PORTSMOUTH, NH – With roots in Massachusetts and currently being based in Montpelier, Vermont, Ali McGuirk is a singer-songwriter who has a way of captivating whoever is listening with a soulful vibe. She’s consistently pushing the boundaries of her craft, which is apparent in her latest album. It’s titled “Watertop,” and it officially came out on September 12 via the Northampton, Mass., independent label Signature Sounds. McGuirk and her band are currently doing a run of shows ringing in the release of the full-length, which includes a performance at The Press Room in Portsmouth on October 12. Brooklyn rock artist Aubrey Haddard is going to be starting off the festivities at 7 p.m.
We recently had a talk about the songwriting and recording approach that went into the new album, aiming to combine her passions into a singular outlet and what people can expect from the upcoming show.
Rob Duguay: What was the experience like making “Watertop”? Did you aim to do anything differently than your previous album “Till It’s Gone” in terms of creative vision and approach?
Ali McGuirk: I would say for this album, I was making it in Vermont and I really wanted to have a homey, cozy feel. That was probably one of the early priorities and for what we wanted to make, I kind of wanted to push myself on the production side to be a little bit more into it while making something that sounded new, weird and different from what we had done in the past, if that makes sense.
RD: Yeah, it does. I got that from listening to it.
AM: Yeah, we had been playing so long as a band and I feel like we have such a different live sound from the records often. We’re such improvisers and I think that’s our style, just going with the flow each time we approach the songs. I knew that it wasn’t going to exactly be the live show because I wanted to do a ton of vocal layers inspired by ‘90s R&B where there’s a lot of vocal stuff going on. Since we are so experimental, I wanted that to come through in the production.
RD: You also brought in Dwight & Nicole into the fold for the song “More Than Enough” and you also brought in Elise Leavy for “Wedding Song”, so how did you go about getting them involved in the recording process? Were their parts done remotely or were you all together in the studio in Vermont?
AM: We were all together. Dwight & Nicole were kind of a no-brainer when I wrote “More Than Enough”, I heard it almost as a duet through those harmonies and Nicole has such an incredible voice. She’s also one of my close pals and she’s close with Ezra Oklan, who was a co-producer on it, so we all had a grand old time doing that one. With “Wedding Song”, I always knew it was a duet, but I did spend a lot of time thinking about who it should be to do it because it’s such a different song from the other tunes. For me, it was trying to capture the essence of what my sound was going for while writing it, and I’m a huge Elise Leavy fan.
I think she’s an absolute superstar talent wise and I knew I wanted the song to sound like a classic American Songbook kind of vibe, which I’ve learned to do very well. She’s got a quality that you can’t quite put a finger on, and I just like her songwriting so much. I actually wrote “Wedding Song” about 10 years ago and I kept it on the shelf for so long because I thought it was too sweet and too nice, so I wasn’t vibing on it. I knew that I had to find somebody who wasn’t going to overcheese it up with me.
RD: Very cool. It’s been mentioned that social activism played a role in the thematic aspects of the songwriting for “Watertop”, so how did you go about channeling this? Was it just absorbing what you were seeing on social media and other sources of information, or was it something else?
AM: I’ve always, always been called to try to understand societal justice and be part of some sort of solution. The way I grew up, my parents were teenagers who had very tough lives and my brother and I were in public housing. This sense of justice was something that we carried with us through our whole lives and I have worked in social work on and off throughout my career. Now I work part-time as a case manager for a housing service provider, so I think that as a songwriter, I’ve always been working to square those two interests and synthesize these two guiding passions in my life. Sometimes it feels like I’m wearing two different hats, and I think right now what I want to do is make it one hat.
Growing into it, really owning my voice that way and learning how to be more direct. Obviously, when we’re performing on stage, I think that I’m already a vulnerable performer, but sometimes we have reservations on giving our whole selves or being vulnerable in certain ways on stage. That’s something I’ve always navigated, so saying what I believe in politically is a specific type of vulnerability that I’m really trying to get better at.
RD: It’s great that you’re trying to put this forth through your art. What are your thoughts on performing at The Press Room?
AM: I love it. Portsmouth is one of my favorite towns to play in and I haven’t played at The Press Room in a while, I think the last time I was there was with Session Americana. I’m psyched, I think Portsmouth is great and I got a lot of folks on the North Shore in Massachusetts, so it might feel like a little bit of a homecoming.
RD: Awesome. When it comes to infusing the new album into your setlist for the upcoming show, what can people expect? Do you plan on performing “Watertop” in its entirety from start to finish, or will it be weaved in with older material?
AM: You’ll definitely hear all of the tunes from “Watertop”, but in an order to be determined because we have some covers that we’ve worked into the set. We’re definitely going to be going back into the catalog of the other two records to make sure that we’re hitting our favorite tunes, which changes over time, but it’s good that they’re all there.