MayKay STORE

ABOUT MAYKAY & THE RECORD

“I’ve always thought that music can send messages that can’t be sent any other way.”

How do you make a record about relationships? Relationships of all kinds? Romantic, familial, and the relationship one has to the self? It all has to start with honesty. Strip everything away - every expectation, semblance of pressure, any concept of the end result. Find a tone and sonic medium that pulls the songs from you - in this case, the lap steel guitar. Create in private - so private that there’s a high chance the songs will never even be heard by anyone. Start in the darkness, and work your way towards the light. 

This is the self-titled debut album by MayKay. It’s a record that has sat in its own liminal gestation, completed four years ago, and only now urging its way towards being shared. Recorded during the pandemic, when MayKay was on a creative and personal search for musical authenticity, the time has come for others to hear it. And hear it they will. This is a record of astonishing beauty, honesty, and vulnerability. In it, MayKay’s voice opens up and explores new plains and topographies, and the result is a glistening constellation of songs that upturn what we expect from one of Ireland’s most captivating musicians, singers, and performers. “I’m a huge fan of shouting and screaming,” MayKay says, “but now I love the wisdom that’s in a whisper”

The album is charm bracelet of genres, crossing country, pop, new wave, and more. MayKay is known for her toweringly energetic stage presence, and on this album, she turns away from the glare of the spotlight, and instead presents a facet of her artistry that is as open as it is eclectic, as raw as it is true, and as gentle as it is robust. “It’s as honest as I can possibly be about myself and the life I’ve had,” she says.

When MayKay heard Ian McFarlane playing the lap steel, she knew she had found the musical accent through which she could express new language. Writing quietly in what was her father’s grain store of his farm in Kildare, and still processing the grief of his death, and unpicking complications of other relationships in her life, the songs flowed quickly, a rapid expression of the travails of relationships building, falling apart, and maintaining. Unburdened by expectations, and free to upturn them, a new musical integrity emerged.

There’s the summery warmth of Let That Boy Know, the heaving breakup grieving of Boys, the correspondence to the self of My Top Five, the Texan outskirts dive bar jaunt of Goodwife, the yearning pain of Forgive Me, the blistering darkness of Fire, the wry dance between trust and mistrust of Busted, and the sonically scuzzy relationship advice of Dating Shit. The record concludes with the astonishing Funerals, with its memories of attending funerals with her father, a paean to ritual, and the communal holding of grief. It, like so much on this album, is about the breadth of what one learns in a life and through others, ultimately coming down on the side of what really matters. 

“The thing about living a good life,” MayKay says, “is it’s about being trusted, being a good person overall, being consistent. I feel like I’ve learned a lot and I’m also so aware of how little I know. Handing this album over to listeners is kind of like me saying: this is what I know, if this is of any use to you, take from it what you will.”

MayKay burst on to the Irish and international music scene with her landmark band Fight Light Apes, and subsequently brought her ferocious presence and voice to Le Galaxie. A renowned collaborator, working with Jerry Fish, Kormac, Elaine Mai, Jack O’Rourke, Ailbhe Reddy and more, this latest chapter in her creative life will surprise and enrapture listeners. Utterly unexpected, tender, deeply personal, and grounded is the pursuit of honesty, this is as much a new beginning as it is the culmination of all that has gone before. Now, as a solo artist, MayKay has cracked open a new chapter in her creative progression. How wonderful for the listener, that they get to see, hear, and feel these revelations.