My mom is a trained musician and music instructor, and most of my earliest memories include music.
I loved listening to the radio and home stereo as a kid, but playing music didn't excite me. I grudgingly learned to sing and play piano and played drums in band, but it all felt too much like school, so I quit all of it at around 16.
Then when I was 22, I made a friend in college named Michael Holmes who played acoustic guitar and wrote and sang his own songs. He taught me how to play the basic chords, and suddenly, I was obsessed (this was also the point when I went from a 4.0 spring semester to a 2.2 fall semester).
My biggest obsession was figuring out how to play and sing at the same time, which didn't come easily to me.
I would try to play and sing a simple cover, and it felt like school again. The day it flinaly clicked for me was the first time I tried to write a song.
I called half my friends and excitedly scream/played my new masterpiece to them or their answering machines.
I graduated the next year with about 100 mediocre songs under my belt, went to grad school so I wouldn't have to get a job yet, and formed my first band.
30+ years later, I'm still obsessed.
On Wicked Din
lead vocals and rhythm guitar (1990s Fender Stratocaster and Fender Twin Reverb) on all eight tracks — I Knew, The Beanstalk Speaks, Kiss Hello, Wicked Din, Soup A, Lonely Lady, Life Fever, Unshakable No.
Albums I love
Records Mac keeps going back to.
On right now
What Mac has been playing lately.
Photographs
19 shots Mac is in. The whole gallery.
What the press said
Bartine's voice is … rich, unhurried, capable of both the barroom holler and the confessional near-whisper, sometimes within the same verse. He sings like a man who has waited decades to say these particular things in this particular order, and that patience translates into control.
Indie Dock Music Blog
Frontman Mac Bartine has been sitting on these eight songs since the late nineties, and you can hear the sediment. This is music that has been rained on, dried out, rewritten, and rained on again. It has weather in it.
Indie Dock Music Blog
Rich vocals sit against soaring guitars, pedal steel, vintage keyboards, and cinematic swells that give the songs a road-worn glow. You can hear the room in it, the air around the instruments, the human grain of performances that favour warmth over sheen. It feels like a band playing together, listening hard, and trusting the song to lead. Frontman Mac Bartine's songwriting sits at the centre of that chemistry.
Songplode