Monifieth violinist and songwriter Laura McGhee is having a good year, touring the USA and seeing her second album spending over a month in the Americana chart top 40. She told Jack McKeown about her plans to break America.
Laura McGhee is back in her hometown of Monifieth after a hectic few weeks Stateside promoting her album Celticana which has spent more than a month in the Americana top 40, reaching a high of number 30.
Born in Monifieth, Laura developed an interest in music as a young girl attending Seaview Primary. She went on to Monifieth High, then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where she took an honours degree and a post-graduate diploma in music.
As well as performing modern and folk songs, she’s an accomplished classical musician. Her first album, Green Eyes, was released in 2006, and the past few years have seen her perform with Shane MacGowan of The Pogues, Rod Steward and Pete Seeger.
Her new album’s title pronounced with a hard ‘C’ at the start was stumbled on almost by chance.
“The bass player asked the guy that did my website ‘what kind of music does Laura do?’,” she explains. “He said ‘It’s a little bit Celtic and a little bit Americana’ so we combined those two and came up with ‘Celticana’. We didn’t initially intend to make it the album title, but it’s what we kept coming back to.”PromotingLaura went to the USA in February to do a series of concerts promoting the album the first to be released in America playing a series of concerts in Memphis and Nashville.
After a brief time back in Scotland, she returned to the States in March, playing the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, and a gig at the legendary Bluebird Cafe. She then went to New York, where she led the 6th Avenue Parade for Scotland Week. As part of the event, she also performed at a concert celebrating Tennessee’s historic links with Scotland, held at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
“I presented Johnny Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, with an award from the Scottish Government and the Scottish people,” she continues. “Then I performed Wildwood Flower with him.
NASHVILLE FLOOD APPEAL-LAURA MCGHEE from Laura McGhee on Vimeo.
The floods claimed the lives of 30 people but were not widely reported in the UK because by then we had our own issues with Mother Nature in the form of a massive volcanic ash cloud drifting over from Iceland.
Laura did her last gig in Nashville the day before she was due to fly back.Postpone”I’d been asked to do Woodsong’s Old-Time Radio Hour in Kentucky, so wanted to see how much it would be to postpone my flight for a few days.
“As it happened my flight was cancelled because of the ash cloud and I was stuck in the States for longer than I’d expected.”
With her album doing much better than expected, lingering in the Americana Top 40, the delay came as a blessing for Laura. She used the time to do one last tour, this time of radio stations.
“I visited about 10 radio stations over the next 10 days, and did telephone chats with a bunch of the more remote ones.
“I went through New Jersey, Virginia and North Carolina. Sometimes I’d do a live performance followed by a chat, and it would last for 10 minutes. A couple of times I played eight live songs, a few album tracks and was on for a full hour.
“At one of the stations the DJ was brand new and I was his first ever live interview. He was a lot more nervous than I was, which was quite refreshing for me.”
Laura is currently planning her next trip to the States.
“I’m looking to go back out there in July. My album is doing better over there than I could have hoped and I just want to keep the momentum going.”
Celticana is out now.