The Roots Report: An Interview with Edwin McCain Okee dokee folks… Singer-songwriter Edwin McCain may not be a name that is at the forefront of your brain, but you definitely know his music. His songs “I’ll Be” and “I Could Not Ask For More” are mainstays of “lite” radio, have become classic wedding songs and are often sung on “The Voice.” McCain has released 11 albums and five have reached the Billboard top 200. I spoke with McCain last week and I honestly have to say it was one of my more enjoyable interviews! John Fuzek: Hey, Edwin, it’s John from Motif magazine in Rhode Island. Edwin McCain: Hey, John, how’re you doing? JF: Alright, how are you? EM: Good! JF: Are you in South Carolina now? EM: Yes, but I am actually driving and heading to Georgia right now! JF: You’re driving? EM: Yes JF: Are you okay to talk? EM: I got my headset on and everything is good! JF: So, you are headed to the Odeum in a couple of weeks EM: I am looking forward to it, I don’t think I have ever played there before JF: I am not really sure, too many things to remember these days and my own gigs, too! EM: It all runs together, doesn’t it? JF: Yeah, it does! So, are you playing tonight? EM: Yeah, it’s a private, corporate thing, Christmas party JF: What time does that start? EM: 7 JF: Not too long of a drive is it? EM: Nah, it’s like an hour and a half, no big deal JF: What part of SC are you in? EM: I live in Greenville JF: so you are just going over the border pretty much EM: yeah, it’s literally like a two hour drive JF: That’s not too bad! So, at the Odeum will you have a band, trio or playing solo? EM: Trio, I rarely play solo, Craig and Larry and I have been playing together for so long it’s just easy to play this way JF: What is the instrumentation? EM: My sax player, Craig, he plays wind controller, saxophone and various wind instruments and Larry is my guitar player, and Craig, we’ve been playing together almost 30 years, and Larry’s the new guy in the band he is a scant 25 JF: Wow, this getting old thing sucks, I think of where I was at that age and it’s a drag! EM: Are you my age? How old are you? JF: I am ten years older than you! EM: oh, ok, so you’ve got road years on me and road years are like dog years so you’ve got about seven years on me! JF: So you’re two big songs are songs that are big at weddings EM: Thank, God! JF: How do you feel about that? Are you a big wedding person? EM: Well, it’s interesting because when i was in the throes of it, when Atlantic was pushing me to be this balladeer, I was in my 20’s, oh my gosh, 28 year old me, I was like (said in a goofy voice), “I don’t want to be known for just singing wedding songs”, and 48 year old me looks back and thinks what a douchebag 28 year old me was, I couldn’t see how ridiculously lucky it would be to have a song be considered a wedding song, right, that just didn’t occur to me, i was like, (said in a goofy voice again),”well, that’s not cool…I wanna be ironic and I wanna write these dark songs and stare into my belly button” and now I just laugh at what an idiot I was and I laugh and I always say that 48 year old me would never be friends with 28 year old me at all, not one single bit! I am so lucky to have a job playing music and I wouldn’t care if they were known for being in cat food commercials! As long as I get to play gigs and there are people there, are you kidding me? JF: You know, you are the first person I have ever interview to actually say this! I look at it the same way and I am grateful I can play music! EM: Oh, my God! Nobody has any clue how lucky, like the fact that I was so oblivious to how ridiculously lucky I was to be when I was, you know the thing about it is, in your 20’s, like I wanted to believe that it was because “I got a talent” but you know what, lot’s of people have talent! The timing of it is everything. Like Malcolm Gladwell has this book called Outliers and that is all you ever need to know about what success is. It has mostly to do with timing, a lot of people put in their 10,000 hours but timing is what plays a crucial function and we were so lucky to be when we were and we worked really hard, I’m not going to say that we didn’t work hard because we worked our tails off but so did a lot of people, at the end of it, I think the people that I met along the way that are still playing after 30 years, I’ve never met anyone who isn’t grateful, you can’t be here this many years and not realize how supremely lucky you are, my wife laughs at me because every year I give her the “2 year speech”, I’m like, “Baby, this is only going to last a couple more years, I got to find another job” and she just laughs at me! And then someone on American Idol sings it again, and I got a new job! JF: I have a song that’s been played at a couple of