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"The one thing I felt I could hold on to, that I wasn't going to lose, was the music. I didn't know before that, that music was where my soul based itself."
By Kathleen Warnock
of ROCKRGRL Magazine
Meghan Cary was going to be a biomedical engineer. But life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.
These days, the former Duke University pre-med major is a rising singe/songwriter living in New York City. She plays house concerts, intimate venues in the east and south, at conferences and festivals, and steps over the lines drawn around people who sing powerful songs they've written themselves on an acoustic guitar.
New York is only a few hours, yet eons away from Hershey, PA, where Cary grew up. In the small green town, the streetlights are shaped like chocolate kisses and local kids spend their summers playing and working at Hershey Park.
Cary left the self-proclaimed sweetest town in America to study at Duke. "Somehow I came out with a drama degree," she says. Cary followed up with an MFA in acting at Florida State's Asolo Conservatory, and returned to Hershey, degree in hand to become one of ther performers she'd idolized as a child.
"My first professtional job was six shows a day, seven days a week. At the time, it was a dream come true. It was fun, and it was one of the hardest things I'd ever done." But Cary had a golden opportinity to use those acting chops. "You had to get strong or fall apart. I lost my voice two weeks before the end of the season. When I had to do my number, I got to the big belt notes and nothing came out. I had a hand-held-mic, so everytime I was supposed to sing, I looked at it like it was shorting out."
The summer after she got her MFA, Cary announced to her family and friends that she was moving to New York. She had $200 and no idea where she would live.
"The day before I was going to leave, I got together with a bunch of friends. One happened to be going to New York City the next day, so I got a ride. That night, I got home from a party, and my mom said that someone was trying to call me from a ship." An actor friend who was working on a cruise ship had heard Cary was headed for New York. "She asked where I was staying and I said I didn't know. She said her apartment was available and that I could stay there for the next two months."
After landing in New York, Cary started lining up acting gigs. Casting in the musical "Pump Boys and Dinettes," came with another unexpected change of plans. "I met a musician who was in that show, Matthew Black, and he and I fell in love. He was in a cover band and a great flat picker." Cary and Black joined forces professionally and personally. "I sang backup and did a few solos in his band, and we got engaged."
But Black died suddenly in 1995. Cary's first album, New Shoes, is a tribute to him. "The one thing I felt I could hold on to, that I wasn't going to lose, was the music. I didn't know before that, that music was where my soul based itself."
In her performances, Cary tells a story about how just before his death, Matthew bought a pair of new shoes, tried them on, and left them in the middle of the bedroom floor.
"When I came home, they were still there and I couldn't move them. I went off to the mountains to heal. When it was time to come back and have the memorial service, I called up a friend and told her about his new shoes. His robe was in the bathroom, his razor was on the sink, and I said I didn't know what to do about that. She told me to write a song. So I picked up Matty's old Martin guitar. I just put chords together that I knew, and started writing music."
Out with friends a few months later at one of the bars they'd played, the bartender inquired if they were playing next week. Cary said no and the guy asked why not. "I told him that Matthew had passed away and he said, 'Well, can you play anyway?' I was thinking 'hell, no,' but what came out of my mouth was 'yeah.'"
The following week Cary debuted as a solo act. "I only had three original songs, plus 'Angel from Montgomery' and 'Me and Bobby McGee,' but I had to play two 40-minute sets. I filled them in with a lot of stories, and got people to participate in the music, as well as to really listen, to get what's going on. I still try to do that."
Cary learned how to write songs, play, and handle the business end of a musical career on the job. "I told myself I'd better keep writing. I'd better learn how to play this monster. It wasn't so much a choice as a falling in to the circumstances."
"New Shoes" was Cary's first real, finished song. "A lot of those early songs are all about loss and carrying on. We'd only been together for two years and we were in the place where every hue was vibrant."
Cary decided to make a tape of all the songs she'd written for Black, and give them to his family.
"I got those songs together and I didn't really have a way to record them, so I got an engineer and a producer on board. Then I realized that I had a producer, and engineer, and all these songs. That's how I made my first record."
Cary released New Shoes in 1998 on her own AngelBear Record label. Since that first positive recording experience, she recorded a second album with a producer she said made her feel like she "didn't know anything." She ultimately decided to produce it on her won and plans to release her second album, Onion Dream, this spring.
"The problem with diving in is that sometimes you hit your head on a rock and almost drown. Other times, the ripples that you make really do something for you. My head is above water again."