McClain Sullivan – Happy Anniversary
McClain Sullivan – Happy Anniversary (2015)
Directed by: Adam Cohen & Jess Miller
McClain Sullivan’s new album, Rachel, displays a powerful songwriting gift. This EP plays like a musical diary of McClain’s cross-country and cross-stylistic American life. Her voice is capable of anything from bluesy heartbreak to highly joyous and playfully provocative sound. At once angry and sly to heartbreakingly hopeful, her songs are written with a new musical vocabulary and are sung with a gut punch of rock, jazz, and pure soul.
Rachel reaches all the highs and lows that encompasses a life deeply lived, each song holding strong with a solid rhythm section, horns, and strings. Her pure love of rhythm and blues infused with jazz influences give a candid, confidential, impassioned treatise on life and love. Her melodies and words will linger in your head long after a first hearing.
Born in Seattle, Washington, McClain Sullivan has an unwavering passion for making music. Playing guitar and writing her own songs since the age of twelve, McClain attended the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, while developing her singular style. “ I could sing before I could talk,” she says. After moves to Vermont, New york, North Carolina, and Texas, she realized that New York was truly home, and moved back, settling in to make and play music in Brooklyn.
Line Up Magazine calls McClain ‘a bona fide super talent, about the shake the musical community to the bone.’ She has been featured in Rolling Stone Italia, Nu Soul Magazine, and Crankbox. A touring musician for 15 years, McClain has opened for The Roots, Talib Kweli, and Souls of Mischief, and played the Savannah Jazz Festival, Fillmore Jazz Festival, House of Blues and the Hammerstein Ballroom, among others.
McClain’s versatile talent and singular voice shines in any genre; from hip-hop and funk, to classic jazz, to confessional acoustic indie. She strives for honesty and genuine insight in her lyrics, with a broad spectrum of influences like Ani Difranco, Erykah Badu, and Sarah Vaughan. Her songs address the gamut of human emotion, dismantling past relationships with savage precision, incisive humor and uncontainable soul.
