Kelley McRae

Van touring and Southern folk

Kelley McRae grew up in Mississippi and lived in Brooklyn for years; her own biography calls her music Southern folk drawing on folk, gospel, country, blues and rock. She told Rocksucker in 2012 that she found songwriting in college while studying acting, and had been writing, performing and recording for about ten years. Her bio compares her to Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch and says the filmmaker Wim Wenders and the BBC Radio presenter Bob Harris admired her; Wenders, asked about art that moved him to tears, named two of her songs in a San Francisco Chronicle interview, though the interview we read does not say which. She lists Patty Griffin, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams among her favorites.

In 2011 she teamed with the guitarist Matt Castelein, left her New York apartment and bought a VW camper van to tour full time; in 2012 she reported more than 200 shows in recent months and 40,000 miles in the van, and WNYC says she later settled in Austin, Texas. Brighter Than the Blues (September 15, 2012), her third album and her first independent release, was recorded by the pair with a few microphones in a rented house with a studio in Tennessee over a winter break, and was earlier free on NoiseTrade. Search listings put Never Be in 2006, Highrises in Brooklyn in 2008, with a Brooklyn debut produced by J.D. Foster, and The Wayside on April 7, 2016; none of these years or credits is confirmed by a page we could read. A video for "Land of the Noonday Sun", inspired by a cabin in North Carolina's Nantahala Forest, premiered on June 20, 2016.

Later records are This Side of Night, Can You Change the Heart of Me? and Good Company, which grew out of a weekly Zoom songwriter group; its first single "Ashes" was written in March 2022. She appeared with Mary Gauthier on season four of the SongWriter podcast in August 2022, and sang "Until the End" on the soundtrack of the Korean drama The Glory. If It's Too Loud's Jeff Raymond called her roots done right, the perfect balance of alt-country and folk. Setlist.fm has only six of her setlists, from 2006 to 2019.