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Macy Gray
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Macy Gray was born Natalie McIntyre in 1970 in Canton, Ohio. Gray studied classical piano for seven years and went on to enroll in USC's screenwriting program. When a signer failed to show up to sing her lyrics she wrote, Gray stepped in and inadvertently made a demo. She sang jazz standards for some bands in L.A. and started a buzz. In 1999, she released On How Life Is as her debut album and received two Grammy nominations.
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The voice of Macy Gray is a wondrous thing. It can be as intimate as the wee small hours or as exciting as a packed nightclub; disarmingly sweet on one song, harsh and raspy on another. The obvious comparison is to the post-war Billie Holiday, but there are traces of other singers both legendary and little-known: Abbey Lincoln, Betty Davis, Nina Simone, Karen Dalton, Tina Turner. Yet in the end, Macy Gray sounds like no one but herself: Within eight bars of any given song on her Epic debut album, On How Life Is, The Voice is unmistakable. Over the course of ten tracks, Macy creates a musical melange of old-school soul, hip-hop, R&B, funk, and rock. She seems to shrug off format, genre, and market.
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Macy Gray has a lot of supporters including Rosie O'Donnell who blasted the Grammy voters for not giving Macy an award. Her album made a number of music critics' best-of-the-year lists for 1999, and she received 2 Grammy nominations. On top of that success, she was ... a commercial success, as her album has sold millions worldwide. Not bad for a woman who as a child refused to talk because neighborhood kids taunted her due to her awkward voice.
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Macy Gray parlayed an utterly unique voice and an outlandish sense of style into R&B stardom at the turn of the millennium, appealing to audiences of all colors in search of a fresh alternative to mainstream soul. Gray was actually born Natalie McIntyre in Canton, OH, in 1970, and grew up a shy, awkward youngster who was frequently teased about her odd-sounding voice. She studied classical piano for seven years, but ... soaked up the music of soul legends like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin, not to mention old-school hip-hop; at boarding school as a teenager, she was exposed to a variety of white rock & roll as well. She moved to Los Angeles to enroll in USC's screenwriting program, where one day she agreed to write lyrics for a musician friend's original songs. A demo session was scheduled to get the songs on tape, and when the singer failed to show up, Gray -- having adopted the full name of an elderly neighbor in Canton as her creative alias -- wound up singing on the recordings herself, in spite of her distaste for her own voice. One of the songs was never overdubbed with another vocal, and when the tapes started making the rounds of the local music scene, Gray's raspy growl attracted a lot of attention, much to her surprise.
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Macy Gray took soul music back to its natural roots with her acclaimed 1999 debut, ON HOW LIFE IS, updating old-school R&B with a few modern touches. Gray's sound is partly Lauryn Hill-style conscious hip-hop, and part a Lenny Kravitz/Neneh Cherry rock-R&B hybrid. Since her startling debut, she's collaborated with everyone from Slick Rick and Fatboy Slim to famed producer Rick Rubin... making her screen-acting debut in the 2001 Denzel Washington movie, TRAINING DAY.
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Macy Gray was signed to Epic Records in April, 1998 and in June of that year began recording "On How Life Is" with producer Andrew Slater (Fiona Apple, the Wallflowers) at several Hollywood studios. "It was a real big hang-out," she says of the sessions. "The spirit of it was great. Everyone just wanted to play, and it was kind of a new style of everybody to do."
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Macy Gray