April McLean and Todd Moore in the studio
Earnest songwriter, passionate pianist and longtime Nashvillian April McLean has dedicated her life to her craft. As a youngster, McLean found a safe haven in music. Later she crafted two stellar full-length albums with support from Todd Moore, her producer and devoted husband of nearly 30 years. McLean and Moore plan to release her third record Where I Belong on Aug. 6. But this one carries a different weight than any of her previous projects.
McLean has been diagnosed with corticobasal syndrome, a rare neurological disorder associated with early onset Alzheimer’s. The illness has affected her fine motor skills drastically, including her abilities to walk, speak, write music and play piano. Day-to-day life is wildly different for the couple and their 17-year-old son Griffin, with each day bringing new challenges as McLean’s symptoms progress. Moore is dedicated not only to attentively caring for his wife, but also making sure her story is told.
Todd Moore and April McLean at their home
“The first thing we noticed in 2022 was that she couldn’t play her own songs anymore,” Moore says, sitting in the living room of the couple’s East Nashville home. “We were both really depressed for two or three years. Finally, in 2023, I took off my depressed husband hat and put on my publisher-producer hat. She’d been writing songs her whole life, since age 8. It’s a big part of who she is. I started listening back to some of her catalog, and then I remembered that we have all of these songs that didn’t fit her previous records.”
McLean was born and raised in rural Virginia. When she was very young, her parents divorced and she, her two sisters and their mother settled in the historic village of Waterford, Va. These were difficult times marked by a challenging family dynamic, and songwriting became a necessary release for McLean. It offered her a way to be her authentic self and gave her a newfound sense of freedom.
She fell in love with writing, so much so that she went to Berklee College of Music in Boston to pursue a career in songwriting. Her honest, confessional lyricism drew in her audience and ultimately landed her in Nashville, where she wrote contemporary Christian songs like “In My Father’s Hands” for Warner Chappell Music. McLean has released two more pop-oriented records of her own, Becoming (2002) and Darbytown Road (2007). Her rich, deep, gently weathered voice stands out on her albums, whose sonic settings are in a similar vein to other pop songwriters of the 1990s and 2000s like Sarah McLachlan and Vanessa Carlton.
Among the things that drew Moore to McLean was her stunningly vulnerable, open songwriting. He met her first at church, where he awkwardly told her that he loved her performance during the service, and then again through mutual friends who shared their love of music.
April McLean photographed in 2005 at the Grand Lobby of the Union Station Hotel
“January of ’95 is when we started dating,” Moore recalls. “We were going to go out to dinner, but first she wanted to invite me over to hear a song she wrote. So I picked her up at her apartment in Antioch, and she sat down at her piano and she played me this song called ‘Where I Belong.’ Now that’s the last song on the record we’re releasing in August. We’d only been dating two weeks when she played it for me, and now it’s coming out. It’s full-circle.”
Over the course of her career, Moore — a producer and musician himself — made live-to-tape recordings of almost every one of his wife’s songs as soon as they were written. They’re raw, intimate portraits of McLean and her process.
April McLean and audio engineer Charles Yingling in the studio
To honor his wife and keep her strong through her diagnosis and declining health, Moore took out a little of their savings for a special project. He started with nine of the vocal-and-piano recordings, three of which remain unadorned. On the other six, he collaborated variously with cellist Matt Butler, saxophonist Todd Cooper, bassist Matt Pierson and multi-instrumentalist Mark Comden on mandolin to add sparing accompaniment. In a throwback to his and McLean’s times playing coffehouses together, Moore also plays djembe and shaker on some songs; Moore did some recording in their home studio, but also worked elsewhere with engineers Charles Yingling and Jeff Pitzer. The resulting tracks will be released as Where I Belong. Plans for a release celebration are in the works, but haven’t been finalized as of this writing.
“Music becomes a bridge through illness,” Moore says. “One of our biggest things is that we’re not done yet. April can’t do it anymore, but she’s still here. She has an opinion, and I can ask her yes or no questions. When I was producing this session, I was always checking in on her. I’d ask her ‘Do you like this?’ or ‘Do you want to change this?’ It was magic. It really was magic, 31 years in the making.”
