{"id":8935,"date":"2013-02-06T17:00:52","date_gmt":"2013-02-07T00:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=8935"},"modified":"2013-02-06T17:01:18","modified_gmt":"2013-02-07T00:01:18","slug":"macy-gray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2013\/02\/macy-gray\/","title":{"rendered":"MACY GRAY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"MACY GRAY<\/h1>\n

Honoring a music legend with a cover of a classic album\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n

Macy Gray was on a mission to honor her personal hero, Stevie Wonder, by covering his iconic album Talking Book<\/em>. The new record\u2014which coincides with the\u00a040th anniversary of the original\u2019s release\u2014features Gray interpreting classics from\u00a0\u201cYou Are the Sunshine of My Life\u201d to \u201cSuperstition.\u201d But don\u2019t call it a tribute record. \u201cIt\u2019s a love letter and a big thank you,\u201d says the Grammy winner. \u201cStevie practically created pop music, and I don\u2019t think we do enough for him.\u201d Produced by veteran\u00a0Hal Willner, the album capped a busy year for Gray, who also acted in the film The Paperboy<\/em> and released the album Covered<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Why choose Talking Book<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s one of my all-time favorite records. I knew it really, really well and felt I could sing it from the heart. That album also had \u201cBig Brother\u201d on it, which is so relevant to today. I also found out it came out in 1972, so being the 40th anniversary, it all made sense. My label wanted me to do Blue<\/em> by Joni Mitchell, but I just couldn\u2019t do it. Joni\u2019s songs were really specific to where she was coming from, the way she grew up, and who she was.\u00a0It just wasn\u2019t me.<\/p>\n

Were you nervous taking on such a legendary album?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was mainly nervous about how Stevie would feel. He called me and said he\u2019d heard the album and was really flattered by it. For me, it was a labor of love, something I wanted to do in his honor. I just get tired that he doesn\u2019t get honored more.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Could that be because R&B has changed so much?<\/strong><\/p>\n

R&B is completely different\u2014it\u2019s not even in the same room anymore. He did all his stuff live. It\u2019s a different sound. And the things he wrote about I don\u2019t hear a lot in R&B. Radio gravitates toward sex and smoking weed, because hip-hop has really taken over. I don\u2019t know when it changed so that you can only talk about one or two things, but Stevie wrote about everything from black history to true love to Big Brother. We definitely don\u2019t have an artist out there like that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

How did you meet Hal Willner?<\/strong><\/p>\n

He invited me to sing \u201cGod Bless the Child\u201d at an event for the 30th anniversary of \u00a0the Polish Solidarity Movement. We just hit\u00a0it off. He did a record as soon as we\u00a0got back, and he asked me to be on it. Then I started my record about a month later and I asked him to produce it. We got along so well. I loved his old records, and he knows everything there is to know about music. He\u2019s just really cool to be around. He produced some stuff on\u00a0my next album, too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What can you share about the direction of your next album?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s all original, no covers. The whole time we were doing those covers we were writing, so I have quite a bit of songs. I\u2019m trying to put together the right album where everything goes together. We were really looking for a sound that stuck out, something nobody was doing at the moment\u2014and I think we found it. It\u2019s very raw. Most of my albums have like 50 gazillion tracks on them. We could have done this entire album on an eight-track tape recorder. It\u2019s all live instruments. I didn\u2019t want to do what everybody else is doing. But that\u2019s not the only reason; I also definitely wanted to take a step up from what I usually do. I wanted to step out of what comes easy to me.\u00a0\u2013Amanda Farah<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MACY GRAY Honoring a music legend with a cover of a classic album\u00a0 Macy Gray was on a mission to honor her personal hero, Stevie Wonder, by covering his iconic album Talking Book. The new record\u2014which coincides with the\u00a040th anniversary of the original\u2019s release\u2014features Gray interpreting classics from\u00a0\u201cYou Are the Sunshine of My Life\u201d to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[5885,510,6008],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8935"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8935"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8938,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8935\/revisions\/8938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}