History has shown that, for some, 'going electric' can be a difficult process. For Mackenzie Scott, the guitarist and vocalist behind Torres, it was a change born out of necessity.
“I needed a bit more bite. More teeth,” she said. “I was having trouble during the live shows, just getting people to listen. People expect to see a young girl on the stage of a coffee shop with an acoustic guitar. With an electric guitar, you can crank that thing up as loud as you want. People will shut up pretty quickly.”
Scott won't have any trouble convincing people to listen in future. Her debut record – which she self-released back in January – is a collection of raw, melancholy songs driven by her brooding vocals and lonesome distorted guitars. Recorded straight to tape in a matter of days, the album is a 49-minute punch to the guts that straddles Americana, post-punk and folk.
“A bunch of live takes is what it ended up being,” she said. “Once you've honed in on your craft, I'm a big believer in everything coming out right the first time. It's the most emotional. I wanted songs that sound like they haven't been tampered with too much. That's part of the reason why I had such a short recording time. The other is that it's expensive.”
Scott's DIY determination and bare sound are balanced out by a lyric sheet that documents desperation, fear and deep emotional wounds. On the outstanding Honey, she drawls: “Honey, while you were ashing in your coffee, I was thinking of telling you what you've done to me.” Her words are barbed but beautiful, and it's not a surprise to discover that certain songs on the record began life as poems.
“The poetry and the songwriting are both super personal to me, but the songwriting was definitely an extension of the poetry,” she said. “A lot of the songs on this record began as poems, even poems that I wrote a couple of years ago that I came back to.”
Scott grew up in Macon, Georgia and moved to Nashville, home of Music Row, country pop and Christian rock, for college in 2009. She's had to battle for space in a fractured musical landscape, finding love in the city's garage punk scene and plenty of cold shoulders elsewhere.
“It's not really so much a music community as a bunch of pockets and different scenes,” she said. “They're pretty exclusive. I found it pretty tough to break into any one of them. Having that many facets and not being able to break into one of them is kind of indicative of a problem. I'm not into the country pocket. Welcoming is not the word that comes to mind, to be honest.”
Scott is now preparing to up sticks for New York, a big move that she'll tackle after a debut UK tour which centres around a performance at the Lexington in London on July 16 and an appearance at Latitude.
“Oh man, I am so stoked,” she said. “I have never been to Europe so I'm pretty excited about that. It'll be a three piece, my guitar, a bass and drums. That's it. It's going to be pretty loud.”
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