“I’m just now getting my feet back under me,” he says via phone from his Cincinnati home. Arlo McKinley performs on Wednesday, Aug. 17, at the Winchester in Lakewood. “It was amazing. It was a good experience. I’m still kind of processing it all. It’s a little different pace, and you have to get used to it, but it was great, and I loved it.”
The recent European tour signifies the way McKinley’s profile has risen, but it certainly hasn’t been an easy climb. McKinley initially began singing with his Baptist church when he was 8. He then started playing in punk bands when he became a teenager.
“I have two older brothers, and they were into punk and metal and and hardcore all that stuff,” he says, adding that he played some gigs in Cleveland with locally based hardcore acts such as Integrity and Ringworm. “My dad had a crazy bluegrass and country vinyl collection. If my brothers weren’t home, I was in their rooms going through all their records. And when my brothers kicked me out of their rooms, I would go into my dad’s room.”
In 2019, singer-songwriter John Prine came to one of McKinley’s Nashville shows. Impressed, he signed McKinley to his Oh Boy label.
“That show ended up being the final audition, I guess” says McKinley. “I got signed on my birthday in 2019.”
When it came time to record 2020’s Die Midwestern, his first record for Oh Boy, he traveled to Memphis to work with producer Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price, Jason Isbell, St. Paul & the Broken Bones).
“He steered the ship,” says McKinley when asked about Ross-Spang. “He got a good band together for me for Die Midwestern. It just worked. I didn’t want to switch it up [for This Mess We’re In]. Die Midwestern was recorded in seven days. We did it pretty quickly. When we came back for This Mess, we spent 14 days. That was a long time for me. We were more comfortable with one another. It was more relaxed. We took a little more time.”
McKinley says he mostly recorded the album live and used very few overdubs.
“For the most part, that’s how I like to record,” he says. “I want to get that energy. I want a record to sound like it’s people in a room playing. Most of the overdubbing is me doing harmonies on my vocals.”
Even though it’s a track McKinley says he was working on for a while before recording it for This Mess We’re In, the album opener suggests a departure from Die Midwestern if only because a string arrangement dominates the tune.
“I was listening to Nick Cave and Nick Drake, and both get string heavy,” says McKinley. “I think the only thing I said walking into the studio was that I didn’t want another Die Midwestern, and I didn’t want to make a straight-up country album. I think we succeeded.”
“Back Home,” another song McKinley pulled out of his back pocket of half-written tunes, centers on his love/hate relationship with his hometown.
“‘Back Home’ was one of the first songs I wrote when I started my solo project,” McKinley says. “I just never recorded it. As I was getting the songs together, I looked back to some of the old ones and grabbed it. It’s my view on some things here in Cincinnati. It’s a place I love, but there are some things I feel like I should get away from. But it’s always been home. As much as I’d like to get out, I always find myself back here.”
A beefy organ riff drives “To Die For,” another album highlight.
“That’s the song that I knew would be the biggest leap from Die Midwestern,” McKinley says of the tune. “I wanted to put out a rock song and have music that matched the lyric content. It was great watching Rick [Steff] play in the studio. I was set up right next to him. Watching him play was amazing. He’d be doing one thing on organ and something else on piano and moving all over the place.. It’s like a mad scientist in his lab doing his stuff. Rick is a good friend of mine and having him there as a mentor and musician is great. When he speaks, I know I should be listening and it’s going to be something I should hang onto.”
Last year, McKinley revamped his band and retooled his live show, so it rocks more than it has in the past. He says the volume might surprise some of his longtime fans.
“The shows used to be more laid back and what the album sounds like,” he says. “Now, it’s more of a rock show. I try to even it out. In the middle, I play a few songs by myself or with the pedal steel player. We do these songs pretty much how they are on the record — only a little louder. It’s fun. We’ve experimented with horn sections and different sounds and sometimes I don’t even play guitar. I just sing and be the frontman. It keeps it interesting and fun. The live show wasn’t lacking that, but I wanted it to be a different experience from the record.”
This article appears in Jul 13-26, 2022.
