When you think of solo female artists, the image of a woman and an acoustic guitar often springs to mind — with good reason.
That’s a shame because there are so many female artists who do so much more so well. Consider Australian-born Anne McCue, who just released a new album, “Broken Promise Land.”
“A bit dirty, a bit rockin’, a bit swampy and a bit bluesy, with a touch of mysteriousness to it,” McCue said in describing the sound that sprang from her love of ’60s and ’70s rock. “I love sitting around and playing together live and getting an honest record down.”
You can classify her music as folk if you want — she did win the Folk Artist of the Year from the Roots Music Association — but she’s as much about Jimi Hendrix’s killer electric guitar riffs as she is about the lush storytelling of Bob Dylan.
Not that the road has been easy.
She was originally signed by Columbia Records while living in Melbourne, Australia, and moved to Los Angeles at the label’s request. After about eight years, she left the West Coast to live and work in Nashville, Tenn.
“Los Angeles was more about show business, as everybody knows, and I didn’t get caught up in the dream of it,” she said. “Here [in Nashville] it’s all about the music. Every weekend we have jams. … Everyone here isn’t mainstream country — there is everything else here, too.”
Although she clearly has the opportunity and talent to pursue whatever format she chooses, she remains devoted to the classic blues rock sound.
“I guess it’s my favorite era of music, the late 1960s and early 1970s, before everything got really corporate,” McCue said. “It was still all about the artists and their vision in those days.”
For the new album, McCue wrote about half the cover and recorded songs written by others that she felt sonically portrayed “the spirit of that era.”
In the hands of McCue, that means the raucous guitar playing of Hendrix combined with blues and plenty of rock. But don’t think that there aren’t heartfelt stories behind the songs, many of which have been covered by some of today’s most well-known singer-songwriters, including Lucinda Williams and Patty Griffin.
“Given enough time, I’ll tell you the story about everything,” McCue said about reaching out to her audience. “It’s all about trying to capture a moment in time, capture a feeling.”
