By Jim Barber
A daughter of free-spirited creative parents, Smiths Falls, Ontario-based singer/songwriter Ambre McLean was born into a home that was alive with song. Both of her parents were songwriters, who lived a life and raised their precocious children in an environment and lifestyle that allowed for expression and exploration, and Ambre herself has continued to use the gifts imparted to her through her lineage to write, record and perform music that is as evocative and heartfelt, as it is vibrantly diverse and dynamically authentic.
Even though she has ‘settled down’ and embraced small town life as a wife to fellow musician/songwriter/label manager Matt Connell, and become a mom to a pair of delightfully unique kids, Mickey and Frankie, McLean’s vocation and passion is for making music that not only is revelatory of her own experiences, emotions and observations, but which strikes at the heart of similar life moments, similar transitions, challenges and joys for those listening.
After what has been arguably the most trying few years in her life – a period where she had the dislocation and disorientation of the pandemic compounded by personal tragedy, a potentially devastating health scare and more – McLean emerged from this crucible stripped down to the bare essentials of her soul and spirit, which has produced possibly her most powerful, most personal, and most beautiful album since embarking on her musical journey more than two decades ago – Wild Iris.
Iris is a character, in a way. It is the emotionally unfettered version of McLean that inhabited the world and her early creative days before the vagaries and vicissitudes of life began to weigh more heavily, heaping on layers of worry, responsibility and world-fatigue which began to ‘tame’ the wildness within, to a degree.
Iris is not a persona adopted by McLean. Rather it is an integral component of her personality and spirit. Her id. It is Ambre at her most natural, even feral, and most open and unabashed. It is a release of psychological constriction, a banishment of the fear of failure, a rejection of self-negativity and a powerful affirmation of allowing the floodwaters of creativity, of passion, of sadness, grief, of joy and delight cascade throughout the songwriting process.
Iris disappeared for a while, but is now back, and bringing along a renewed sense of purpose of desire to express herself without any shackles of doubt or concern over the opinions of others. McLean’s life over the last few years has seemingly needed a little more Iris – more of that sense of purpose, of inner strength and resiliency as she has been through way more than her fair share of tumult and tragedy.
First, when she was ready to release a new album, the third part of a trilogy, entitled The Moon, she lost her voice. That was a setback, one that came about in the wake of the death by addiction of her beloved brother Victor. Oh yeah, there was also this little thing called the COVID pandemic happening. She put The Moon on the back burner, where is still sits, with the possibility to be released down the road to be determined.
“It was a really, really hard thing. It was a very tragic death, and it was not expected. It was fentanyl, and that was not very expected for us. I mean, we knew he was into things. He’s a musician. He was travelling and he certainly was a drinker. He certainly smoked a little, but that was nothing we were worried about. And to be frank, I don’t think there was anything else that he was dabbling in either. I think that it was very much, I wouldn’t say a one time thing, but it was not usual, and not expected,” she said of Victor’s passing.
“Around that time, I got into a pretty heated argument, and I usually always stay away from anything heated on Facebook. That’s just not my style. But I was really upset after the passing because a buddy of his posted that that was how my brother died. And I remember getting really upset with him and sent this pretty blunt message to take it down. It’s nobody’s business. But I’ve come along. My positioning is very different now. I think there was shame wrapped up in all of that, and I was holding that for myself. I don’t know why really. I think I was maybe also trying to protect him, the opinion of what people thought of him, and how did that reflect on us as a family and all of that. I took a really hard look at where I was coming from with that, because there are so many good people that become a victim of this sort of misadventure and we have absolutely no idea of the circumstances surrounding it. I realized there is no shame in this. This is something we need to talk about. This is something that’s affecting our young people, but also people my age, and there’s a reason why people go down that path, and I am certainly not one to judge that at all. Also, around that time, I decided to go back to school as well and started on this journey of getting a certificate for grief counseling. And at the same time, I also started to write a manuscript. I don’t know if it’s ever going to see the light of day, but it was called Back to the Wild, and it’s this whole idea of just kind of retracing or re-finding or reevaluating that part in yourself that is just like sober and innocent in mind and body,” she said, explaining it was through all this that Iris began to reassert herself, leading to the creation of Wild Iris.
