightful melodic passages, such as the bluesy turn on the title phrase at the end of each chorus. It’s surprising and beautiful, as is this entire album. Add to that a bridge of aching yearning that resolves into a sparsely tender acoustic guitar solo, surrounded in loving instrumental touches, combined with a lyric of gentle confidence, and you have something timeless and great.

The production throughout – as steered by Paula with the multi-instrumental Ian Hattwick (who also co-wrote several of these songs and contributes lovely musical  touches to each track) – is wisely subtle, always understating the arrangements to enhance rather than overwhelm these powerful songs. These songs are not only inspired, they’re crafty – designed by a savvy songwriter to last,  so that they won’t fall apart on the street like a cheap radio. But they are singularly uncontrived, which is the hardest challenge for all songwriters, met and surpassed by Paula, to write something which is fresh and unheard, yet alive with a timeless inevitability. Her songs sound great on first listening, and only grow richer in time.

“Without Ever Saying A Word” is a breathtaking ballad that is brilliant in its simplicity. Kind of the lyrical flipside to George Harrison’s “Something,” it’s built on a clever conceit but easily transcends cleverness to pinpoint an intangible, always a hard hurdle to clear in the realm of romantic songs, and with a gorgeous tune. “So Long” is a great upbeat declaration, and on it she bears the kind of edgy but passionate feminine presence of a Liz Phair or Patti Smith. Sparked by an unrestrained electric guitar solo by Hattwick, it shows the range she possesses, from tender ballads to rockers. The poignant “3 Flights of Stairs” displays the kind of lyrical spell she can cast, as she projects images of fragile vulnerability, connecting this stairway to a person’s crooked spine so that we not only recognize her subject, we internalize it.

That this is her debut album is hard to believe, because it resounds like the work of a mature, experienced singer- songwriter, someone who’s been doing this for decades. But like Laura Nyro, Carole King and others who wrote inimitable masterpieces from the very start, Paula is a prodigiously gifted singer- songwriter who has taken her inherent abilities and soared with them.  With clear and confident vocals and a natural gift for harmony singing (she beautifully overdubs harmonies with her own voice with the warm assurance of Joni Mitchell or Dan Fogelberg), she has everything it takes and more to be a lasting presence in our musical landscape.  In a world where there seems to be too much of everything except time to take it all in, this is a collection of songs that demands attention, and given it, it’s time well-spent. This is a record that makes no promises it doesn’t keep, but culminates in the promise of more to come. Paula McMath is very much the real deal, an artist plugged directly into the electric current of creativity. This is not to be missed.

writing again… feels good.

Flying west to LA from Ontario. A whole new year in which to play – but it’s always so bittersweet – so hard for me to leave.

“all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold, Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

“Christmas break, a time for touchin’ home  –  the heart of all [I’ve] known        and leavin’ was so hard.”                                                 Stan Rogers

It was great to play a couple of songs with Jessica Huebner and Claire Wagner on the McCabe’s Concert Stage for this year’s Holiday Show.  It’s been a dream of mine to play Stan Rogers’ poignant “First Christmas Away from Home” on that stage for some time.

Stan Rogers was a much revered Canadian singer-songwriter who died, tragically, in a plane accident on June 2nd, 1983.  He was only 33 years old.  One of his last concerts was given five days before, on May 28th, at McCabe’s.

We also performed “The Secret of Christmas” written by Van Heusen and Cahn.  I heard Ella Fitzgerald’s version of it last year, for the first time, and fell in love with it.

More on this week later – it involves something in January and I don’t want to jinx it…

I’m honored to be named in Music Connection’s year end list of their Top 25 New Music Critiques for 2010. I know that MC receives thousands of submissions, in a year, so I’m thrilled to be among the other 24 artists / bands who are also named there.  The magazine’s statement says it best, “Music Connection is dedicated to helping unsigned artists get their music noticed.“

This comes at the end of a really good year.  I have spent countless hours sitting at my desk trying, with all my might, to honor the body of work that I recorded on Trust the Sky by putting it out there.  I’ve learned a lot, in the process, and will take this experience to the next body of work.  I’m excited to be moving on to writing more songs.

Recently, my Dad sent me an article about Daniel Lanois – featured in Canada’s Globe and Mail. Lanois has produced albums for Bob Dylan, U2, Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, (and many others) and I noticed a few quotes that I’ll include here.

I have struggled to make music that is really honest and authentic – but it’s difficult to earn a revenue stream from that.   Dylan, in a quote from the article says, “Good reviews [sic] don’t sell records.” And Lanois says, “We never make records thinking about the commerciality at the beginning of it.   We make music in the hope that we bump into something with substance – something that has a reason to exist. Perhaps by having the fundamental values intact, commerciality can come into play.”

Here’s hoping that I have “bumped into something of substance.” I am deeply encouraged both by Music Connection’s critical praise and also by the review I received, earlier this year, from Paul Zollo. More on that to come…

Thanks to Mark Nardone and Andy Mesecher, at Music Connection.

I am bolstered.

“Why the Mud Flap Girl?” My friends have asked me.  “Does it really represent your music?”  “Are you trying to be ironic?”  I’ll do my best to answer those questions here.

About a year ago, I met Ric Menck.  Ric strikes me as an artist who really gets other artists.   He’s a musician and songwriter who plays in the revered Indie band Velvet Crush. He’s played drums with Liz Phair, Marianne Faithful, and Aimee Mann.  He sent me a Facebook message, earlier this year, and in it he said, “In our culture now, people are used to things happening very quickly.   TV shows like American Idol perpetuate the myth that an entertainer can become famous overnight. The reality is, it takes a lifetime for an artist to gestate.”

Gestation.  What a great metaphor for the life of an artist.

I’ll offer these broad strokes about my own gestation.  Sometimes I’m asked when I started making music.  It’s a difficult question to answer.  I can’t think of a time, in my life, when it wasn’t there.  You can’t take water out of mud.

In the late 90’s, I endured the sudden end of a significant relationship.  It’s sounds like a bad stereotype, but those things in life that are the most painful can sometimes lead us to where we’re supposed to go.    At that time, I flashed on this image of myself as some girl left on a dirt road, splattered with mud from a late-model pick-up truck as is screeched away.  In my imagining, there were chrome “mud flap girls” on the back end of the the truck, and they were also splattered with mud as it sped off.   I didn’t realize, at the time, that being hit with that particular “imagined mud” would be the start of a better life.  Songs started pouring out of me.

Enter, the Mud Flap Girl.   As a young girl, I’d written embryonic songs – but now I wrote with a vengeance.   I wrote my first serious body of work and did a short pressing / limited release of Mud Flap Girl my “first CD” in the early 2000’s.   I set up my music publishing, through BMI, and named it after my curvy, mud-soaked friend.

Here were are, about 10 years later, and she has a new life.  Philip Warbasse has put her into the design for a QR Code, to represent my music, through his company Print 2D.   This new technology is, to quote Philip, “In it’s infancy now but within a year or two, this will be mainstream.” Users can scan the 2D Barcode, with a smartphone or iphone, and be taken to the music via a designed mobile environment.   The “readers / reader apps” for this technology can be easily downloaded – but will become more and more available, in cell phones, as the platform takes hold.   I’m thrilled to be in on the front end of this curve.  I’m sure there will be many more applications…

As to the Mud Flap Girl, “Does she really represent my music?” I dunno – I like to think that there’s a certain grittiness to what I do musically.  There’s a little dirt under my writer’s nails, a small-town innocence, a femininity…

“Am I trying to be ironic?”  Absolutely.