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A Musical Life: Scott Mackey

Scott Mackey is a member of The Candy Lords and The T**s, and a veteran of Wichita bands such as Black Gasoline and Bright Young Hopefuls. He is also sound engineer at Barleycorn’s.

“A song will start with something as simple as a three-chord guitar riff. Or maybe you’ve got Riff A and Riff B and they go together really well and you present those to your bandmates and leave it up to the rest of the team to come up with the bridge or Riff C. I call that going through the bandalizer. You can have an idea in your head and you can hear it in your head a certain way. Once you communicate that idea to your bandmates they hear it different. They give you their take on it. Then it comes down to an issue of trust. ‘Is this guy going to screw up my song?’ ‘What are you doing to my child?’ Pick your bandmates wisely.

Make sure that that process is always fun because at the end of the day of you might be performing this song for five people at Kirby’s. That’s all the reward you’re going to get out of it. It might do better. Let’s hope. Fingers crossed. But if you can still get that same sense of reward performing that song in an empty hall then you’ve done your job.”

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.