Chantel McGregor Shines on Shed Sessions Volumes One and Two
UK singer/songwriter releases pair of excellent stripped down (mostly) covers albums while under pandemic lockdown.
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For this issue, I wanted to discuss a pair of (mostly) cover albums by a talented and unique young musician from England, Chantel McGregor. Her two recent Shed Sessions releases caught my ear several weeks ago and I couldn’t wait to talk to her about them. I hope you check them out.
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The global COVID-19 pandemic has been awful in just about every way imaginable, but there has been one welcome side effect. The world has seen an increase in music output from artists stuck at home without anywhere to play live dates. Many musicians around the world have used their time off the road wisely and productively, with a rise in the number of album releases over the last 18 months.
One musician who turned the negative into a positive is UK singer/songwriter Chantel McGregor. With nowhere to play live in front of her fans, she created, and kept, a virtual weekly appointment with her fans during the UK lockdown. Those streams eventually led to her releasing a pair of albums a month apart — Shed Sessions Volume One and Shed Sessions Volume Two.
“The Shed Sessions came about because over here in lockdown, obviously gigs were canceled, people couldn't go out,” McGregor said. “And I was like, ‘What can I do to try and cheer people up a little bit and kind of still give them live music and keep in touch with fans and stuff like that?’ So, I thought, ‘I’ll do a live stream,’ and did one, and did another one the week after. And it just carried on from there, every single week for over a year. Every Saturday at five o’clock. It was about 15 months I did. I think I missed one for Boxing Day, and that was it. It was really good for keeping in touch with fans and keeping them in touch with each other as well, and making new social connections and stuff.”
Playing those live streams created a demand from fans to release the songs she’d been doing albums they could purchase. The songs that made it onto the two Shed Sessions albums were mainly covers with a few of McGregor’s originals sprinkled in on the second volume. They became two releases due to the way they were recorded, with Volume One being a completely stripped-down acoustic guitar album and Volume Two featuring McGregor on acoustic and electric guitar, as well as some piano and keyboards by Jamie Brooks.
“Everybody was sort of saying, why don't you do an album of the songs that you've been doing, and re-record it properly, and stuff like that,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So, the first half of the pandemic I was up north in Bradford, my hometown, and that was just me and an acoustic (guitar). And then, in June I moved down to Cambridge, and (was with) my boyfriend (Brooks), who's like an amazing keyboard player. It meant I could do more electric things, and some more widdly guitar stuff, and that sort of thing.”
With the instrumentation used setting the two sets of songs apart, it made sense to release them separately, but McGregor pushed Volume Two out only a month after Volume One to get both out before the country opened back up for live gigging again.
“It wouldn’t work as one album, because they’re just so completely separate,” she said. “So, that’s why I thought two albums, and then I was like, ‘It’s nearly the end of the lockdown, I need to get these things out.’ That’s why it was one month apart.”
The acoustically based Shed Sessions Volume One contains some obvious choices for the stripped-down arrangement, such as James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” Jewel’s “Morning Song,” Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done,” and John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” But there are also a few surprises on Volume One. McGregor reimagined Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile,” and Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” as solo acoustic guitar songs and they all work well.
“It’s just one of those things I like to do,” McGregor said. “Sort of like with the Metallica song (“Nothing Else Matters”), I just kind of listen to things and think, ‘That would really work if you strip it back.’ And I think that's probably the art of a good song is if you can strip it back to an acoustic guitar and a vocal and it still works and stands up, then you know it's a good song. Obviously ‘Sledgehammer’ is an amazing song. And I was like, ‘Actually, there is something in this that we could make this work.’”
McGregor playfully blamed her father for the inclusion of “Voodoo Chile.”
“I’ve kind of played that for a while at shows and things. I sometimes do acoustic shows in the UK. I’d never played it and then my dad I think shouted out, ‘Do “Voodoo Chile”!’ or something. And I was like, ‘This is going to sound awful,’ because it’s not an acoustic song. Everybody loved that version. Everybody says ‘Oh, we want this on the album, you’ve got to put it on.’ I kind of wanted to craft it a little bit so it wasn't just (Hendrix’s) album version, and obviously playing it on acoustic, that is totally different. You’ve got to make it your own and put your own stamp on things.”
McGregor isn’t convinced her version of “Voodoo Chile” quite works, but I found it to be a pleasant surprise among some of the more obvious acoustic choices, and softer rock numbers like Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and “Gold Dust Woman.”
One of the Volume One high points is “Morning Song,” with McGregor’s vocal doing incredible justice to the original by Jewel. Other highlights include her interesting bare-bones version of “Sledgehammer,” the two covers each from Fleetwood Mac and Neil Young, Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home,” Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters,” and her guitar work on “Voodoo Chile.” If that sounds like there are a lot of highlights, well…there are.
