Kieran McGee in the News
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Ash Wednesday, February, 2002
Kid Folk, April 18, 2003
Outrider Magazine, February, 2002
Ash Wednesday
“He has a gift for striking imagery. Watch out when McGee turns of drinking age.”
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Kieran McGee – acoustic & electric guitars, bass, piano, harmonica, percussion, organ, drums on 5 & 9
Ash Wednesday liner notes
One gets hit fast and hard by Kieran McGee. He’s a prodigy. Now, as for his sound, there’s a lot of Bob Dylan influence… the good kind, not the voice. McGee just builds songs the way Dylan did, back when Dylan was building songs instead of rebuilding those same songs, as he’s been doing for the past three or four records, but that’s another story.
Back to Kieran McGee, His father was a music writer and his mother was a pianist, so they encouraged their son’s interest in music from the diapered beating-on-the-pots-and-pans phase on. He ended up with a drive to tell stories in song and a penchant for the basic musical frameworks of an earlier generation. Ash Wednesday could have been titled “Highway 61 Extension” to acknowledge the Dylan influence. Not that Dylan ever sounded this good. Also, truthfully, Dylan had more to say, but society looked worse to more people when Dylan was young, so it was easier.
Too early on Ash Wednesday, Mr. McGee has to start crooning about unrequited love for a particular woman instead of the world‘s ills, which gets plenty of singer/songwriters through lifetimes, but which in a guy who’s pretty close to being a Bob Dylan impersonator comes across as inadequacy. Kieran McGee is born and bred to be a musical spokesperson for something, but his parents’ generation is not that something…. Their records were recorded a long time ago. He needs and deserves a producer/ally who will help him find something that needs a spokesperson today and some more original bandstand and studio partners.