It’s late August, the height of the racing season, and singer/songwriters Kevin and Katie McKrell are sitting on the patio of the Parting Glass, an Irish-style pub in the heart of Saratoga Springs. They’re there to play a show, but right now they’re watching the show as the summer party people file in after a day of losing or winning at the track.
For Kevin, it’s just one more night at the Parting Glass, a venue he’s played once or twice nearly every month for 25 years. But while there’s something intimately familiar about the scene, there is also something new. For years, when you said “The McKrells,” you were talking about a Celtic-bluegrass band that livened up pubs and festivals around the Capital Region and beyond. Today, the McKrells means something much different. The old band is gone, and earlier this year Kevin teamed up with his daughter, Katie, whose own music career has shown promise for some time, but had lately stalled. Father and daughter have come together now when both are at turning points, in a sense reinventing themselves through their collaboration with each other.
At 52, Kevin has the ruddy complexion of a man who’s seen many miles on the roads of a few continents. For three decades, he’s played every Irish pub and dive bar from here to Hell’s Kitchen and back, along with many in Canada, Ireland, and Europe. He once played Carnegie Hall to a standing ovation as opening act to the Furey Brothers. He’s been a permanent fixture on the regional music scene as well, first in the late ’70s with Donnybrook Fair, a high-energy, crack-harmony Celtic outfit. That group was followed by namesake band The McKrells, whose virtuoso players Kevin led through three albums. The quality of Kevin’s work has long garnered the respect of his peers, in praise money can’t buy.
“Kevin’s an anchor, a master. He’s not gonna not do quality work” says Michael Eck of WAMC’s Performance Place. “A veracity informs what he does, and it always comes from the right places.” Eck gives the nod to daughter Katie being brought in to the act. “I think it’s positive for Katie joining now, after being on her own. By doing that, they come together as peers.”
Kevin agrees that the change is the right move at the right time. The permanent-band gig has its rewards, but McKrell needed a break from The McKrells. “Once you’re in a band with guys, all of a sudden this false loyalty thing develops. I go to Europe five times a year, and that became an issue—‘why aren’t we going?’ Everything you do, you’re attached at the hip. They [were] brilliant players, but I just wanted to move on. It ran its course; you lose steam.”
Out of the ashes of the old band, McKrell has built a new configuration, the Hard Road Céilidh Band. The focus here is Kevin and Katie, who sometimes play as a duo, but more often with a revolving cast of backup players. “A Céilidh or céilí [pronounced “kay-lee”] is a social event,” Kevin explains, “typically with Celtic music and dancing. The word is in fact a Scottish Gaelic word for ‘visit,’ indicating that these cultural events began as informal gatherings in people’s homes.”
If Kevin is the star of the show, his daughter Katie isn’t far behind. She sings harmony, backup, and the occasional lead, and is a constant onstage foil to her father. Now nearing 30, Katie has performed as a solo singer/songwriter, having penned several intriguing, edgy pieces of her own, but this is her first band experience. After recently enduring a rough patch medically and emotionally, Katie understands the Hard Road part of the new combo’s name. Not only does it seem to be a good place for her musical growth, it’s a safe haven for her personal progress as well.
At the Parting Glass, show time is looming, but there’s no visible sign of concern in Kevin’s demeanor. “I go on when I want to,” he says. His long relationship with the pub allows him to call his shots on this point, and makes the gig as informal as an old Gaelic visit.
As fans file in, they find Kevin and say hello. He greets them as old friends, sharing his time with ease and humor.
“You gonna sing me some songs tonight?” one man asks, stopping by with his companion.
“I can do ‘Summer in Dublin’ for you” McKrell replied.
“That would make me happy,” said the man.
“That’s my lot in life,” he grinned, “what I live for.”
“Things are good with you?” the man asked.
“Yeah,” replied McKrell dryly. “I’m sitting up and taking soup.”
The band has tuned up and is waiting to go on stage. It wasn’t hard for the McKrells to find players to work with. Kevin must know everybody in the business, and he knew what he wanted. “I asked a bunch of guys if they liked being in a band that’s not really a band. We come together for big festivals, we do big venues, we don’t slog out the bar stuff. And it’s working great,” he laughs. “We have festivals booked without having played a gig.”
“The new band is like a co-op,” he explains. “Coming from the pressure of being in a band for 15 years, doing all the work, doing the booking for all this stuff, and worrying about whether we had work or not, I don’t want to do that again, but I want a band. And I want an Irish band.”
McKrell’s Irish heritage is a key part of his musical identity. He has considerable history with the island. “My father’s family is from County Louth,” he says “a small town called Carrickmacross where we still have tons of relations. I also have family in Newry in the north. My Ma’s family, the McCauleys, are also from Ireland, emigrating to Canada, where they settled in Edmonton, Alberta.”
Kevin’s musical roots resonate with centuries of Irish bards and singers. Likewise, given who her parents are (her mother Carla, herself a vocalist, also played with the old McKrells from time to time), Katie was probably destined to become a musician. It seems logical that she would join the family business, but working with her father wasn’t something either of them foresaw before now.
“The right thing at the right time,” Kevin says of their collaboration. “She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to get into it, and I wasn’t sure whether she was gonna be able to pull the weight—the schedule, and the crap that people say to you.”
