Few people do bored quite like Macy Gray. Sitting, with her feet on a stool,
in her New York bedroom, the 39-year-old is getting her nails done, and she
barely acknowledges the tiny beauticians who minister silently to her
fingers and toes. She’s going for cream and chocolate today, creating a
reverse effect with her fingernails topped off with a thin line in dark
brown, which merely makes her hands look as if she’s been out potting plants
and has forgotten to have a good scrub with a nailbrush. Gray only rouses
herself to address her courtiers when there is a slight misunderstanding
about the bill — and, briefly, it looks as if a Macy moment is about to
occur. It becomes clear that a gratuity is expected, and Gray, looking down
at the invoice and then up at the women with a dangerously dark expression
in her eyes, says incredulously: “That’s $239. Are you asking me for a
tip ?”
A few years ago, this is the point at which the scenario might well have
taken a very nasty turn indeed. Back then, Gray had a reputation that can
best be described as tricky. Drugs, hangers-on, shockingly bad punctuality
problems and paranoia brought on by her declining record sales meant that
she’d fetched up with very little goodwill in the bank. But on this
occasion, the shadow that has briefly passed across her face vanishes, and
Gray, with a regal sweep of her drying hands, signs for an absurdly generous
tip, and then ushers the diminutive helpmeets from the room.
“In retrospect,” she says, in her sandpapered helium rasp, “I think I needed
to be humbled.” (Gray left Sony after her third album, 2003’s The Trouble
with Being Myself, flopped.) “I had developed a really huge ego; I wasn’t
the person I had been. And I had a little drug habit for a while; I wasn’t
keeping in touch with the people who did really care for me. I believe in
God and I think it was just his way of doing it. Looking back, maybe I
needed that. And, you know, if I’d kept going, I might be this horrible
person — shaving my head, or in rehab or some shit like that.”
She lets out a gurgling, phlegmy cackle at this point, another sign that the
new Macy is in the room today, as is the amount of eye contact this famously
evasive interviewee grants. As the title of her comeback single, Finally
Made Me Happy, suggests, a new chapter is beginning in her life story. The
idiosyncrasies remain, however. The payoff in the song is that Gray,
addressing her man, barks that she only found that happiness “when you
walked out the door”.
Another key track on her new album, Big, is Strange Behaviour, where Gray
bumps off her fella for his life insurance, and sings: “People are asking
me; I say, ‘He’d be here but he’s deceased.’ And then I go and spend my
paper.” It is arguable, though, that her most important song is still the
one she first made her name with. I Try is a tune she’s both been having to
live down and live up to for eight years, ever since it tore up the airwaves
and propelled her debut album, On How Life Is, to worldwide sales of 7m,
about 3m of them in America. In a sense, this was the anomaly — not the
subsequent US sales figures of 500,000 copies for her following album, and a
rumoured 135,000 for her third. Needless to say, her record label didn’t
quite see it that way, and things came to a head two years ago, when it
suggested — having first, presumably, plucked up some courage — a new
direction to her.
“Tommy Mottola left,” she says, referring to the former Sony boss, “and
everything kind of fell apart after that. All the people that really
supported me over there, they all left. So it was really different. And the
guy that took over wanted me to do something I just didn’t want to do — and
it just kind of fell apart. He wanted me to do a 1960s covers album” — she
practically spits out this last phrase — “but I didn’t want to ruin my
career.”
In the interests of my personal safety, I refrain from putting it to Gray
that she’d already done a pretty good job of that herself. But she is
surprisingly candid when she says that this was the conclusion she was
forced to draw when, for the next 18 months, she was becalmed as an artist —
first, by having to sit out the remaining period on her Sony contract, and
then waiting by a phone that never seemed to ring.
“It was devastating, and eye-opening,” she continues. “You hear all these
horror stories about the record business, but I had never been exposed to
that. I’d been treated like a queen. I had it in my head, you know, ‘I’m
Macy Gray, everyone’s going to be banging on my door’, and that didn’t
happen at all. I’d watch those VH1 one-hit wonder shows, and I got really
bad about that. I thought, f***. I didn’t know if I’d ever make another
record, because nobody was sweating me. I think Clive Davis [the J records
boss and founder of Arista] asked me to send him a demo tape, which was like
really insulting. Go to the record store, do you know what I mean? I was
like, why don’t I call him and ask for his résumé?”