“The Wild Iris is just trying to find that space in yourself that you had when you were small. It’s not like inner child stuff, but a little more of that sense of innocence of us before we’re needed, before we want too much, where we just feel free, and we don’t have a lot of responsibility, and the world doesn’t need so much from us. The songs were all kind of born from that. The song ‘Wild Iris’ was the song that made me realize that there was an umbrella for the project. And, Jim, I swore I wasn’t going to tell this to anyone, but when I was little, I begged for a Cabbage Patch doll for probably a year when they were popular and my parents were musicians and they were like, ‘we’re not spending that much on a doll. You have a lot of dolls.’ So, I woke up one Christmas morning and there was this doll named Iris, and I thought it was such a beautiful name. And I called myself Iris and I wanted everyone else to call me Iris for a long time after that. So that has always been my softer self, or my more whimsical self. And it suited me.
“I used to walk barefoot everywhere. I used to just go camping on a whim. All these things that I used to do that I didn’t care if anybody thought were silly or impulsive – I didn’t care about what they thought. But then something happened along the way where I just started to care more about my position in the world and obviously I still do. I care about my outreach to other people, but I stopped caring about me in a lot of ways. I think Iris is a persona that everyone has. Everybody has versions of themselves that they tuck away and don’t show people, and I think this is just a more whimsical version. I mean, you wouldn’t know this, but for years I can’t count how many time people would call me crazy for all these ideas I’ve had and things I’ve done. Eventually I took that to be that I wasn’t completely grounded to the earth or something, or that it was something negative about me. But looking back, everything I’ve ever done that I have been happy with, has been done on that impulse. But I was taught or felt that other people felt that I was being irresponsible, absolutely. I’ve just always felt that if that inkling’s there to do something creative, or that dream is strong enough, it’s our responsibility to follow it. So, I now think less and less that that persona, Iris, is a character but that it is me. And it’s funny because when I was growing up, I never thought of myself as a flower child, but I guess I grew up in a very alternative lifestyle family. We were people of the earth. My parents were sort of hippie musicians, singer songwriters. I was a vegetarian until I was 35. I was the granola eater. So, it feels like I have finally kind of rediscovered all of that and it’s starting to come out in my music, especially this latest group of songs.
The return to songwriting, and the embryonic spark of what became the Wild Iris record, began when McLean regained both her literal voice as well as her songwriting voice a couple of years ago, and reached out to another long-time friend, Canadian country music sensation Danielle Todd.
“She’s a very dear friend of mine and she moved to Nashville a few years ago and ended up marrying a country star down there named Grady James. Together, they opened a recording studio – a beautiful, beautiful studio. I kept sending them song snippets just saying, ‘do I still have it? Are these any good?’ And her husband wrote back saying, ‘oh my gosh lady, you have a country record there.’ I don’t know if I could dabble in country – alt-country maybe. But I said that I didn’t really have the drive. I didn’t have the motivation to do anything at the moment. And he just said, ‘tell you what. Why don’t you come hang out here. Let me produce a record for you and we’ll go from there.’ So, I took a road trip. I travelled to go and see one of my dear friends and her husband and I ended up recording these songs while I was there. I was in a country space, and I didn’t feel I could claim that space because my music is kind of genre defying anyways. So, I just gave some simple ground rules and basically said that anything that goes on this record has to be done on one instrument. If you want to play drums you have to play it on the body of the guitar. If you want strings, it has to be played on the guitar. So, we ended up producing these seven songs using a guitar and the different sounds it makes. And it sounds amazing. I was really proud how it turned out. And I came home, and Matt and I just summed it up with one song that we had written here, and that’s the new record,” she explained, as she began talking about the song ‘Coming Home,’ one of the most beautifully evocative tracks on Wild Iris.
“Coming Home is kind of a long story. When I met my now husband [Matt Connell] he was a friend of my drummer’s. At the time, my grandfather had either just passed or I was taking care of my grandfather just before he died. He had Alzheimer’s and I was very, very close to him. So, when Matt and I got together, I came into this new family and the grandfather was still alive and his name was Poppy and everybody loved Poppy, and everybody gathered around the cottage that Poppy built with his sons when they were growing up. Poppy had five kids; my husband’s mother was one of a set of twins. And they’re a very, very tight knit family. In the beginning it was a bit overwhelming for me. My family is not estranged or anything, but we all live in different parts of the country and not super close, I would say. But this family was very close and just as I was losing my grandpa, Poppy kind of took me in. I remember when Matt and I were just freshly dating, him putting his arm around me and he said, ‘well, you belong.’ That was the first time I felt like I was part of this big family. One day when we were closing up the cottage, he had a stroke. It was on my brother’s birthday, actually, and we weren’t there, but everybody was around him. He’d done his last duty, fixed the cottage up for the winter and then passed away that night in the hospital.
