Edwin McCain remembers the moment he decided what to do with his life. He was around 12 years old and his father had taken him to see folk singer David Wilcox at a place called McDibb’s in Black Mountain, N.C.
“It was a little room with maybe about 75 people in it,” McCain said in a recent phone interview from Mobile, Alabama, where he was performing.
“He came in with his guitar and sat on a stool and he gave us his version of life. This is the idea of a songwriter, mining the poetry out of what you know and what you’ve experienced and so he did that. And I remember sitting in the audience just going ‘Man, what a cool way to live. This is awesome, this is way better than anything else I’ve ever seen. Run around with your guitar and sing your songs to people? That’s what I’m doing.’ That became the idea early.’”
McCain, who turns 48 next week, has been living out his singer/songwriter dreams for the past 20-plus years, staying true to that roadhouse storytelling tradition even after his mega pop success love songs “I’ll Be” and “I Could Not Ask for More.”
He’ll bring his repertoire to The Birchmere on March 8.
Southern Daycare
McCain was 8 years old when singing became a part of his life growing up in Greenville, South Carolina.
“It’s the classic church choir story, or as I like to call it, 'Southern daycare',” he said. “I was in church choir as a kid. I had really bad dyslexia, I couldn’t read, so I was struggling really bad in my early years. So I could sing. It was sort of natural, kids, the thing they get attention for, the thing they’re into. So I was definitely not getting any attention for school. As soon as I started singing, I stuck with that.”
The choirmaster was old school, McCain said. “He drilled us like it was a military outfit. He wasn’t mean. He treated kids…he expected them to step up. It’s funny how we kind of did. In that setting we were asked to be on point so the ones of us who wanted to be in choir did it. He implanted the idea you’ve got to grind, you’ve got to work.”
By the time McCain was 10, his uncle had given him an acoustic guitar. “I grew up around him playing,” he said. “He went to the University of North Carolina in the ‘70s and during that time he had started cataloging and playing all this eastern Appalachian folk music, that they call Old Time, it’s the predecessor to bluegrass. It’s the living oral history of the way people were living in Appalachia. It’s really powerful stuff, it’s pretty violent actually, some scary stuff.”
If country music is about people dying, McCain said, “Old Time music is about killing. People got thrown down wells, drowned in rivers, buried in the mineshaft. All kinds of horrible stuff. But I grew up around the campfire listening to him, with this whole idea of ‘story songs’ and the idea that songs carry a message. That was ingrained real early. That was kind of how I started it.”
But by the time McCain was in high school, he had drifted away from his idea of a music career although he was playing in bands. “I decided the music thing was never, that was really never going to be a career. ‘That’s crazy.’” His plan instead was to go to college and then go to law school. “I did one semester in college and hated it so much,” he said. “And then I discovered that the university had an equal amount of hatred for me too. I forced myself into the only other option I had ever considered.”
‘I was so ignorant...’
Did he ever doubt he’d make it? “I was so ignorant, I never didn’t think it wouldn’t work out,” he said. "When I was 19 years old, there was never a question in my mind that I was going to be able to play the rest of my life. I already had 10 gigs a week in the resort town in Hilton Head Island and that was as good as I ever thought it could be. I was like ‘All right, well cool, I got it!’ Nobody told me you shouldn’t play 10 shows a week. Why can’t you play three on Saturdays? I had that much time. So, I was just playing my fool head off but what I inadvertently did was put in my 10,000 hours. I accidentally put in my Gladwellian 10,000 hours.”
After he’d put in the time, “the next level of the game opened up,” he said. “And again just like ‘Outliers,’ the timing became the key, because Dave Matthews and Hootie & the Blowfish had broken the wax seal of grunge and we were allowed to stop staring into our belly buttons and feeling bad about ourselves.”
