Mindy McCready says she failed media training.
The petite 20-year-old Florida native, who now is following the initial Top 10 hit “Ten Thousand Angels” with the sassy and fast-rising “Guys Do It All The Time,” laughingly adds that she has been told by interviewers that it’s nice to hear somebody reflect real life for a change.
Media training, which all new major Nashville recording acts have to undergo at the behest of their record companies, tends to discourage that kind of discussion.
“They teach you how to answer questions politically correct,” McCready explains. “They teach you how to avoid answers that would be a little bit offensive to one person or another. They teach you how to keep away from things you shouldn’t be talking about.
“Sometimes I choose to use my media training, and sometimes I don’t. Using it makes people so mechanical a lot of times. They’ve been through such severe media training that you get yes or no answers. I don’t think it’s nice to say anything bad about another person, but there still are things that you can talk about that people are interested in knowing.”
So in an interview with McCready (pronounced Mc-CREE-dee), a youthful Nashville iconoclast who grew up singing gospel music and wearing shirts that show her belly button, you hear talk somewhat straighter than you’re accustomed to hear from a new country female. Quotes such as:
– “I’m singing about how I need 10,000 angels to help me tell a guy no. Every girl has to face that every single weekend when they go on a date with some guy.”
– “My mom didn’t want me to have sex before I got married, and I’m sure there are a gazillion other Southern parents that are like that, and then you go off with your boyfriend and they know that’s what you’re doing, or something of that sort.”
– “I have gone out and had some beers with the girls before (a la the heroine of `Guys Do It All The Time’), and there’s no need to act like I’m holier than thou, like I’m perfect.”
On the other hand, she’s obviously no male-crazed beer-guzzler. Rather, she’s a young woman who has successfully taken on a lot of responsibility, finishing high school two years early, helping her mother raise her younger brothers and holding down significant wage-earning jobs in her mother’s business and elsewhere.
Raised on Christian music by her mother, she says she actually does have 10,000 angels–or somebody Up There–looking out for her. All available evidence suggests she’s right.
McCready came to Nashville at age 18 with only karaoke tapes and a one-year deadline. A total of 51 weeks to the day from her arrival in Nashville she was signed by RCA-affiliated BNA Records, and throughout her contract-less year in the Tennessee capital she was able to support herself doing music-related work.
“It really wasn’t that I thought, `I’m so talented that I can come and get a record deal in a year,’ or `I’m such a good singer that I think they can’t not sign me in a year.’ I just thought, `If I don’t get something going in a year, it probably means God wants me to do something else with my life.’
A few years ago, McCready might not have fit the country music fan’s typical demographic in more categories than age. Her father was CEO of a string of supermarkets who later opened a non-emergency ambulance service and then, after being divorced from McCready’s mother, moved on to become a highly paid woodworking craftsman.
When McCready was in her early teens, the mother–a former model and beauty pageant queen–was operating the ambulance service, where the daughter learned to do everything from dispatching vehicles to attending patients.
She says she started listening to country music regularly when she heard Trisha Yearwood’s 1991 hit, “She’s In Love With the Boy.”
“I think that was the horizon of young people listening to country music,” she says. “I really think that was the start. I think both guy and girl can identify with a song about mom and daddy not wanting them to be together.”