“During the mourning period, everybody was so distraught and so frozen. And I felt like an outsider, even though I wasn’t an outsider. We were married. We had a child at that point, and I just remember sitting on the outside going, ‘this kind of grief is the other side of love.’ And it was just so beautiful but also so heartbreaking to watch. I remember sitting upstairs and realizing the only thing I can do for any of these people is to write a song. When they were going through all these things, they found this note in the top drawer of Poppy’s desk and it was a note to his wife who had passed before him. And all it said was ‘I love you honest.’ No comma, just ‘I love you honest.’ And I realized, that’s it, that’s the song. While everyone was downstairs getting the funeral arrangements ready, I sat upstairs on the bed, and I wrote about the cottage. I wrote about him. He was a military man. So, he often left and had to come home, and the kids would always wait for him. They’re all grown and have their families now, and I spend summers with all of them and all the children that have trickled down since. So, they’re three generations deep now, but it was all born from Poppy and his wife. And this song, ‘Coming Home’ was my gift to them.”
Another exceptionally, emotionally potent and wonderfully crafted song is ‘Mama, Do You Pray?” which was inspired by a much younger family member – Ambre and Matt’s daughter Frankie.
“It was about a year after my brother had passed, maybe even two years. And one of the things that I had decided when my brother died is that one, I was going to stop numbing anything. It wasn’t very easy although, to be frank, I spent the first week obliterated. I woke up and I put something in my mouth that would take anything away. It was awful. And I remember sitting around a fire and it was right around that time and I thought, ‘my kids are gonna lose me.’ I’m going to disappear because I was so broken. I helped raise my little brother. I felt very maternal towards him and I just felt like I’d lost one of my own children, and it was really heartbreaking. All I wanted to do was sleep, and I thought my kids were going to lose me. So I woke up on a Monday morning, it was the day after Thanksgiving, and I gave thanks for being alive, and also decided that I was going to experience every awful depth of grief and I was going to let my kids see it. Not in an unhealthy way, I just didn’t hide when I cried. I would talk about him. I would talk about what happened. I would talk about how I thought he got there, and I didn’t hide that from them. I thought that was important. And I would always say to them that this grief was the other side of love. It’s the same love, just the other side – this is the hard part,” she explained.
“The first verse is kind of about him – a little bit of a message to him. It wasn’t even a song yet. It was just me talking in melody. When I put Frankie to bed that night she said to me, ‘some of my friends believe in God. What do you think?’ And I said, ‘well, I wanna know what you think.’ So we talked a little bit and it became a pretty long conversation and I was worried she wouldn’t get up on time and be late for school. She asked me about praying, and because she and her friends are all eight year olds, she said, ‘people say that you pray to get stuff?’ I thought that was a very interesting concept for a small person, because maybe that’s what it looks like. So we had this really big, long conversation. And the minute she fell asleep, I ran into my room and I wrote down every question she’d asked me, and she was really firing questions. Like, is there a God? Do you ask him things? Do you pray? Is it even a guy? Is he in the sky? Does he make it rain? It was just this incredible pool of these innocent questions that I’m sure, I don’t even know what I believe. I’ll be honest with you.
“I’m not so bold to say I know what it looks like after I close my eyes for the final time. But I do believe in wonder, and I believe in magic and I believe in miracles – I believe in all of these things. And I tried to just frame that from an ‘innocent me’ perspective and then connect that to what this young person that I’m raising has. I don’t ever tell her what she should believe and I just encourage her to ask a lot of questions and maybe she can figure them out for herself too. So at the end of it, I played her the song and I just said, ‘you know, you wrote this,’ and I played it for her and she’s like, ‘that’s me, that’s me!’ She remembered asking all of those questions, so I thought it was natural to give her a co-write on that one.”
This conversation with McLean is yet more proof that art, and more particularly music has is one of humanity’s most powerful gifts, most enlivening and enriching forms of expression, or most healing of emotional and psychological salves.
“Music has always been my sort of DIY therapy. I’ve often spoken to other musicians, and visual artists too, because I know a lot of painters. I ran a gallery for a while and there’s something incredible about being able to look at the ‘thing’ whatever the thing is: sadness, heartache, heartbreak, conflict blah blah blah, name any word, and to put it outside yourself and look at it from a different perspective. There’s learning that comes from that. There’s understanding that comes from that. And sometimes that process, that observation offers incredible growth. Sometimes it offers perspective or healing or whatever, and when it’s inside you, you can’t look at it, but when you see it in a work of art, or hear it in a piece of music, it can be really healing,” she said, adding that for her as someone who not only feels deeply, thinks deeply and creates from a place of deep emotion and contemplation, having an outlet such as music has probably, literally been life saving.