Here is the full track list for Shed Sessions Volume One:
Needle and the Damage Done (Neil Young)
Morning Song (Jewel)
Sledgehammer (Peter Gabriel)
Angel from Montgomery (John Prine)
Gold Dust Woman (Fleetwood Mac)
Fire and Rain (James Taylor)
Can’t Find My Way Home (Blind Faith)
Love Has No Pride (Bonnie Raitt)
Harvest Moon (Neil Young)
Landslide (Fleetwood Mac)
Voodoo Chile (Jimi Hendrix)
I Can’t Make You Love Me (Bonnie Raitt)
Nothing Else Matters (Metallica)
If Volume One has some surprises, those are matched on Volume Two. They start right off the bat with the album opener, which is a haunting and somewhat fragile cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” with just piano accompaniment. There are also two excellent covers of songs by progressive rock giant Steven Wilson — “Drive Home” and “The Raven That Refused to Sing.”
McGregor calls herself a “massive fan” of Wilson’s work.
“I’ve absolutely adored his music back to the Porcupine Tree stuff. I just love it,” she said. “You know, things like ‘Open Car’ and ‘Arriving Somewhere’ and all that stuff. It’s just absolutely phenomenal. And obviously when he put out the album The Raven That Refused to Sing, I was just like ‘This is the best album ever made.’ The guitar playing on it by Guthrie Govan is just out of this world.
“I never thought that I could tackle those songs and Jamie was like ‘Why don’t you just give it a go and see how it sounds? Learn it for Shed Sessions and see how it goes.’ So, we did ‘The Raven that Refused to Sing’ first and actually this kind of works. There’s no bass, there’s no drums, but we can make this work.”
After that, people encouraged McGregor to try “Drive Home,” but she was reluctant to give that one a go at first.
“I can’t play that guitar solo at the end, because you just don’t try and play the ‘Drive Home’ guitar solo at the end if you’re in your right mind,” she said. “Because nobody’s ever going to do it as well as Guthrie.”
McGregor eventually decided to just put her own stamp on the solo rather than trying to mimic Govan’s original solo and liked it well enough to share it. The response encouraged her to put it on Volume Two.
Like on Volume One, the Jewel cover on the second volume of Shed Sessions is exceptional. There are some similarities between McGregor’s voice and Jewel’s, although each has its own distinctive characteristics as well.
Here is the track list for Shed Sessions Volume Two:
Creep (Radiohead)
Foolish Games (Jewel)
Drive Home (Steven Wilson)
Winter (Tori Amos)
Walk On Land (Chantel McGregor)
Uninvited (Alanis Morrissette)
Summertime (Ella Fitzgerald)
April (Chantel McGregor)
River (Joni Mitchell)
The Raven That Refused to Sing (Steven Wilson)
Her guitar work on her own reworked original tracks “Walk On Land” and “April” is stunning and shows why she’s impressed critics and audiences since arriving on the scene.
One of the challenges of recording at home was getting the vocals to come out right and McGregor found a unique solution to the problem — she took her Blue Woodpecker microphone into her clothes closet.
“Because of the pandemic I couldn't gig, so I couldn't earn,” she said. “I've been doing a little bit of voiceover work, which obviously needed soundproofing, and I didn't have a studio down here. So, all I did was went in the wardrobe with the microphone, set it all up on like a board thing where your jeans and your trousers go. All the clothes in the wardrobe soundproofed the wardrobe. Yeah, so I sang in a wardrobe.”
Volume One will appeal to fans of Americana or singer/songwriter type music, while Volume Two shows off McGregor’s ability on the electric guitar. I honestly can’t pick a favorite between the two, because the one I want to hear depends on what mood I’m in.
Listening to how McGregor handles a guitar, it’s no surprise to learn that she got her start in music at an early age. She began learning guitar basics at age three from her father, took proper lessons starting at age seven, and has been performing live gigs since she was 12 years old. Music remained her educational focus into adulthood, as she earned the Leeds College of Music Prize for Outstanding Musicianship and a first-class honours degree in popular music. Her talent is evident in her playing and her recordings. She’s won several British Blues Awards, including the 2011 Young Artist of the Year, 2012 Best Female Vocalist, 2013 Guitarist of the Year and Best Female Vocalist, and 2014 Guitarist of the Year.
Despite the British Blues Awards she’s won, McGregor doesn’t consider herself a blues artist.
“I’m not blues. I’ve never really been blues, but because I play electric guitar and do solos, people are like, ‘Oh, it must be blues,’” she said. “There’s blues influences. There’s progressive influences. But then I like to do acoustic, so there’s folk and country influences.”
Prior to the two Shed Sessions releases, McGregor put out two studio albums — Like No Other (2011) and Lose Control (2015) — live album Bury’d Alive (2019), and a cover of Lady Gaga’s “Stupid Love” in 2020. Her current band is a trio with McGregor on lead vocals and guitar, Colin Sutton on bass, and Thom Gardner on drums. She’s hitting the road with dates in October through December in the United Kingdom, with some February dates on the horizon as well. There are currently no plans to tour in the United States, owing in no small part to the outlandish costs and red tape involved in securing work visas, which prohibit many independent artists from being able to play live in the U.S.
The Shed Sessions albums and McGregor’s previous releases are well worth your time, and they’re available for purchase on Chantel’s website or to stream on Spotify.
For my entire interview with Chantel, please see the video below. In addition to the Shed Sessions, we talked about Steven Wilson’s music, the music she was exposed to early in life, her future plans for more original music, as well as other topics. And her cat, Raven, slept behind her the entire time.