Ohio songwriter beats back addiction and finds his groove to release the hard-earned Die Midwestern
Born and raised in Cincinnati, McKinley grew up in the city’s punk and hardcore scene, playing bass in bands. Later he joined the folk duo the Great Depression with Jeremy Pinnell, where he largely served as a harmony singer. Then in 2014, he reemerged as a solo performer with the album. He embraced the D.I.Y. spirit of his punk days to help spread the word.
“Bag of Pills” stems from a rough period in McKinley’s life when he was cash-strapped and seeing many of his friends struggle with opioid abuse. At the time, the Cincinnati area and neighboring Kentucky were being ravaged by addictions. These days, McKinley is free of opioids, but he writes about those experiences knowingly. “We’ll get high and talk until morning/Then you can catch me sleeping,” he sings in “Bag of Pills.”“His music’s really honest about a lot of that stuff, but I don’t think he ever glamorizes it,” Whelan says. “He drops you into the eye of the storm.”, fleshes out this chapter of hard times, dealing in heartbreak and restlessness along with the scourge of addiction.
“[It is] about that struggle of deciding, ‘Do I move on out of here, away from things that I love and also hate, or stick it out because it’s the only thing I’ve ever really known?'” he says. The album wraps up with “Walking Shoes.” It’s the most hopeful song of the lot, a relaxed country-rocker that sees McKinley bidding farewell to past mistakes and trying to move forward.
“I’ve got a whole ‘nother set of songs that I would like to get out that touch on the same stuff,” he says. “But a lot of the newer stuff I’m writing, it’s a new chapter. It’s just about other things.”
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