“I do honestly think that I probably wouldn’t be here. And I don’t say that in any dark kind of way because I don’t feel that way now. But I was a pretty reckless kid. I won’t even get into all the trouble I got into, but I got into a lot of trouble and I remember thinking, ‘thank God I have this to take whatever’s inside of me that’s in unrest and just put it out there.’ I used to say onstage that I was glad people like to listen to my diary, because I would just write about what I was thinking and feeling. The songs were really honest and really, really truthful. Most of the time, it was about me because my world was smaller, because our world is smaller when we’re young. I don’t write from that perspective now. There’s always a little bit of me in everything I write now, but I focus more on the outside world than the inside world. I think I just have more experience now when I write about other things.”
One observation McLean has made about this process for artists and creators, especially in the wake of all the time that these folks had during the COVID pandemic, when there were no concerts, no gatherings, no song circles, or even co-writing sessions in person, was how choices were made about integral existential issues, including sobriety.
“I think that creative people in general are pretty deep feelers. I think you go to some pretty incredible depths to be able to pull something out. It’s funny, but over the last five years, since COVID, a lot of people have gotten sober. I don’t mean that that’s getting rid of substance, but in some cases it is. People were getting really real with the things that they’re battling, that we’re all battling. We had a lot of time to sit within ourselves,” she said, thinking of her brother Victor’s experience.
“And some people didn’t come out on the other side. My brother didn’t. He’s one who did not come out on the other end of that and I think for me, it’s been a very sobering period in my life, because for the first time in a very long time, I would say since childhood, you were alone with your thoughts. I had a house full of people and a baby, but outside of that there were not a lot of distractions. And it was all about coming to terms with and liking yourself, spending time with yourself and thinking, ‘oh, I actually really like this body I’m in. I really value this life that I have.’ There was a big shift there for me, still a deep feeling, but some sort of a resolution and realizing that I’m not headed for a padded room anymore, I guess.”
The beauty of this acquired wisdom and the thoughts and feelings that it has engendered has in turn lead to even more creativity, more outpourings, and more compelling music that is delightfully, authentically, masterfully expressive.
“I wrote a song very recently, just a few days ago. It came out of the blue and it was about putting down the weight of something that you’ve been carrying. Whether it’s for somebody else, or it’s a pattern of yours, or something that somebody can’t see, but something you’ve carried it in. And I kind of framed the song around another song that I wrote for my other little brother when we were little. He was really upset about something, although I can’t remember what it was. We were probably like six or seven, and he came out of the front door and had his backpack on and said he was running away. He ran to the edge of the driveway and that was considered running away. He didn’t know where he was going to go because, well, he was six,” McLean said.
“I remember I ran after him and then we played with the snakes or did whatever we did at the edge of the driveway. And I was thinking about that moment and that there’s so many of us who, in our lives now, just want to run away from something. We just want to run away instead of dealing with it, and what does that actually feel like when you take that weight off – physical weight, emotional weight, anything in your life. When you take it off, what does it feel like? We may feel light as a feather and feel like we can do anything. And even if it doesn’t last very long, it’s about that feeling of unburdening ourselves from whatever it is and the whole idea is that you do it for yourself.
“I would say I spent a good portion of my life running away from things I didn’t want to deal with. And I don’t do that anymore. I don’t even know when that pattern changed for me, I just don’t feel like there’s anything to run from. So if there’s something I have to face, that’s what I do. I deal with whatever the process is to take that weight off, to gain that peace. I think that’s what comes with a little bit of age and a lot of experience. I also know that I spent a lot of my life trying to prove something, even when my kids were being born. I wanted to prove that I could still go overseas and tour and still do 200 or 250 shows like I did when I was young. I don’t have that in me anymore. No, I want to perform because I want to share my stories. I do have plans to go overseas but we’re just looking into what that looks like and how long that’s going to be because I don’t want to go away for long periods of time anymore. I might stick to Canada. I’ve got some irons in the fire right now to play small concert halls or house concerts – I love house concerts. I love talking to people. Often my songs now come from sharing a story with another person and I can see a parallel or connect between something I’ve experience that they’re sharing.”
Wild Iris was a labour of love not only for McLean, but also for her fans and admirers as she was able to record and release it thanks to a successful Indiegogo fundraising campaign last year. The album will first be available through Bandcamp on June 26, before a wider release on streaming platforms.
For more information, visit www.ambremclean.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
