interrupting yr broadcast: shannon mcardle

interrupting yr broadcast: shannon mcardle

The Mendoza Line always had a knack for somewhat mocking and defeatist album titles, culminating in last year’s final recording, 30 Year Low, and the band’s black humour hasn’t been lost in singer Shannon McArdle’s transition to solo star in the making. For nine years, McArdle was an increasingly integral part of The Mendoza Line. A fling with frontman Timothy Bracy turned into a relationship, and that relationship turned into marriage. Shannon and Tim wed in 2005. In February 2007, he left The Mendoza Line, the marriage, everything. Shannon came home from work one night and there was just a note. It read, simply, “I’m gone”. Her new album Summer Of The Whore is a desperate, honest and brutal document of the months that followed. ”It was the worst time imaginable,” she admits. “It was a huge shock. We were having problems but nothing that I thought we couldn’t get through.”

The two have still not spoken or seen each other since that day, an almost unfathomably painful thing to come to terms with. It was Tim who stimulated Shannon’s previously untapped songwriting talent, Tim who gave her her first guitar, Tim who asked her to marry him out of the blue. On the band’s Myspace there’s a weirdly discomfiting photo of the couple on what must have been their wedding day; in it, Shannon is gazing warmly at her new husband, who fixes the camera with an unnerving steely glare. He looks tense. In other photos, the two look completely at ease, curling up on a sofa together and laughing. As Shannon saw it, this tension was just part of their everyday. She says she felt very secure in the relationship, although admits the two did seek joint therapy at one point.

“How did YOU know I went to therapy? Obviously I’ve been talking way too much,” she laughs. “Couple’s therapy hurt us more than helped us. Bad therapist perhaps. But going on my own since Tim left has been extremely helpful.”

They say that bad things always come in threes, and so it proved. A serious accident had Shannon laid up in bed just weeks after Tim left. “I was accidentally tripped down the subway stairs and nearly broke my back,” she says. “I had a bump the size of a watermelon on my back for a month, tons of bruising, and had to go through months of rehabilitation.”

And then? “And then I got mugged a couple of months after that. I really thought it was the end for me!”

So music swept in like a handsome saviour to restore her to her rightful standing? Well, not quite. Shannon was in too bad a place for things to be that poetic and simple. “I thought I had no interest in ever writing music again,” she admits. “It is what I associated with Tim, whom I loved so deeply.”

As it turns out, it was writing a children’s book that got Shannon back on the wagon. A rickety wagon, but one that was moving forward nonetheless. The book, ‘Mushka’, was accompanied by six songs rich with sweet, sad sentiment and Shannon decided that they ought to be recorded, if not for release then for her friends who were starting families. After months of near isolation she picked up the phone and called Mendoza Line drummer Adam Gold. He agreed to record the songs with her, and soon they were complete.

Obviously that’s not where the story ends. Shannon may freely admit to having “a very dirty, juvenile sense of humor”, but calling a kids’ record Summer Of The Whore is perhaps stretching the boundaries of taste a bit too far. No, the ten songs that make up the album came later. Creatively rejuvenated and feeling inspired by the ‘Mushka’ project, in July last year Shannon sat down and wrote three of the songs in a single sitting. “I didn’t exactly have writer’s block,” she says of the time. “But when I did start to write, I completed writing the entire record in a matter of 3 weeks. It came pouring out!”

Shannon and Adam worked on the songs – with her twin brother Philip on guitar – between July and November last year, while “holed up in a dark, dingy basement studio”. Amazingly, she counts the location as a high point of the summer. “We were both so miserable, it was comforting,” she smiles. “The biggest challenge was just having the confidence to do it, at a time when my self-esteem was at an all-time low.”

The finished product is unflinchingly stark and quietly ferocious, a sort of Exile In Guyville for the Americana set that leaves you constantly questioning whether McArdle’s stepping up to the post-breakup plate is done with a swagger or pained stagger. Probably both. The album’s title suggests a willingness to provoke, but with her assurance that it’s neither self-defamatory or entirely flippant, it kinda makes sense. These songs were written when Shannon was trying to pull some semblance of her former self around the place, trying to claw back those feelings of security and confidence, trying to make the best of what she was left with. In her eyes, she was acting out of desperation and the title just fell into place. People tried to talk her out of it, sure, but she held firm.

As you might expect from someone who holds down a second job as a teacher of English to non-native speakers, Shannon knows a thing or two about the impact of words. And she employs them in interesting ways, too, sometimes delivering them as deadpan as you like. Standout track ‘Poison My Cup’ is as overtly sexual as the title track is brash yet playful, whereas ’He Was Gone’ is an excruciatingly hard look at what might have been: “He could have made us a universe / I can’t say which loss haunts me worse,” she opines painfully as the album draws to a close.

If Summer Of The Whore were unrelenting in its bleakness and monotone in textures it’s unlikely you would wish to revisit, but its variety of moods and compelling thread of twisted little ways in which to smile at yourself and the world around you provide more than enough appeal. And Shannon is definitely lighting up the room more these days. “So many things make me smile,” she tell us. “Terrible jokes, my two cats, and just about anything that is not appropriate. Nothing sophisticated here!”

All gaucherie and crassness aside, Shannon seems to be riding on a crest of newfound confidence in the wake of the critical reception for Summer Of The Whore and that crest is advancing fast on pastures new. She’s already working on a new record, she tells us, but why the haste? “Of course, I’d be delighted if this record had a long shelf life.”

“But I’m already tired of hearing myself talk about it! I don’t want everyone else to get tired too!”

* * *

Mario Onnis and Alan Pedder
Summer Of The Whore is out now on Bar/None Records. 

Written by: Mario Onnis

Tags: shannon mcardle, the mendoza line

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