Macy Gray

Behind the voice of Canton’s most recent music star

By Susan Fee

That voice--it’s sultry, smoky, and sexy. It’s part Billie Holiday, part Tina Turner and part Marge Simpson on helium. It’s unmistakably Macy Gray. It’s that voice I hear on the phone when I talked to the Canton native about her latest CD and concert tour with David Bowie which comes to the CSU Convocation Center this month. I recognize her voice, but at the same time, there’s something unfamiliar about it.

I had seen Gray on various TV shows and read past interviews. She had always seemed exuberant, if not unpredictable. Foremost in my memory was her 2001 appearance at the Pro Football Hall of Fame exhibition game. Donned in a Browns jersey, she delivered an offbeat, tentative version of the National Anthem. Her voice grew more wobbly as she stumbled over the words. The crowd began laughing and booing. Mercifully, a low-flying formation of planes drowned out the end. Gray later referred to the incident as “life’s most embarrassing moment.”

So, when we talked, I was prepared for a conversation that could be potentially bizarre. Macy Gray was anything but that. She was thoughtful and polite. Yet, her voice revealed something different--a cautious, guarded tone.

“Fame changes everything,” she said. “It changes who you can trust and who you can’t. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’m not having fun; I’m having a blast. But I don’t trust like I used to. There are a lot of people who suddenly want to be my friend. I never wanted to be a person who didn’t trust. It’s heartbreaking, really.”

Gray says it’s part of what inspired her latest work, The Trouble with Being Myself. “It’s about the trouble with being true to yourself,” she explained. “When you do, people don’t understand. It may not be conventional stuff, so it’s hard to take sometimes.”

Gray’s rise to fame has been anything but conventional. She grew up as Natalie McIntyre, adopting her stage name years later from a Canton neighbor named Macy Gray. “It was just a cool name,” she said. “It sounded like show business.” Her mother, a teacher, never married her daughter’s biological father. When Gray was seven, her mom married Richard McIntyre, and she took his last name. “He’s my father, not my step-father,” she said. “He’s the only man who ever raised me.” McIntyre recently died, and Gray acknowledges him in the song, “Things That Made Me Change”:

Sure would like to see you and visit your big house in the sky.

I wish you didn’t have to leave us, but since you’re gone the time sure does fly.

So I don’t get attached too much anymore,

it’s a different world and I’m a different girl.

The voice that helped her win a Grammy in 1999 kept her quiet as kid attending Crenshaw Jr. High. “I wasn’t crazy about school. I was teased about my voice. I was a misfit, an outcast.” Her voice wasn’t the only thing that set her apart. Nearly six-feet tall, she towered over her classmates.

“I remember my clothes were always too little. I’d go to bed and have growth spurts, and I then I’d be walking to school in clothes that were too small,” she said. “My hair was big and messy. My mom always had to rush off to work and didn’t have time to brush it.” She describes herself as a shy, awkward child. “But, I had a lot of cousins. They saved me.” Today, she says she, “has friends and is fun,” but is hardly extroverted.

In 1981, Gray entered Western Reserve Academy as part of A Better Chance, a scholarship program offered to minority students. Kristin Mayer was her roommate freshman year. “When I found out that Natalie McIntyre was Macy Gray, you could have pushed me over with a feather,” says Mayer. “She was painfully, painfully shy. She’d sit in the corner and keep to herself. If you’d ask me to choose someone who was going to go on and become a music star, Natalie would have been the last person.”

Headmaster Henry Flanagan recalls the 14-year old as showing an interest in music and composition. “She was part of the Glee Club. Her voice was singular with a distinct pattern and tonality. And she was tall, even then.” Flanagan also remembers Mrs. McIntyre, “She’s the force behind her daughter. She’s a clear thinker, quite a woman.”

Mayer also says her roommate’s mother made a strong impression. “Her mom is an amazing woman. She’s open and bubbly. I don’t think they had it easy, and her mom made it against the odds. She’s extremely educated. She became my role model too.”

