Album news: TIRED was featured in the fourth season "Felicity" DVD
DEEP was used in the DVD and on line version of the TV show "Life" Episode #109
McKinley grew up in Anchorage, Alaska where she spent a lot of time pretending she was a cowboy or a secret agent. She then went to a girl's Catholic high school in California where she learned "Hail Mary" in Spanish and how to gracefully scale a chain link fence without snagging her pleated skirt.
After earning a mechanical engineering degree, McKinley lived in London for almost a year, and then rode a bicycle alone through Israel, mumbling and humming to herself in the same desert that made those prophets that she learned about in Catholic school come undone. She picked up a copy of Franny and Zooey in a Tel Aviv bookstore and stayed up all night reading it in a scary hotel.
On the porch of that hotel in her underwear, she decided she would make something out of the humming in her head. She bought a ticket to Seattle and began writing her first songs there in a tiny apartment with no furniture. She came to Portland next because it seemed like the right size.
In Portland, McKinley gathered the musicians and momentum she needed to record her first six-song EP. A local label, Burnside Records, then helped her record six more songs for a full-length CD. These first songs are rich, quiet and spooky. The music editor of the Oregonian dubbed her style "chamber pop" because of the use of violin, cello, and orchestral percussion in virtually every song and because of the close-in personal quality of the lyrics and recordings.
She is now playing with a band called Dirty Martini (www.dirtymartinimusic.com) and writing a musical about God, physics, death, and love called "Gracie and the Atom" due out in 2008.
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