Shannon McArdle lost not only a husband but also her band when her marriage with fellow Mendoza Line member Tim Bracy ended. McArdle at one point vowed to quit music altogether, but turned to songwriting to express the heartbreak she was experiencing in the aftermath of the divorce. The result was the provocatively titled solo album The Summer of the Whore. We spoke to McArdle to shed some light on this dark period.
YourGigs (YG): You were at the point where you gave up on music altogether. What was it that got you to the point where you started writing again?
Shannon McArdle (SM): I just really thought I wouldn't write any more for the first few months after Tim left. I just thought it was a chapter of my life that thought was over, like my marriage. I just didn't imagine having any desire to continue, and then after a couple of months of laying around in bed I thought I really wanted to do something - so I commissioned Adam to record some songs for a children's I had written, that had six songs, and we recorded that and he said, "Shannon, no mother is going to let their child listen to this - It's too depressing!" ... but that sort of got me writing again and then the songs for Summer of the Whore, I wrote those in a matter of two weeks. They just sort of came flowing out and then we recorded them so quickly too it meant that I had to get that record out before I could do anything else.
YG: Do you want people that have gone through something similar to you to take something of it? To use it as a 'break up album'?
SM: I think that it's such a universal theme and it's nice to know that it helps or that it at least comforts them in a way to think that someone else had these very low dark feeling as well. I'm really glad that people can connect with it in that way. And that's men and women as well. I'm surprised at the number of emails I got from men, with their wives or girlfriends having left them - I was surprised by that.
YG: There's that age old theory that suffering creates great art - do you find yourself that when things are going well, you have less material to write about?
SM: It's a different kind of writing I guess, when I think back about happier times when I was pretty content in my personal life or it causes me to reach for something else which is not so personal. Early on in my writing career, everything was just about me and everything was so honest and people I imagine would get tired about hearing about [how] someone's heart is broken and how they are depressed and how they want to find love.
I feel that in my early twenties that was all I wrote about because I wasn't content and then I became content and it didn't feel natural to write about these things any more so I started to do more thematical songs and really try to think about topics that interest me or that I felt needed attention, and that to me is actually harder.
It's very easy for me to write personal songs. I'm a an extremely emotional person, so that's not really challenging to me, and for a lot of songwriters it is and they're the opposite ... but for me that comes a lot easier than writing things that are outside of myself or outside my realm or my circle of influence.
YG: Just putting so much of yourself in the songs and how open and honest you are in your lyrics, is that something you had trouble with initially? Has it ever had any detrimental effect in real life?
SM: I think that early on when I was younger I wrote very personal lyrics because I just really didn't think about it, and it came so honestly and so easily to me. I got to a point maybe 5 or 6 years ago where I felt that in order to write good music, it has to be intelligent - it can't be about emotions because that's what Elvis Costello or Bob Dylan would write about - but I just find it really comforting to write songs that are just about how I'm feeling at that moment.
I didn't have any hesitation writing these lyrics or writing the whole record. But when it came to the time for it to come out here ... I suddenly realised I just had this moment of panic when I thought "oh fuck, what have I done, what have I written?" and "Tim's going to hear this and people are going to ask me questions about it." But I've asked for it because it's this brutally open and honest record. I became terrified but, y'know, I made my bed...
Summer of the Whore is available now through Inertia.
Andy Ryan
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