Second Chance at a Dream

The first thing you notice about Macy Gray in concert is her voice--a quirky, high-pitched sound that has been described as everything from a cross between James Brown and Minnie Mouse to Tina Turner on helium.

Equally engaging is Gray’s novel--at least these days--musical direction. There’s a trace of contemporary hip-hop in the textures supplied by her nine-piece band and two female backup singers, but the heart of the style is drawn from the classic Memphis soul and Motown traditions of Al Green and Stevie Wonder.

And finally, your attention turns to the range and depth of her songs--which alternate between playful, optimistic ones and dark accounts of obsessive relationships.

It all makes Gray a striking new arrival, and it seemed only natural that the audience cheered her mightily on Friday at the Universal Amphitheatre.

That response was especially sweet for Gray, who gave up her pop dreams in Los Angeles a couple of years ago and headed home to her native Canton, Ohio.

Pregnant at the time, the now-divorced mother of three needed the financial and emotional support of her family after being dropped by Atlantic Records, which never released an album she had made for the label.

The response Friday was equally welcome to her new record company, Epic, and her manager Andrew Slater, whose other acts include the Wallflowers and Fiona Apple. Even though Gray is superbly gifted, she is having a hard time getting airplay in today’s highly fragmented radio market.

Thanks to video exposure on MTV and BET as well as scores of glowing reviews, Gray’s debut album, “On How Life Is,” got off to an encouraging start in late July, entering the charts at No. 171 and climbing to No. 97 before losing momentum and dropping to No. 124 last week. (Sales to date in the U.S.: an estimated 60,000 copies.)

The problem is the lack of radio airplay, still the key to a hit. Programmers feel Gray’s music is a bit too soul-oriented for stations with a hip-hop-based urban format, and that it doesn’t fit the novelty demands of mainstream pop stations.

The game plan at Epic is to keep building word of mouth through touring and videos, trying to generate enough buzz to convince programmers that Gray’s music will appeal to a wide audience.

That’s why Friday’s response was so reassuring. Gray--the opening act on a bill that featured Eminem, Everlast and the Roots--was performing before a young, hip-hop-minded audience. The fact that she connected so strongly with this crowd supports Epic’s argument that Gray will reach urban and pop audiences in the manner of such recent success stories as Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu.

Gray and her advisors know that it may take months to achieve a breakthrough, but they are committed to hard work. She’s just thrilled that she’s getting a second chance to live out her dreams.

“When I left Los Angeles [in 1996], I thought it was for good,” Gray, 30, said in an interview a few days before the Amphitheatre concert. “I never really stopped making music when I went home. I still had songs going through my head all the time, but I thought I was through with the record business because I didn’t want to put myself through the [disappointments] again. I was getting older, and I had to be practical about my life.

“My mother talked to me about going back to school for another year to get a teacher’s degree, but I finally started my own typing business. We lived right next to a college, and I started typing papers for students.”

‘I Was So Quiet When I Was Growing Up’

It was in Canton that young Natalie McIntyre (she took her stage name from a male neighbor) first got turned on to music, listening to the ‘60s soul records that dominated her parents’ album collection. Though she cites everyone from Stevie Wonder to Sly & the Family Stone as influences, she didn’t get passionate about music until she got into her teens and heard Prince and, especially, hip-hop.

She had a knack for words and thought vaguely of writing songs someday, but she couldn’t picture herself ever becoming a singer. Who would ever want to listen to that squeaky little voice?

“I was so quiet when I was growing up because my voice was so funny,” she said, sitting in Slater’s office in West Hollywood. “Every time I would talk, the kids in school would start laughing.”

Believing her future was in writing, she came to Los Angeles in the late ‘80s to study screenwriting at USC. She was a big fan of the gritty realism in the films of such directors as John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee--and many of her songs, including “Still,” a stark account of physical abuse, are in that tradition.

While at USC, she wrote lyrics for a fellow student’s composition, and through other students she got a job singing with a jazz band at Sunday brunches every week at a hotel in Orange County. After college, she worked a few years in low-level jobs in the TV and film worlds until deciding her career might progress faster in the music business.

Sure enough, she landed a contract in the mid-’90s with Atlantic Records and made the ill-fated album--which was shelved when the executive who signed her left the company. Unlike the soul strains of her Epic collection, the Atlantic one had some rock touches, including lots of guitar--and by some accounts was ragged, indeed.

She was back in Canton, typing the term papers and thinking about her future, when she got a call in 1997 from Jeff Blue, who is now vice president of Zomba Music Publishing. He had heard the unreleased Atlantic tape and loved her voice.

He persuaded a skeptical Gray to give music another try, and she returned to Los Angeles. A new demo tape led to a contract at Epic, where Polly Anthony, the label president, put her together with Slater, who produced Fiona Apple’s 1996 debut album, “Tidal.”

Both Gray and Slater acknowledge that the recording process was often difficult, partly because they had to find a middle ground between Gray’s hip-hop instincts and Slater’s ‘70s soul vision.

Their work paid off. “On How Life Is” sounds like a lost soul treasure, but with ‘90s sensibilities.

Because Gray tends to move about with the same upbeat enthusiasm onstage regardless of the theme of the song, you get a better sense of the troubled undercurrents in her music on record than you do from her live show--a sign of an inexperienced performer.

“Still” and “I’ve Committed Murder” are troubling looks at physical abuse and unhealthy relationships, and it’s sobering when Gray tells you that most of her stories have some sort of autobiographical ties--though she is quick to point out that she did use her imagination a little on “I’ve Committed Murder.”

She also sings about sexual matters, in such tunes as “Sex-O-Matic Venus Freak,” with an aggression that is rare for a woman in pop.

“I know sex is supposed to be a man’s thing, but I think it’s good to challenge [the assumptions about men and women],” she says during the interview.

Gray’s smart, soulful style has already struck a nerve in England, where her show Friday at a 2,000-seat hall in London is already sold out. She’ll then make a video with acclaimed director Mark Romanek (Nine Inch Nails, Janet Jackson), on “I Try,” perhaps the most commercial track on her album.

“I guess I’m just a late bloomer,” she said before the Amphitheatre show. “I love being onstage, performing in front of an audience. That’s what broke my heart the most when I thought I had given up on music. When other things get you down, that’s one thing you can always look forward to . . . stepping onstage and hearing the band start to play one of your songs.”