One of Canada's hottest new country acts has our community right up front. Jacky Mae is the lead singer and part of the songwriting team for buzz band Me and Mae. She's calling on the local audience to come hear what the national fuss is all about when she and the band hit the Saturday night stage at the Cowboy Ranch.
Me and Mae has played Prince George once already, at The Generator, and also performed in Vanderhoof where Mae lived for her high school years, but that was before the group hit a wave of popular attention. In recent months they have been the Fresh Faced Feature on CMT's online home page, interviewed on Shaw's The Rush program in Alberta, City TV's Breakfast Television show in Vancouver and CTV's Live Morning program (twice). They scored fans and industry supporters at country radio all across Canada as they performed and interviewed their way from Victoria to Ottawa and back.
"The amount of TV and radio visits we've gotten have been phenomenal," said Mae in her first hometown feature interview. "Some of it is because we have an amazing management team, but the other part is a track record building up that we can handle ourselves in front of a TV camera and we handle interviews with some fun. It all goes hand in hand."
Mae is new to the spotlight but her bandleader is not. The group's name is a sonic play on words, combining hers with lead guitar player and co-writer Shawn Meehan (Meehan Mae...Me and Mae...get it?) who has been touring as his own artist and in the band Krome for years. He was good at it, modest success was earned, but no major breakthrough.
He was highly respected in the music industry, however, as much for his pleasant attitude and business acumen as for his guitar chops and vocals. He made a friend of an up-and-coming pop singer to whom he taught guitar and with whom he co-wrote a song his publishing company liked a lot. Her name was Carly Rae Jepsen. Their song was posted in the company's available pool.
Inexplicably, in Meehan's view, other artists passed up the song. He decided to take it back for himself. He believed in Love Me, Leave Me Lonely so much he decided to build an entire band around that one tune and create onwards from there.
That's where Prince George became a fateful ground.
Meehan and Krome were headlining at the BC Northern Exhibition in 2011 (then called the PGX). Mae was in a high school band from Nechako Valley secondary school that had a spot on the BCNE undercard. When radio host Matt Porteous and Krome launched a contest for a guest vocalist to do a duet with the band during the fair, Mae threw her name in the ring since she was already in Prince George. Not only did she win the chance to do a song with Krome, she blew Meehan and band mates away.
"When she came onstage she just killed it," Meehan said. "It was an awesome performance and I remember going over to the others and saying, 'I think this is our singer.'"
Long distance communication turned into a job offer, and Me and Mae gelled. She left her studies at UNBC to hit the road and haunt the recording studio with the upstart group. The band also includes Adam Reid (multi-instrumentalist folk rocker), Ben Parker (classically trained vocalist and folk-pop instrumentalist), Kim Gryba (local audiences will remember her as the drummer of Painting Daisies, the award-winning band co-founded by local rocker Rachelle Van Zanten), and occasional guest musicians.
No amount of publicity or touring equals success without the material to back it up, however. One song will not propel a new group in a genre as competitive as country, so the rise of Me and Mae is also a testament to the songwriting. In addition to Love Me, Leave Me Lonely the group has also scored audience points with a catchy tune called Watcha Wearin', they utilized their influences carefully by including Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire and Dolly Parton's 9 To 5 in the mix, and their latest single is a summer party track called Tailgate Party.
"We write for the people, its all about how the audience reacts, and this one is our anthem right now," said Mae.
Her name on the songwriting credits came from some off the cuff remarks in a casual conversation with Meehan. He is focused on the melodic hooks of the songs he writes and made mention that he isn't comfortable with lyrics, trying to dovetail language and spoken imagery into the musical colours he creates on the instruments. Mae made mention right back at him that she was an English major at UNBC. Words: her thing.
"It clicked. We ended up writing about three-quarters of the CD together," she said. "Our game plan is: Shawn will wake up in the middle of the night with a melody line in his head, he'll send me something on the iPhone, and I'll start working with it. Usually he'll throw in some made-up words or suggest a theme he had in mind, or maybe we had a cool tag line we came up with as a band that hasn't found a home in a song yet, and we'll just go with that."
The results are in full effect on Saturday night on Queensway when Me and Mae hit the stage.