weddings, I have never performed it at one, it’s a real schmoltzy song that I wrote with a friend, sometimes I am embarrassed to play it but I have played it opening for some national acts and these little old ladies went right out and bought the CD and I was like “Yes!” EM: Yes, Yes! That’s the other thing, the songs that I love are the ones where other folks go get a beer, I am not allowed to ever be the one that picks the single, like one year at the record company I forced the issue and made them let me pick the single, I know which song is going to connect, I thought and I pushed this song called “See The Sky Again” it didn’t even circle the bowl! I don’t think we got one, it was so ridiculous how wrong I was and from then on, and the other thing, too, always the songs that I think are going to register with people it’s never that, that was the lesson where I learned art isn’t about intention it’s about interpretation, and it isn’t art until it’s been interpreted and it’s none of your business how they interpret it, like when people ask me what does this song mean I never tell them because what i meant is off compared to the way some people have heard it, and I’m like “that’s a way better reason!” I realize that it’s sort of like giving credit to the lightning rod for the lightning, this stuff is out there, we try to get in the way of it, we try to be a good conduit for it, but never in any moment are we the genesis of it JF: It does take on a life of its own EM: right, it should, and if it’s good you’re just letting pass through you and all of my heroes and all of the people that I revere as musicians, artists and songwriters are the ones that it just flows through them effortlessly JF: and who are they? EM: Kevin Kinney from Drivin’ n Cryin’, David Wilcox he’s another one who can just tackle some 5000 year old biblical human condition and can sew it up in 3 1/2 minutes with elegant language where it all makes sense with interesting guitar parts JF: he’s got all those capos going on! EM: Right! and part of it, too, you know I really love the 80’s, I can’t listen to it now, don’t ever think I am sitting around listening to Husker Du, but the 80’s punk, these bands back then that I was way into because of what it was, it was music for its sake, it was a voice, it was energy, that kids needed to rally around and so I was into that so I think that sort of educated my position on what music was supposed to be and it probably cost me a lot of money, too cause that punk ethic runs contrary to commerce at times so, but I love the idea of just being out there playing and I did not function very well in the big label model where you trying to just go on a campaign JF: I am not really a big fan of that whole process, I have been doing music for most of my life and I just play it because that is who I am, if turns into a business it kind of sucks the life out of it EM: Music and money are two completely different substances, it’s oil and water, you can put it in a paint shaker and shake it up and it will separate, right, I have always found that to be true and another thing to, I never wanted to go, and that was the big conundrum, too, the big, the big Diane Warren song, like that was a little bit of a moment of sell out where I agreed to that song because they paid me to do it and I never wanted to do other people’s songs, I felt that when I was going to hear a songwriter i was going to hear something perceptive, this is what they’ve mined out of life, you know, this is where they’re coming from, that was the thing that would always blow me away was someone’s interpretation of their life so far was the whole idea for songwriting, that’s what I loved about songwriters that I was a fan of, this is the poetry they’ve mined out of the dirt and not a song that 3 songwriters wrote in a writing room for a song pitch and you know, it’s not fictionalized JF: sometimes you have to do those things because it allows other people to hear what you do EM: Agreed, and I had to come to that conclusion, it was a narrow minded way of looking at it but it was always how I approached my career JF: it’s just a way of evolving, too, that just shows that you can evolve, some people can’t evolve, and they’re not capable of doing any mental evolution, the fact that you can shows where you are as a musician and an artist EM: It’s like Billy Joe Shaver, Billy Joe sort of, when Billy Joe is playing you a song, you know that that is some shit that happened to him, and I love those songs, but he also wrote songs for other people, so I get it, but it took me a bit to be able to get there JF: Sometimes it’s just s tory and it’s interesting to repeat a story that someone else has told and you give your version of that story sometimes it can be done in