phenomeNEWS - This Month's Music Review

This Month's Music Review
by Greg Ozimek

This month, a solo album from a trained opera singer and Broadway veteran who had the itch to leave success in the Big Apple and start the drum beat to making it as a singer-songwriter in LA.
And the beat goes on.

TRUE BELIEVER
MALEA MCGUINNESS
ALLEDGE PRODUCTIONS
www.maleamusic.com

Ms. Malea McGuinness’s mature, strong, sweet, warm, full and expressive voice and the experiences from her young life which somehow have given her tempered insights into life... and a life-long quest which is not necessarily a straight line by many standards... are all keystones which her first solo and indie album: True Believer are based on.

I trust in the things my eyes can’t see because what if they’re true?
I don’t know why, why I even tried, to fit into something you could see.
From “Spinning”: True Believer

Now hear this! True Believer is definitely not an opera performance CD! No, no. Far from it.

However, before Malea finished her degree in Opera Performance at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music, she was building her vocal muscles and skills as a lead in the Broadway performance of The King And I with eight shows per week. This semi-native New Yorker (born in Texas) also stayed busy with a few years of modeling and TV commercials before that.

Rather than choosing to simply jump tracks and find a solo singing career while in NYC without missing a beat... and not taking to heart Frank Sinatra’s immortal words, “If I can make it here, I can make it any where....” Malea dropped out of the NYC scene and started over in Los Angeles. She entered into the bounty and tragedy of LA. When you start out with success in the Big Apple, LA. is the last step before the Pacific Ocean.

Hollywood swallows up a lot of people, most of the people who come from all the fields and towns of America to become stars or models find they are the grist for the restaurants and the Los Angeles economy: waitstaff, cooks, skilled and not-skilled trades, maids and landscaping. Malea took turns at all of these stand-by jobs.

“On True Believer, I wanted to write about experiences that had shaped me and my life,” she said. “I had so many discouraging moments when I first got to L.A. and was trying to figure out what to do while working these odd jobs and listening to people who thought I made the wrong choices. The one thing I knew was that I was going to make music and I kept believing, even on the tough days. The songwriting started with a book of lyric ideas and all of the concepts were based on things I’d been through.”

Malea’s pedigree includes Tanglewood and Oberlin Conservatory before the Manhattan School of Music. She’s won awards (AAM Music Awards Female Vocalist of the Year, 2007), many of her True Believer songs are in rotations on XM Satellite Radio, VH1 and MTV and her songs are charting and rising on those top music charts.

What she really likes is, “To connect with audiences and really touch people with the music I write and sing. It’s an incredible feeling to know that they appreciate and support what I do and that my music can be a source of hope, healing and inspiration for them.”

And to this we say: Oh yeah, thank you for being your own True Believer! Bring it on Ms. Malea! Your True Believer album of 14 tunes was quite complete but too short. It leaves us happy and wanting more from you! When will we see album number two? Visit www.myspace.com/maleamcg