Under the influence

>> The classical training and local
assimilation of Tallahassee’s Jade McNelis

OF GREEN FABLES: Jade McNelis

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I’m a tyrant, apparently,” says Jade McNelis, the Montreal-based singer-songwriter and pianist last seen opening for Stars at le National, minus the band that used to back her up. They were well paid, she says, but quit over a dispute involving her record deal as a solo artist. “It’s so much more fun to have a band but I’m sure I’ll meet the right people to play with, at least for live shows. I’m not worried.”

Playing solo is no sweat for McNelis, whose musical accomplishments thus far are mighty impressive for a 20-year-old. Born in Taiwan, McNelis was adopted by American parents and grew up in suburban Tallahassee, Florida. Her father was a cowboy, and although her parents forced piano and violin lessons upon her, she preferred riding horses. When they divorced and horses became scarce, she fell back on music.

Prior to middle school, she listened primarily to the likes of Beethoven and Rachmaninoff—George Gershwin was as pop as her taste would allow. But then she went through a boy-band phase, and a straight-edge hardcore phase, before discovering indie music, via bands like Death Cab for Cutie.

Coincidentally, it was on a break from a Death Cab tour that Stars wound up playing a headlining show in Tallahassee, with McNelis as the support act.

“I didn’t even get to see their set that night ’cause I was so hammered,” McNelis admits. “I was throwing up in the bathroom and had to go home.”

Luckily, Stars singer Torquil Campbell introduced himself before nausea took hold, and over the next year, demos were recorded and a deal was signed with local label Good Fences, home of his other band, Memphis. In 2006, McNelis came to Montreal to record the All the Fables EP, a sophisticated patchwork of intricate piano, pretty, winsome vocals and sparing guitars, horns, strings and synths, co-produced by Stars keyboardist Chris Seligman and Studio Plateau’s Drew Malamud. And she never left.

“I’d come up to visit a few times and I was always enamoured with Montreal ’cause it’s like a European city in North America,” she says.

McNelis will record her debut LP this winter with Jace Lasek at Breakglass Studios, and has signed to L.A. label Chop Chop, an extension of the music supervision company responsible for the soundtracks of The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy. She intends to produce a more live, gritty record, set to drop in the fall.