Salvation came in the form of will.i.am, the producer and Black Eyed Peas
main man, and then only because Gray showed up at a recording session one
evening, hoping to blag a cameo on the band’s new album. “I thought, maybe I
can do a hook on his record. I’d minimised myself to that point where I was
like, I’ve got to get something. The things I thought were going to happen
just didn’t.”
They have now. Gray has a deal with will.i.am’s new label through Geffen, and
Big is a stunning return to form. Nothing that was great about the original
Macy has been sacrificed: you can still trace a line back to the misfit,
accidental singer who took over vocal duties for an LA band one night when
their front woman failed to show, who later established a jazz and open-mike
cafe in the city, and, with three young children and a broken marriage to
contend with, got signed just as life collapsed around her. That Macy wrote
lyrics of bracing directness and sidled up to the mike, alternately snarling
and doing her unique version of a coo, as if not at all sure if she should
be the singer in the first place. On Big, there is a wonderful moment where,
on the Justin Timberlake collaboration Get Out, Gray lets out what sounds
like an involuntary, feral snore, way down in the mix. Anyone else would
have mixed that out. Gray leaves it in.
Bruised by record-company battles and rejection, she still took a while to
get back in the swing. She says she’d pray every night to get her desire
back, beating herself up about her perversity in longing for a new record
deal, and then wondering if she really wanted to go through it all again. “I
was going through the motions, but I wasn’t excited by it. It had been so
long, and I felt so abandoned, that I didn’t know if that’s what I wanted to
step back into. You have to have the desire, or else it all falls apart.
They would say, ‘So and so wants to do so and so with you’, and I just
really didn’t care. But I woke up one day and I’d got my desire back.
Without it, you’ll just feel like crap, and you’ll just be crap.”
Another problem with the mad Macy stories, she feels, was that they got in
the way of any discussion about her merits as a singer and writer. Sure,
you’d never call Gray’s bizarre, whisky-soured contralto a textbook, tutored
talent-show instrument — but, when measured against the crazed,
attention-seeking coloratura of chart contemporaries such as Mariah Carey or
Christina Aguilera, it seemed thrillingly visceral. Yet you’ll search in
vain for any mention of her vocals in the cuttings. Her mangled,
career-torpedoing rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner at a baseball game
in her Ohio hometown in 2001; her infamous run-in with Lord Snowdon during a
doomed photo session in London; the brushes with the law that this former
self-confessed burglar continued to have; her eccentric attire — these were
the anecdotes people swapped; her music was an afterthought. “You wake up,”
she says, “to the fact that perception is a lot more powerful than
reality, do you know what I mean? And when you’re a celebrity, that’s
magnified; because people don’t really know you, they only go on what they
read, and draw their conclusions from that. So they tell someone about you,
that person tells someone else, and all of a sudden you are that.”
Reminded of the Snowdon incident, when, having stormed out, she purloined a
car and drove off down the King’s Road, searching for shoe shops, calling
her publicist 30 minutes later with the unforgettable, “I’m near the river;
where are you?”, Gray rolls her eyes and lets out a long, eyelash-batting
giggle. But she can only do so now, she says, because that isn’t her any
more. She’s come through.
As for how Big fares, she does her best to come across as cool about it all,
but you can tell she’s anxious, if bullish. “There are things I know now,
mistakes that I’m not going to make this time. But I’m not counting on
anything. The industry has changed so much. I know my music is very
different, and I’m not 21 any more.”
The next day, we hit a swanky jewellers on the Upper East Side for a bit of
Macy retail. Lolloping towards a box of priceless, brightly coloured baubles
that resembles a pirate’s treasure chest, Gray mutters distractedly to
herself, “Bling, bling bling.” She's heading back into the fray, so she
might as well get some rocks for occasions. A camera crew hovers outside.
She’s got her second shot, and Big deserves to make it a successful one. Gray
has got her groove back. To paraphrase I Try, she tried to say goodbye, and
she choked.
