Ellen Mary McGee

Of Irish and Romany gypsy descent, Ellen Mary McGee was born the year that John Lennon and Alfred Hitchcock died and grew up on a notorious council estate in the midlands amongst used syringes and burnt out Ford Cortinas. She would regularly escape into the nearby stately homes and parks of Newstead Abbey and Sherwood forest, caught between the spirits of Lord Byron and Maid Marion.
She taught herself to play a beaten up nylon stringed acoustic guitar acquired at a local car boot sale at 15 years old, starting out by playing traditional folk songs and a few years later writing her own music and forming various fledgling bands in and around Nottingham, initially inspired by the likes of Movietone and Quickspace.
Singing of transient characters she has known, loved and lost. She sings of the darkness on the edge of town and the blood of others, caught between the bright lights of the city and the pastoral yearning for a simpler less landlocked life. Inspired by the kitchen sink realism of fellow Nottingham export Alan Sillitoe and family dramas of Arthur Miller as well as the magical escapism of Jonathan Carroll, Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, her music is at once literary and yet primal.
Ellen plays off-kilter transcendental folk on guitar, banjo, mandolin and dulcimer primarily and has toured widely in the UK and US, playing at various psych/folk festivals in Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Providence and has an album The Crescent Sun ready for a March 2009 release.
"...spare, dreamy pop loveliness and hushed moments of introspection....like the flawed beauty of Tindersticks. This music is fragile stuff, slow and sad, but never less than compelling. " Foxy Digitalis
"London-based Ellen Mary McGee, a multi-instrumentalist who specializes in stringed things like guitar, dulcimer, and zither, belongs to a small class of exquisite weirdos that also claims the great Kendra Smith, Faun Fables, and Spires That in the Sunset Rise—in other words, artists who don’t see why folk music should necessarily sound earthly. Though her music is undeniably pretty, McGee is no fragile flower; the proud resignation in her voice evokes a young Stevie Nicks." Monica Kendrick, Chicago Reader