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Making original music after an almost two-decade hiatus, MD McNally’s debut solo LP The Marvelous is a lush, harmonic romp through classic, prog, and jam-band rock, new wave, alt-country, and modern indie. Whether drenching his melodies in a thick fog of luscious guitar tone or elegantly illustrating anthemic folk with eloquent fingerstyle playing, McNally and his tight-as-heck bandmates deliver with heartfelt, easy confidence.
A vivid, unabashedly hooky record that manages to balance technical virtuosity with a compellingly loose, broken-in feeling, McNally’s self-produced premiere is richly immersive and leaves its marks long after the music stops. Equally at home at sweat-drenched rock clubs as beer-soaked honky-tonks, The Marvelous promises a heck of a good time either way. A perfect example of this comes in the form of the new single “The Day She Died”, which we are pleased to premiere today.
About the song, MD comments “The week of the final sessions for The Marvelous LP I attended the funeral of an incredibly brave mom who succumbed to breast cancer after years of battle. I was deeply moved by her character and by the courage of her kids and husband. The reception was really an afterparty – live music, full bar in the street, rootbeer floats – because that’s who they were. Walking home, my thoughts of tragedy were interrupted by a theme of victory. I mean, there were spectacular remembrances and tributes and this tangible invigoration of good spirits in the massive crowd of mourners. With each step on the sidewalk I felt a melodic pulsing that I knew I had to try to capture because it was like nothing else I had expressed musically. Ideas like that have a tendency to flutter off out of my reach really quickly. So I held on as hard as I could and put the full song together that afternoon. When I played it for the other fellas it was clear that we needed to make room for it in that last session. Despite the title, I wanted the song to be about the joy that deserves to emerge from such grief.”