And the success of Matthews and Hootie & the Blowfish brought record labels beating the bushes, looking for the next big thing. They showed up in the Southeast, McCain said. “They said ’Oh, do you know the guys in Dave Matthews? Oh, sign here.' If you were in a band in the Southeast at that time after they had blown up? If you were standing on a street corner holding a tambourine you got a record deal. It was just that easy, it really was, it was amazing. But then the trick was how do we stay? You snuck into the party. Now how do we stay?”
Songwriting: ‘This is easy!’ … and Excruciating
The inspiration for his songs can often be random, McCain said. “It’s everything, it’s sometimes a turn of phrase that you overhear,” he said. “It’s just as random as anything. As random as one of those shower thoughts and it’s as absolutely excruciating as staring at a blank piece of paper and hating all of your life, it really is. Then you’ll get one of those days — ‘This is easy! I was made for this!’ And then there are months of ‘What the hell? Like I’ve got nothing, nothing. I can’t believe I have a job doing this.’
"The only time I ever really felt comforted was I read in some article where Sting said the worst moment of his life is when the pen is an edge away from the paper," he said. "And I was like ‘OK good.’ Cause that guy can write songs. That guy’s amazing, Like he should never question his ability at all, yet he still does.”
A Hail Mary Pass: ’I’ll Be’
McCain’s song “I’ll Be” is often misunderstood as a love song and is often played at weddings. But the song was inspired after a break-up and it was something of a Hail Mary moment in his career, he said.
“At the time that happened, we were out the door, they were kicking us out,” he said. “The label, they were done with us. I came with the song and I was like ‘Yeah, but this is a really good song and they were like, ‘Yeah, not really.’ The label released the song on three radio stations in Alabama and Missisippi, telling McCain “it’s going to have to do something, or we’re done with you.”
“Of course I did the only thing I could,” he said. “I called everybody I knew in Alabama and Mississippi and sent them money. ‘Go buy this record, go call the radio stations.’ And you just do all the little stuff you can actually do to try to get the needle to kick a tiny bit so that the record label says, ‘Hey, something’s happening.”
The sales went from 1,500 a week to 19,000 and then it was “Katie bar the door, and after that it was a rodeo and it’s still going,” he said. How did it feel to have a song at #5 on the Billboard chart? “I was 28, so it felt like, all of this total fake it ’til you make it, lying to everybody who’s ever asked you how things are going, all that used car salesman crap I was doing was finally coming through,” he said. “And now finally we’ve got something we can kind of count on. And you start to feel solid footing under your feet.”
Living (and Smoking) at the Doubletree
Even after another mega hit the following year, “I Could Not Ask for More,” McCain continued a grueling pace on the road. “If we made a mistake it was that we carried that insane work ethic playing 200-plus shows a year, we carried that it into the salad years,” he said. “We never took the foot off the gas. I lived in a bus and when there were breaks during the tours I lived in the Doubletree in Atlanta, that was my home. I apologize if any staff ever reads this article, I’m extremely sorry that you didn’t want me to smoke in those rooms. What a jackass I was.”
He still considers hotels the worst part of touring. “Sleeping in a hotel room, going to the sad free breakfast,” he said. “It’s a little depressing. But then every time I start to think like that … really? Really? Poor thing. You poor baby.”
During his down time, he doesn’t listen to music. “I don’t listen to anything,” he said. “I listen to the NFL Network, the NFL channel (the Patriots are his team) almost exclusively. I went through this phase of listening to Randy Newman and then everything I wrote sounded like Randy Newman so I don’t want to do that. I listen to AC/DC ‘Back in Black’ about twice a week.”
Today he’s still living out the dreams that got in his head when he was 12 years old, when he was watching David Wilcox sing about life.
“The best part is I get to play music for a living,” he said. “I love playing for people, I love that interaction. I especially love The Birchmere. It’s sort of the gold standard of the songwriter experience. For people of my ilk it’s sort of the ultimate nod, you get to play The Birchmere, it’s like a badge of legitimacy. Once you can play there, you’re OK.”
Find ticket information here for The Birchmere show.
