Macy Gray's unusual-sounding raspy voice found mainstream success with her Grammy-winning soulful ballad, I Try, from her 1999 debut, On How Life Is. Sadly, she would never reach the same career heights again and was in danger of becoming a one-hit wonder.
Flash forward 11 years, and the 42-year-old Gray has picked herself up after some major bumps in the road, including becoming label-less after the failure of her last and fourth studio album, 2007's Big.
She self-financed the followup record, the recently released The Sellout, which was recorded in six different studios, and eventually got picked up by Concord Records.
The mother of three teenaged children says she had no other choice but to continue to pursue music.
"Just in life you got to keep going, no matter how disappointed or discouraged you get or how broke you get," said Gray in Toronto recently for a free performance (with Chaka Khan) at the TD Toronto Jazz Festival. "You have to keep going 'cause if you stop then you don't have a chance anymore. So I never think about stopping. That wouldn't make sense. This is what I do."
Gray, who doesn't expect to tour until October or November, says with career crisis came artistic opportunity.
"I think when you make music or you're an artist or you make movies or anything creative I think you need ups and downs because those are your best inspirations," said Gray. "You have to have a down to get an up. It gives you stories. It gives you things to sing about. Things to talk about, things to share. So, you know, when you're an artist, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you plateau into some kind of constant happiness, then you don't have any material."
Among the downs for Gray was not getting her phone calls returned as she tried to lineup producers for The Sellout.
"It was like crickets for a while," she joked. "It's really rough. It's very cliche but when people feel like things might not be happening for you, things get a little like, not as accessible as they were before. Not necessarily they didn't call me back. But it wasn't like, 'Oh, I gotta go do that.' Or it was like a distant priority. Like No. 88. It's just about desire. Like everybody wants to do what's hot right now. It's just an energy that I was uncomfortable with so I ended up working with this up and coming producer. I like hunger. Everybody likes that whole Rocky story where you want something so bad. And when you're making a record, you really need that energy."
Ultimately, The Sellout includes guest appearances by her longtime friend Bobby Brown on Real Love, and Slash on the provocatively titled Kissed It which "is about staying in a relationship because the sex is so good, oral sex in this case," she explained bluntly.
She'd been asking Slash to play on one of her albums for years.
"I would send him songs and he would always turn me down. It was the worst rejection." said Gray. 'Cause he's really picky about what he plays on. So anyways, I sent him Kissed It, and he called me right back and was like, 'Yeah, I'll do that.'"
Looking back, Gray said she never thought about topping the success of her debut disc, but everyone else did.
"I think the industry and the press really give you a hard time when you don't have what they consider success. But I feel like I've done really well. My first album was definitely this weird phenomenon that I didn't even see coming and you know I think I've done albums and records just as good but commercial success is a whole different thing and I really my goal now is I want to be honest and I want to be pure in my music. And, 20 years from now, when people are picking up records and listening to music, I want to be one of the artists they still listen to."
''Dancing' was a great experience'
Singer Macy Gray appeared way out of her comfort zone on the 2009 season of Dancing With The Stars, as she lurched around the dance floor and became the second celebrity kicked off. Turns out she was.
"Looking back on it, it was a really great experience," Gray said. "When I was doing it, it was awful, terrifying. I'm not a dancer. I have flat feet. There's nothing in my body that's built for dancing. It was very scary being on television and just the whole thought of being judged by all of America and those three (judges) cause they're real dancers and I'm not."
Turns out, her mother was a fan of the show. "My mother talked me into it," said Gray. "She actually made a good suggestion. She said, 'Why don't you try something new like get out of this rut?' She was kind of like, 'Go refresh yourself. Do something you've never done before.' So that definitely touched a nerve because at the time I really needed to do that ... So it was good for me in that it kind of lit a fire under me a little bit. It got me back and focused, mentally, but I was really nervous."
And what did her three teenaged kids -- aged 12, 14 and 15 -- think of her not-so-fancy footwork? "They just laughed at me," said Gray. "They thought it was ridiculous 'cause they don't watch that kind of stuff. But they rooted for me. They were there. But they were like, 'What are you doing?' "
