Photo by Victor B. Bicycle
While her guitar gently weeps, Adron keeps tunes ‘a little bit weird’
By Laura Leebove
Published: July 2nd, 2008 | 11:20am
Concert venue sound techs are often taken aback when Adrienne McCann marches in and tells them she needs reverb in this mic and more bass on this one. She might be a singer-songwriter chick with a guitar, but she won’t let others classify her as such. And it certainly helps that she has the chops to back it up.
McCann, who performs as Adron, first picked up a guitar as a 12-year-old living in Atlanta. Though trained as a classical pianist from the age of 4, under the influence of the Beatles and Brazilian tropicália acts like Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso, she developed a guitar style that puts her far beyond her 20 years. She has since also become adept with the sitar, although she doesn't use it on the album.
McCann’s self-titled debut, out July 1 on New Street Records, often salutes her musical role models but ultimately carves its own genre. Using a classical guitar with nylon strings, she strums quick chords amid delicate finger-picking sequences. Her voice is soothing and often layered on top of itself (sometimes in the form of bird noises and whistles), and percussion is infrequent, but usually is comprised of shakers and chimes.
Her musical upbringing can somewhat be explained through a picture she drew the day of our interview. Random sheets of paper stick out the sides of the thick, hardcover notebook she pulled out of her bag. McCann opened to a page mostly occupied by the outline of a baby’s head with a headphone covering one ear. Below the head, drawn in nearly a fraction of the size, were the Beatles, which McCann said was the only non-classical music she heard growing up.
“I feel like I’ve been raised by [the Beatles] since conception. They’ve been all over my world,” she said. “Given what I’ve developed into, the Beatles are responsible for that far more than parental influence or anything else.”
The lyrics on her debut are mostly inspired by moments in McCann’s life, although it might take a little deciphering to get to the meaning of some of them. “I try not to write anything too ordinary, too familiar, like, ‘I’m in love with a dude and here are my feelings,’” McCann says. “I wanted to be friendly and just a little bit weird."
She is indeed just a little bit weird, but in an endearing, quirky sort of way, slipping words and phrases like “miffed,” “groovy,” and “oh mercy” into her vocabulary throughout our conversation. And it can’t be too often that a songwriter pens a tune about math and physics, but McCann’s song about science is one of her catchiest.
“Stringsong,” which she said is about her “feelings about string theory and the metaphysics of memory,” has jazz-infused chords backed by string bass and shakers. Her finger-picking prowess shows through more on “Never Leave My Room Again,” which begins with a delicate two-and-a-half-minute guitar solo of pull-offs and hammer-ons before she starts singing. And peppered throughout the album are nods to her tropicália influences, especially in “Bicicleta,” “Ave, Etc.,” and “Airplanes.”
The decision to perform as Adron — McCann’s longtime nickname — was made partially so that she wouldn’t automatically get thrown into stereotypes that surround many solo female performers. “I don’t want my persona to be too gender-specific,” she said. “I really am trying to distance myself from the singer-songwriter, female-with-guitar genre, because it really is a genre, and you can really predict what that’s gonna be like.”
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