Katie can come off as cool and detached at times, but onstage she’s vibrant, engaged, and appears glad to be there. “He never, ever pushed the music on me,” says Katie. “Actually, when I started to play at age 16, he was on the road. He came home and I was playing and it was like, ‘Whoa, she’s writing songs.’ I did my own thing, had my own gigs. Any daughter or son needs to separate themselves from their parents. I really did that. We never joined our stuff.”
On an excursion to the UK, however, that artistic separation changed by chance. “We went to a hootenanny in Scotland,” Katie recalls “and we did an open mic—we were there, and it was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ We did a song called ‘Queen of Argyle’ and they went nuts. It just clicked. [Then] the band went their separate ways, and it was perfect timing. It was just there. We’ve been just having a blast.”
“The camaraderie between the two of us, the experience, who better to learn from?” she asks. “He’s been a working musician for so long. And just being able to play with very, very good musicians, and all sorts of different gigs that I could never get.”
Though Katie is singing just two leads so far, she by no means takes a back seat. Her harmony isn’t layered way in the background, it’s of equal volume, and she doesn’t stand in the background either. Katie may be singing Celtic, but, feet apart, arms outstretched, she has the stance and attitude of a rocker.
Which is who she was in her solo career, a career that’s on hold for the moment. “The stuff I have on MySpace is harder,” she says of her own work. “I’m gonna pick it up again, but I’m learning so much right now. It’s like an apprenticeship. I’ve had to put my independent project very much on the back burner. [It’s] my own choice, of course. I don’t have the time.”
“I’m gigging like a seasoned pro,” she continues. “I know when I go back that my songwriting and performance skills, my own stuff, will be much better. When you play four or five gigs a week, your chops are better. My confidence onstage has gotten so much better, [learning] to talk to the crowd, being funny, entertaining people. Learning how to think on your feet, [and] working off of other people, their jokes and stories and interjecting.”
Katie knows that playing with her dad is a first-rate music school that will prepare her for what lies ahead. Life on the circuit is hard, and few have learned how to endure it better than Kevin McKrell. “Kevin’s a survivor,” says fellow Irish bandleader and frequent-bandmate Rick Bedrosian. “Not everybody has made it this far just playing music full time. Kevin’s tough, both physically and mentally.”
“I don’t mind the work, and I still love the road,” he says. “It was the worry about keeping everybody else working. This unit is nice, no pressure. The motto of the band is, ‘If I turn around and you’re there, you’re there’ ”
At the Parting Glass, the band was Bedrosian on bass and Steve Butler on bodhran, the Irish hand drum. The crowd is a mix of fans and tourists, all seated at a long line of tables in front of the stage, eating, chattering, and drinking Guinness. Kevin has been dealt this hand before. “Saratoga in August,” he notes before heading to the microphone. “You got wankers who don’t know what’s going on, you got people here for the show. It’s gonna be a blood bath. You put your head down, and do what you can.”
Before the wankers know what’s happened to them, Kevin and Katie are charming the crowd with their strong tunes, solid voices, and wicked stage patter. They get the crowd’s heads turned towards the stage with Kevin’s Celtic rocker “Better Time,” then silence the clatter of silverware with a stunning version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Patrons stop in mid-bite and watch in awe. Still, not everyone is happy. A few tunes later, a sloshed onlooker in his late twenties is standing stage-left and shouting.
“Play something from the South!” he croaks repeatedly, apparently expecting to hear “Free Bird” or “Sweet Home Alabama.”
“The south?” Kevin replies finally. “Okay, this is something from County Cork.”
Given Kevin’s history, that heckler got off easy. Michael Eck, who logs considerable hours of his own on stage, recalls legendary stories from years ago where, in the middle of a song, Kevin dealt more directly with obnoxious audience members. “He’d walk off stage and punch someone and go right back and sing,” Eck reports.
Katie might have been inclined to play something from Dixie, judging from her musical role model. “I wanna be working and making the same amount of money as Stacy Earle,” she says with a smile. “That’s exactly what I want. I want to be wearing the same shirts from the same shops she went to in Nashville. We played with her, and I was like ‘uh huh, there’s me.’ She was so nice, so sincere, and so relaxed. She was sitting in her skin real nice, very centered. I do this ’cause I love it, but she’s pulling in the price. She’s a high-ticket item.”
It’s opportunities like that, to play with the likes of Earle, that make touring with her father so valuable, and have raised the stakes for Katie. “When you are playing with others, you want to make sure you are doing a good job, and not letting anyone down,” she says. “But I think it’s probably pretty rare that you love the people that you are working with. It has always been very important to me that I not let my parents down. So, when I get up on stage, both of those worlds collide and I feel that [pressure]. I am sure that it makes me a better musician in a hurry. But if I had to choose the worst thing, more like the hardest thing, it would be that.”
Working with your daughter can be just as tricky for a father. “I worry that she will not have developed the thick skin one needs to deal with our chosen profession,” Kevin says. “So I find I am a bit more protective than I might be of another band member.” Just how does a protective dad deal with those inevitable times his good-looking daughter attracts the usual attention from men? “She’s capable of dealing with most anything,” Kevin says firmly. “But we do have my years of bouncing in Saratoga and Albany bars to fall back on, should any trouble arise.”
For more information, visit www.kmckrell.com and www.myspace.com/katemckrell.
This article appears in October 2007.
