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.