Ginger Mackenzie

Performing as part of Lilith Fair, July 25 at First American Music Center and 9 p.m. July 26 at Exit/In

When Texan Ginger Mackenzie walks onstage this Sunday at the Lilith Fair’s Nashville date, her steps will mark the culmination of a journey that has changed her life. Two years ago, Mackenzie stood in the wings of the Lilith Fair stage in Denver—not as a performer, but as an Arista Records promotions executive diligently working to boost the career of event founder Sarah McLachlan. It was during this concert that she heard her true calling as an artist.

“I had to stand backstage while all of the other women walked [on],” she recalls. “I knew then that even if I didn’t make it in the music business, I certainly couldn’t work in it. It was eating at my soul. This was a celebration of women in music, and I thought, ‘You know what? This is what I am supposed to be doing.’ I’ve known it all my life but I somehow got sidetracked, which is easy to do.”

Her mission established, the soft- but clearly spoken redhead began pursuing her new career with breathtaking determination and effervescence. She quit her six-figure record label job, a move that forced her to lease out her comfortable house and move into a small garage apartment, and took the former job of her Arista intern, selling beer on a country club golf course in Austin. “I had written the songs for my album and was in the process of setting everything up,” she says. “I quit the job the day I got the CDs from the plant.”

Using equipment donated by friends, Mackenzie recorded her debut album, Earthbound (Earthnoise Records), in only a few days at her home, which was in the flight path of the Austin airport. “While I was singing, I had to hold up cords that weren’t grounded right so they wouldn’t buzz,” she says. She wrote all of the songs herself and coproduced the project with Billy White. Released in February 1998, before the singer had ever performed in front of an audience, the guitar-based album sold 3,000 copies after receiving airplay on several Austin stations.

Mackenzie’s second album, Kismet, which was primarily composed on the piano, was released in March and has sold an impressive 10,000 copies in Austin, thanks to a large club following and great success of her first single at KAMX, the city’s top adult contemporary station. The album contains rerecordings of five songs from the previous album, along with five newer songs.

Using the radio expertise she learned from her former day job, the singer approached KAMX earlier this year about adding her song “Garden of You and I” to its playlist. “They liked it...but they didn’t do anything with it,” she says. “I actually rerecorded it for them because I had taken it from my first album, and they wanted it a little more upbeat. I took the new version, and they said, ‘I don’t know.’ I remixed it, made it even hotter, and they tried it.”

The station, which usually doesn’t consider music from unsigned acts, tested the song on an afternoon show. The overwhelming listener response convinced the station to play the song at night, and within a month the tune was in heavy rotation, where it has remained for six months, becoming one of the station’s longest-playing records ever. KAMX is now playing a second song, “Love is Hell.”

Mackenzie’s second album also received recognition at the Austin Songwriters Group’s Song Competition 1998, where she took home six awards, including the grand prize called Best Overall for “Garden of You and I.”

It’s appropriate that the singer makes her national debut at the Lilith Fair, since her sound fits nicely between that of McLachlan and Sheryl Crow. (With the exception of contest winners, she’s the only unsigned act to be added to the bill.) However, her music is devoid of the angst and anger of many of today’s female rock singer/songwriters. She replaces whining with humor, craziness with common sense—think Jewel without the annoying self-indulgence.

Though her music was dubbed “unapologetically pop” by an Austin journalist, it never even occurred to Mackenzie that she’d need to defend her lighthearted, fun music. “I’m just naturally a pop songwriter,” she says. “I don’t even think about it. It’s a lighthearted way of looking at heavier situations. I like songs with a little twist, instead of looking at everything the same way. There are always many layers to anything that happens.

“I have come to the conclusion that the only way I can really bare my soul is through music,” she adds. “It is teaching me to be more expressive and not to be afraid of being human. Besides, writing songs is cheaper than therapy.”

Born in Texas but raised on the Lakota National Reservation in South Dakota, Mackenzie became a keen observer of the characters and high drama that surrounded her during childhood. Her stimuli changed drastically after her father became frustrated with his job at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and moved the family to the small, remote town of Ipswich, S.D. She quickly grew bored and cold, and she remained that way until she received a stereo as a Christmas present.

She began buying one record a week from a nearby drugstore, the only place where music was sold. She studied the songs of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Patsy Cline, and others from beginning to end. “All I had to do was listen to music because it’s winter there eight months out of the year,” she says. “My vocal coaches ended up being Billie Holliday, Joni Mitchell, and my aunt. My aunt sang with Tommy Dorsey, and I listened to her records for hours on end until I could sing all the songs the way she did. And my mother taught me how to play the ragtime classics on piano; I still remember most of them.”

Tiring of Ipswich, at 15, she returned to Texas on a Greyhound bus to move in with her aunt. After graduation, she spent the next several years living a double life: pursuing a music-industry job by day and developing her talents as a singer at night. But the demands of the label gig brought an end to her songwriting efforts. “I started writing songs in junior high, but then I quit for several years and only started again a few years ago,” she says. “I got swept away in the whole 9-to-5 money trap, and then it just ate away at my soul. I decided that’s not what I wanted to do with my life, [so I] quit and started playing again.”

Although she’s extremely pleased with her accomplishments of the last 18 months, Mackenzie has set her sights on a national recording and publishing deal. That goal shouldn’t be too far off, because the buzz she has created in Austin is quickly disseminating. In addition to the Lilith Fair dates, MTV and NBC have expressed interest in using her music. Her Web site has received 11,000 hits in five months and should receive more since it’s linked to the Lilith Fair site. To introduce herself to Nashville and the music industry here, she’ll be performing a 9 p.m. show Monday at the Exit/In.

“I would love to be huge, but I’m pretty happy with everything that’s going on,” she says. “I just want to be able to make a living doing what I love to do the most and not getting caught in the trap of having my soul go to sleep.”