Gray credits her mom with influencing her early musical tastes with artists like Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick and Sly Stone. For eight years, her mother also dragged her to piano lessons twice a week, which Gray says she detested.

According to Flanagan, Mrs. McIntyre is still very influential in getting Canton students into Western Reserve Academy. But Gray says the two years she spent there were not happy ones.

“It wasn’t good for me as a teen girl. They offered college prep courses and forced independence, and I wasn’t ready for that. I was into hanging out, and I hung with everyone else who cut class. I definitely would not recommend boarding school.” Even so, one of her cousins is currently a student there.

Flanagan describes Gray’s departure from the school as a mutual decision. “Academically, we are very rigorous. I think she was overwhelmed by the sheer weight of assignments. But, with time and maturity, we believed she could have been successful here.” She finished high school at Canton South before entering University of Southern California’s film school.

It was in LA that Gray started singing in clubs and demo sessions. In 1996, she recorded an unreleased album for Atlantic Records, and then was dropped from the label. But the record was enough to catch the attention of Epic Records.

In 1998, she recorded On How Life Is. At the same time, she says, she hit rock bottom. “I was a mess. I was pregnant and newly divorced. I had no money. I came home to live with my parents and have my baby. It was a bummer. I mean, it’s not that I don’t love my ma, but living at home when you’re twenty-seven years old is not what you want to be doing at that stage of your life.” She named the baby, her third, Happy.

Gray is reluctant to talk about her ex-husband except to say that he lives in LA and when she’s on tour, he helps to watch the kids, ages six, seven and eight. However, she alludes to the experience in “Things That Made Me Change”:

So proud to have your baby till you up and left us alone.

Would you care that it drove me crazy? I have to make it on my own.

One year later her debut album sold over seven million copies worldwide. Her single, “I Try,” landed her a Grammy for Best New Artist. She followed it up with her second album, The Id and a string of musical collaborations with artists such as Carlos Santana.

Her acting credits are adding up fast too. She’s had roles in Training Day, Scary Movie 3 and Jackie Chan’s remake of Around the World in 80 Days. This month she’ll play Memphis soul singer Carla Thomas on NBC’s American Dreams.

“I want to dive into it,” Gray said regarding her acting. “I want to be great at it before I ever call myself an actress. There are so many women who have worked hard to be great. I’m not there yet, but I want to get to that point.”

Overall, Gray’s work has been well-received. While the critics sometimes make fun of her fashion choices and eccentric behavior, they’ve left her alone on her public criticism of the President.

Last spring, when the Dixie Chicks were being banned from airplay for their comments regarding Bush, Gray shared much the same sentiment while performing at the Odeon in Cleveland. She led the audience in a minutes-long chant criticizing President Bush. She says she can’t explain why some artists are singled out for scrutiny while others aren’t. “A lot of performers had strong feelings about the war. And a lot of them got scared after that thing with the Dixie Chicks and they quit talking. If you do that, you might as well move to Iraq.”

More of Gray’s views on life can be seen next fall with the release of her cartoon, A Pretty Good Life. “It’s a coming of age story of five teenage kids,” she said. “They all have crazy parents. It’s based on my memories growing up.” Gray will be providing her voice for one of the characters. The others have yet to be cast. And it seems the years in film school have paid off. She’s currently writing a screenplay about her life which she hopes to have completed this year.

Even though she lives in LA, Gray says she comes back to visit her family in Canton at least four times a year. She stays with her mom and sleeps in her childhood bedroom. “It’s little, the size of a closet. It has a full-size bed, flowered comforter and a telephone,” she said. “When I left home, Ma painted it light blue, but it used to be white, purple and pink.”

Is this the life she imagined for herself while growing up? “I always wanted to be somebody,” she said. “I’ve always been driven; I pray. But there are a lot of people like that. I don’t know why God picked me.”