AUDIO – THE SONG BIRD SINGS –
May 20, 2024 – “I don’t mean to be self-deprecating when I say this, but I never really understood why people gave me so much credit as a musician,” McDonald says. “I really am just, more or less, a songwriter who plays a little bit of piano.” “More than anything, I think what people who suffer from addiction share universally is that we’re kind of hiding from ourselves. Back then, we were playing basement parties, birthday parties for girls we knew in the eighth grade. And then we graduated to fraternity parties, at a very tender age, which my mother was not happy about. And so she enlisted my father to come on as our manager — not before we were exposed to some of the rites of passage that we were probably too young to witness … We thought we’d died and gone to heaven. Because the girls were all really cute, and the frat guys were out of their minds and they would pass the hat … But then we had a curfew because we were all like 12 and 13 years old. And in the course of all this, we learned all the filthy lyrics to “Louie Louie” and songs like that were college staples.
