Michael McDermott
Noise From Words, the new album from singer/songwriter Michael McDermott, is a candid song cycle of addiction and redemption—or more accurately, the struggle for redemption. The Chicago-based artist holds nothing back on this boldly autobiographical work, motivated by the same impulse that led him to the lecture circuit, where he speaks to troubled individuals who are battling the same demons McDermott has at long last managed to subdue—though he would assert that this battle is never over. “I do it not because I’m ‘fixed’ or healed,” he says of this impulse to lend a helping hand, “but because I’m broken.”
The album (Aug. 28, One Little Indian), primarily performed live in the studio using sparse instrumentation—at times paring things down to just his vocal and acoustic guitar—captures McDermott at his most intimate and most searingly honest, duplicating the cathartic experience of his solo live performances. “It’s fun to have your buds onstage and jump around in front of a band,” he says. “But when it comes down to the solo stuff, it’s very naked and much more difficult to pull off on an emotional level. After a solo set, I’m just drained, not because I’ve been jumping around, but because I’ve just turned myself inside out.”
It’s precisely this acute degree of psychological self-exposure that makes Noise From Words so powerful. McDermott retraces the path that led him to the very brink of the abyss and back again on such unforgettable songs as “Long Way From Heaven,” “My Father’s Son,” “Broken,” “Just a Little Blue” and “I Shall Be Healed.” These understated but urgent songs form the chapters in a sort of aural autobiography whose thematic range also encompasses relationships (“Still Ain’t Over You Yet,” “A Kind of Love Song,” “Tread Lightly,” “No Words,” “All My Love”) and belonging (“The American in Me”), forming a comprehensive view of contemporary existence at its extremes.
McDermott describes the cinematic opener “Mess of Things,” with its evocative tableau of acoustic, dobro, piano and pedal steel, as “the thematic cornerstone of the record. The genesis of this song came from a collage of images of how my past seems to follow me around. The line, ‘I’m on 23rd waitin’ on a friend’ is from my memory of living on 23rd Street in Manhattan and waiting on my dealer. It was one of those moments when you get the feeling that, no matter how bad a decision you’re about to make, there are forces at work beyond your control, like loving the wrong things and the wrong people—and when you reach the crossroads, which direction you ultimately go in.”
At the tender age of 20, McDermott broke out of the Irish Catholic neighborhood that had formed the boundaries of his world, signing a big-time record deal with Giant/Warner Bros. “My ship had come in, or so I thought,” he says with a rueful laugh. His debut album, 1991’s 620 W. Surf, introduced the artist’s spiritually inclined songs and expansive, rootsy sound—exemplified by the rock hit “A Wall I Must Climb”—generating critical hosannas and drawing the requisite Springsteen comparisons, as did his ‘94 follow-up, Gethsemane. But McDermott’s ascending career brought with it an equal and opposite reaction, as the newcomer quickly got his introduction to temptation.
“On my first tour,” he recalls, “every night there was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the dressing room, and pretty ladies waiting at my door. In high school, I had read William Blake, who wrote that ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’ and Arthur Rimbaud, who wrote that ‘In order to be a seer, you must have a rational disordering of the senses.’ Those two quotes became my mantras. I wanted to experience all that was in life—everything, the good and the bad. On my first trip out to L.A., as I was driving down Sunset, I said to a friend, Show me the gutter,’ because I really wanted to experience it. Years later, that same friend said to me, ‘I wish I had never shown you the gutter. I never knew you’d take it down this far.’”
