Macy Gray isn’t your traditional artist. Her unique voice and style has allowed her to perform in many different genres without being fully submerged into one. It is unmistakably her when you hear her vocals on a track whether you are listening to R&B, hip-hop, soul, pop or jazz.
Her style – wild and crazy hair along with a relaxed, casual dress – have left many asking her, in interviews and online, if she is more than just an ally in the LGBTQ alphabet, which she is perfectly fine with.
“I’m not really a girly girl; I like to wear my sneakers [laughs]. I’m 6 feet tall, so walking around in heels for me is uncomfortable and pointless. I used to be very self-conscious about my legs too, I felt like I had turkey legs, so I always wore pants,” Gray says. “So people, some are like, ‘you look like a lesbian.’ That’s never bothered me. I’m just like, ‘thank you.’ I know it’s always corny to say this, but I think it’s important to just do you, you know.”
Gray has been “doing her” since she started singing. She developed that unique sound making the rounds of the music scene in Los Angeles in the ‘90s.
“I started out in jazz. I started singing in supper clubs doing standards with jazz bands, and that’s really how I learned to sing, listening to all these old jazz recordings,” she says.
Gray took her jazz roots along with her love of rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and hip-hop and infused them into her own voice. She also credits listening to legendary artists Prince, Nina Simone and Biggie Smalls for teaching her how to sing.
“I learned a lot from listening to Biggie. I remember when Biggie came out and I remember focusing on singing with that kind of crazy rhythm. I wanted to have that kind of rhythm in my singing,” Gray says.
Gray released her first album, On How Life Is, in the summer of 1999, a time when MTV and radio had artists like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, ‘N Sync, and Backstreet Boys in heavy rotation. Gray offered something different.
“As much as there was a lot of pop, I think music was really open at that time,” Gray says. “They were ready for something new and fresh. I think it was a really great time for music and to try different things.”
Gray’s first album, fueled by the massive success of the single “I Try,” went triple platinum and won Gray a Grammy and fans worldwide; something that came as a surprise to her.
“It was awesome, but I wasn’t expecting it,” she says. “I was just grinding it in L.A., playing little clubs and bars, playing for nine people for so long, so anything other than that was like being at a toy store. When [the album] got that successful, no one was more shocked or happy than I was. I was just glad I got a record deal, but I had no idea it would go that crazy at all.”
Gray says she was happy that fans took to “I Try,” but admits she fought for it not to be released as a single.
“I didn’t think ‘I Try’ was a hit record,” Gray says. “I kept arguing with the label and telling them to try another song. I was like, ‘It’s too wordy, the chorus is too long, no one is going to know what I’m talking about.’ So I was totally wrong, I had no idea what I was doing!”
While Gray hasn’t reached the same kind of success as her first album in the U.S., she has maintained a huge fan base overseas.
“I’m still amazed by it,” she says. “In the states, I do small theaters and clubs, when I go overseas I have like 3,000 people show up. I did a show in the Czech Republic; I didn’t even know I had fans there. But the U.K. is where I kind of had my first success. It started there and made its way back over here, and it was crazy, because I had never even been out of the U.S. before and to see my career take off there. Just to find out that there are people all over the world that listen to my music was an honor.”
Gray’s career choices have been as unique and unconventional as the voice and style that first got her music recognized at the turn of the millennium. She has put out nine albums so far. They include a song-for-song remake of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 album Talking Book as a tribute to the legendary artist, an album entitled Covered in which she covers songs from the likes of Radiohead and Metallica and, most recently, returned back to her roots with Stripped, a traditional jazz album.
“This was an experiment that was offered to me and I knew I could pull it off because I know that whole world and I’ve toured with other jazz artists. It was a perfect opportunity to do something that I don’t get to do every day,” Gray says.
Stripped was recorded live over two days in a church in Brooklyn using binaural recording, a process of capturing audio using microphones the way your ears hear sounds.
“It’s a microphone in the middle of me and the musicians, we were kind of in a circle around the microphone, and we were all standing in the middle of this church,” Gray says. “Churches have these acoustics that you can’t get anywhere else. It gave the album that old school, pure sound without any mixing or edits, no sweeteners. Everything was completely pure and naked.”
Gray is bringing that pure and naked sound, along with her full band, to the Parliament House June 3 as a part of their Gay Days concert series, her first time to Orlando for the annual event.
“I’ve done tons of LGBT events, but I haven’t done Gay Days yet. I’m looking forward to it,” she says. “It’s going to be awesome. I’m going to be on stage with my band, and we have been touring and playing for so long that we perform so naturally. I think considering the affair and it’s in honor of being yourself and being free with who you are, and the fact that we are playing in Orlando after what happened there, it’s going to be a honor for me and my band to come there and play and we are going to make sure that we do a show that is incredible for everybody.”
