These days, Edwin McCain is feeling lucky.
Nearly 30 years after he found worldwide fame with a pair of smash-hit songs − “I’ll Be” and “I Could Not Ask For More” − the singer-songwriter has a recently-released album of new songs and is hitting stages around the country, following a well-received turn on “The Masked Singer” earlier this year.
He visits the Hard Rock Casino in Atlantic City on Friday, Aug. 15, alongside Train.
“Lucky” is his 11th full-length studio album and first collection of new material since 2011’s “Mercy Bound.”
Edwin McCain recently released a new album, “Lucky.”
Don’t call his first album of new music in 15 years a comeback, though.
“It’s kind of this weird reality that I’m in because I was gone, but I wasn’t gone,” McCain said. “I was just back to doing my indie thing, right? For 15 years, I was just being the old indie artist that I always was and I played 70 shows a year in my little 500-seat rooms,” he said.
He said during that time, he was living what amounted to his teenage nirvana, driving a bus with his band, changing the generator oil and all.
“It was the highest level I could ever have imagined when I was 18, to play around the country in a bus and play music for people and make a decent living,” he said.
He also was busy raising a family of three children with wife Christy.
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During that time, producer Lee Brice reached out to him about creating new music −or as McCain puts it, his fan-turned-friend was “badgering me about making a record and getting back in the music business.”
McCain had some qualms about that.
“I was like, ‘look man, I can’t.’ I’ll be an hypocrite if I did that, because I’m the same way with the bands I love. I love the first few records that I know of that band, and I don’t really want anything new from them. When I go to the concerts, like when I go see AC/DC, please don’t play new songs,” he said.
He says he even used to tease crowds at his concerts about playing all new music, to shouts of “nooooo!”
But he says he came to realize he was playing it safe and eventually came around to wanting to share new works with the world, works that he had been creating all along for those he loved.
“Up to that point, I had been writing songs, and I was writing them for people. This is going to sound crazy, but I have people in my life, things have happened to them or something substantial and I would write them a song and send it. Songs don’t always have to be hitched to this cart or driving the wagon of commerce,” McCain said.
Celebrating ‘Lucky’
“Lucky” is a celebration of McCain’s gratitude for his three-decade career, as well as his “ever-present creative ambition,” producers say.
Edwin McCain recently released a new album, “Lucky.”
It’s a mixture of nostalgia and reflection, hope and heartache, stories told in only the way McCain can.
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On the track “Kool Miles,” for instance, he recounts the long friendship of him and saxophone player Craig Shields, who have teamed up for 35 years.
After Shields’ band gig at Hilton Head fell apart one summer, his sister suggested he and McCain play together.
“I was like ‘acoutic guitar and saxophone, that’s kind of weird,'” McCain said. But after playing a few songs together, McCain says he realized Shields’ talent.
“If you’re not a trained musician, and technically you’re not all that good − which was my situation − surround yourself with trained musicians and use them as cover,” he laughed.
“Craig knew what the deal was. I was just some dude playing acoustic guitar in a wing joint, so it wasn’t a very prestigious gig. He said ‘okay, well, I’ll play with you for the summer but then I’m going back to law school.’
“Here we are 35 years later.”
The track takes its name from Shields’ penchant for smoking Kool cigarettes while everyone else preferred Marlboro Lights. “It was all because everybody that used to smoke menthol cigarettes was just so people wouldn’t bum them,” McCain said.
Another especially meaningful song off the record is “Helicopter,” which honors McCain’s mother.
Between 1985 and 2019, she was diagnosed with four kinds of cancer. Upon her final diagnosis, McCain says, she decided against chemotherapy.
But there was one more thing she wanted to do, she confessed, while her husband pulled the car around after the fateful appointment.
“I want to fly a helicopter around the mountain that I’ve lived my whole life on,” she said.
“I looked all over Earth trying to find a big, super safe helicopter,” McCain said.
“I did not find a big, super safe helicopter,” he said. “I found this tiny little helicopter. And we all got in it and flew around the mountain anyway.”
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That experience, coupled with a reminder of the strong women that had established themselves on the mountain, was the linchpin for the song, McCain said.
“The men in our family’s history were addicts and alcoholics and unwell humans, and the women had to step up in extremely adverse conditions and make something happen. And they did it, it’s a testament to all of them.”
Impact of ‘I’ll Be’ lives on
Edwin McCain in concert.
McCain’s relationship to the songs that made him a household name holds strong.
“The meanings change, but more than anything I have this overwhelming sense of gratitude,” McCain says.
“The mathematic impossibility of having a hit song, and then not only having a song, but one that lasts for 30 years, is crazy,” he said. “It’s kept everybody in my band and crew paid and helped people raise families.”
He says it’s a gift and one that he feels responsible to keep honoring.
“I go out there and sing that song as good as I can possibly sing it every time I open my mouth,” he said. “I honor what it’s done for me.”
What he doesn’t do any longer is try any new presentation of it, though.
“I tried, and people hated it,” he said. “I slowed it down and played it differently, changed the arrangement and you could tell. You can’t really mess with it because people want what it is.”
He attributes the successes of “I’ll Be” and “I Could Not Ask for More” to more than a small dose of fate, he says.
“While I did work hard and while I did a lot of things to help aid in the success of the songs − and some stuff possibly more questionable than others − you can’t discount the timing,” he said. “We literally were in the very last class of the big-time music industry. All of the ’90s bands were plugged into a machine that was at its zenith, running at maximum output with very little standing in our way.”
He says he appreciates the impact that his music has had on the lives of others, welcoming interpretations from fans.
“My intention is almost insignificant,” he said. “When it comes to songwriting, it doesn’t matter what I intend. It only matters what people interpret. I think in the case of art, once people have interpreted what you’ve done, that’s when the circle is complete. It’s not for me to tell anybody how to feel. I just am grateful anybody would (make it part of their life) in the first place.”
There are some interpretations that do stray more than others, however.
“I’ll Be” features a few famous oft-misheard lyrics, all of which McCain has heard throughout the years.
“I think the most common is ‘I’ll be your crying soldier,'” he said, rather than “shoulder.”
Another often misquoted line is “greatest event of your life” instead of the correct “fan,” he said.
But McCain kind of wishes that one had played out a little differently.
“I’ve been dreaming of the auto industry this whole time,” he said. “Dude, I can’t believe you haven’t gotten me to do ‘the greatest van of your life.'”
Visit casino.hardrock.com/atlantic-city/event-calendar/train for tickets to the Hard Rock concert, and stay with edwin.com for more tour dates, updates and more.
Ilana Keller is an award-winning journalist and lifelong New Jersey resident who loves Broadway and really bad puns. Reach out: [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Edwin McCain feeling ‘Lucky’ for decades of music and misheard lyrics
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