Intimate Honesty Mindy Mccready’s New Cd Inspired By Her Younger Brothers, Fan Mail From Teenagers
Mindy McCready blames her two teenage brothers for the intimate frankness in her titillating new CD, “If I Don’t Stay the Night.”
The 21-year-old McCready serves as substitute mom for the brothers, who have moved in with her because their mom has a newborn. She says they talk a lot about what everybody else talks a lot about these days.
“The subject that is always there, constantly surrounding everything in their lives is sex - girlfriends, boyfriends, who likes who and why,” mother McCready says. “That’s the topic we discuss relentlessly. In addition to that, I read all my fan mail while I’m out on the road, and that’s the subject with young girls, too.
“These girls are looking to me as if I am their best friend or their older sister, and they are asking me the questions they can’t ask their parents. What hit me hard from the fan mail is that the self-esteem level of little girls is so low. They’re terribly insecure about what they look like and how they feel about themselves. I’m sure it’s because of the images they see constantly in the media that they have to compare themselves with.”
The pictures in McCready’s new album depict her minus makeup, and the singer says that is a result of the fan mail.
“The real me looks like this,” she says. “On the album artwork I wanted to be normal and natural with my freckles showing. No retouch, no makeup, no airbrush. I wanted the girls who see it to say, ‘Oh, I look like that. I have freckles. My hair goes wild, too. Mindy looks just like we do.”’
BNA Records says the new McCready album is country music’s first enhanced CD with multimedia material and AOL software for use on personal computers and the Internet.
The “enhancement” includes audio tracks, music videos, interviews, biographical information and such other material as McCready’s work for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and the BNA project, “Country Cares For Kids,” a CD benefiting the St. Jude’s facility.
“After having explored Mindy’s multimedia presentation, fans can use the free trial Internet connection to launch directly into the TwangThis! Web site, where they can learn more about Mindy and other country artists online,” says Gabriel Levy, executive producer of the project and manager of interactive music for BMG Entertainment.
JMM smelling roses now
John Michael Montgomery has noticed something that seems to dawn on practically everybody eventually: the passage of time.
“As soon as I got my record deal and ‘Life’s A Dance’ became a hit, time flew by,” recalls Montgomery, who has been reminded of it by his new “Greatest Hits” album.
“Now that I’m married and have a little girl, it goes by tremendously fast. I’m trying to take more time at home and enjoy life a little more.
“Before, it was music, music, music, bars, clubs, nightclubs, golf in the afternoon to pass the time. That’s all I ever did. I’m 32 now, and it’s more stop and smell the roses.”
Tillis finishing next album
“Pam Tillis: Greatest Hits” is the CD Tillis currently has on the market, but she has already finished everything but the vocal tracks for her next studio album, and she says it will differ from the last one, “All of This Love.”
“I think in a lot of ways this is going to be a happier-sounding kind of album,” she says. “That was a real reflective album, and this is definitely a ‘Land of the Living’ album.”
Uncharacteristically, she wrote just one song on it because she “can’t tour like I’m touring and write.” Then she admits she has been writing; she just isn’t always confident of the result.
“The competition and the stakes are so high that I kind of thought, ‘Hey, I’m going to play it safe and cut some songs by Dean Dillon and Bob McDill (who wrote her recent smash, ‘All the Good Ones Are Gone’). Can you blame me?”
Maybe they’ll act different now
Lila McCann, the 15-year-old high school cheerleader who launched her singing career with the stunning hit “Down Came A Blackbird,” co-wrote one of the songs on her impressive Asylum Records album, “Lila McCann.”
Titled “Changing Faces” and co-written with producer Mark Spiro, it has to do with people acting differently toward some people than they do toward others.
McCann says that after she and Spiro recorded their first four songs together (including “Blackbird”), they got to talking, and he solicited her ideas.
“I went home that night and just started writing down different song titles,” she says.
“I wrote down ‘Changing Faces’ and thought of a few ideas to go along with that. Then I called up Mark and gave him all these song titles, and he called me back and was like, ‘There’s this one that you put on there, “Changing Faces,” I absolutely love it.’ So we compiled ideas, and that’s how the song came about.”
How did she come up with the title?
“I’ve definitely gone out with guy friends - just friends - and have ‘em, like, blow me off when some hot-looking chick comes in,” McCann says. “I think anybody can be in that position or vice versa.”