“It was a pretty intense trip, to say the very least,” relates an exhausted and jet-lagged Edwin McCain.
He’s referring to a recent month long tour of military bases in Europe, but the 38-year-old singer/songwriter could be speaking about his entire career. From his start playing Southeastern bars and frat houses to his top-10 single “I’ll Be” and subsequent drop from Atlantic Records, McCain has taken the roller coaster route to success.
But he seems less interested in discussing the past than in relating his recent trip. The tour, which included visits to U.S. military bases in Italy, Greece, Bahrain, Germany and several countries in Africa, gave McCain a new perspective on the forgotten victims of war.
“When [you’re playing to] a room full of women and children you realize that the base has been 80-percent deployed and those folks haven’t seen their loved ones for 15 months,” he explains. “It really brings it home that the people struggling most are the families.”
Now back in the States, McCain has little time to rest. He just released his 10th album, a collection of soul covers titled Nobody’s Fault but Mine, and has dates booked across North America through early 2009. He says the idea for a covers record had been tossed around for years, remaining on the back burner until producer Tor Hyams approached him with a proposition.
“Tor had done a soul record similar to this with Joan Osborne and he had a lot of success with it,” McCain recalls. “He asked me if I’d ever thought about doing a cover album of soul music, and I said, ‘Absolutely! Kevn Kinney has been trying to get me to do that for 15 years.’”
The recording, he says, was completed in less than two weeks, designed to mimic the “cut it fast and leave it like it is” recording style of the ’50s and ’60s. “We just pressed ‘record’ and went for it,” he recalls with pride. “That part of it was a lot of fun for me because I really did want to preserve that tradition.”
After such a busy year, you might expect McCain to be apprehensive about returning to the road. But in fact, he’s looking forward to getting back on stage. It turns out McCain’s military tour opened some new doors for the singer.
“I’m excited about being out on the road,” he says with unmistakable sincerity. “We’re really starting to break [in] Europe. We’ve never spent a lot of time over there, but this military tour afforded us the opportunity to get in touch with some promoters and some folks that got really excited about booking us over there.”
If all goes as planned, McCain will be adding a string of European dates to his 2008 calendar, and, he says, there’s even talk of touring the Pacific Rim.
“We’re going to be going a little bit more global now. It’s been a long time coming.”
Edwin McCain plays the Rock n’ Kiss Stage at Coxe Ave. 9-10:30 p.m. on Friday.
