Newswise — Kate McDonnell of Galway, Ireland, is an up-and-coming Boston-area musician, songwriter, worker, student, teacher, world traveler--and soon-to-be Tufts University grad. McDonnell, 37, who lives in Somerville, Mass., will receive her bachelor's degree in sociology & communications on Sunday, May 23. She will be in good company, as fellow songwriter/Tufts alumna Tracy Chapman will be among the honorary degree recipients at the podium during the commencement ceremony.
Having attended four different colleges over the years, McDonnell has pursued her studies at Tufts, where she enrolled as a member of the university's REAL program two years ago. Established in 1970 for ambitious women who had not completed their college degrees due to work, life or family circumstances, REAL offers scholarships to meet adult students' financial needs and has also been open to male students for many years: http://studentservices.tufts.edu/real.htm
"I was born in Africa," McDonnell explains, "in Lusaka, Zambia, to Irish parents and lived there until I was five, when we moved to Galway City." In addition to pursuing her musical interests from an early age, she studied math, science and engineering, eventually working as a sound engineer at studios in Ireland, Germany and Switzerland, working with such acts as the Chieftains and Dubliners.
"Katie McD" as she's known when performing (she adopted the stage moniker upon learning that another Kate McDonnell had played in the Boston area), came to the United States several years ago after accepting a scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music. "I sold my restaurant in Ireland, said goodbye to my family and friends, and made the move so many other Irishmen and women have made," she says. A car crash, which resulted in a neck injury, mounting financial obligations and steep after-scholarship tuition costs forced her to leave Berklee after one year. Eventually, she earned an associate's degree at Quincy College and decided to pursue a four-year-degree program at Tufts.
Kate McDonnell has managed to combine her love of music and the arts at Tufts, where she created a popular new course called "Ireland through the Arts" at the university's Experimental College last semester http://www.excollege.tufts.edu/ She also works as a teaching assistant on campus, and is currently a TA for the "Mass Media and Popular Culture" class. Her debut CD "I Know You Know" will be released on Passion Records on May 26; the disc is already earning favorable reviews from music writers. McDonnell, who has been writing songs since she was 13, says it was difficult to choose the 10 tracks (and one hidden track) on the disc from the 1000 she has written. "I have been at it for a long time," she explains, "and the thousand songs have usually come in waves of creativity I have been fortunate enough to have experienced in more than 20 years."
She notes that interest in singer/songwriter material has grown since 9/11. "The world has changed a lot since then, and audience attitudes and interests have evolved, too," she observes. "People really seem to want to listen to the lyrics, now, and most of my songs have a message." Katie McD says she has played for "all kinds of crowds" in the Boston area, and most but not all have been 100 percent supportive. She recalls that she kept playing while a fistfight broke out at a bar in Dorchester (the owner gave her an extra $100 for remaining onstage and calming the crowd that night). "I was only forced off the stage once, when a very aggressive honey bee chased after me at a festival in Jamaica Plain," she says.
"I'll have a CD listening party at the Elephant & Castle on Devonshire Street in Boston on June 4," notes Katie McD, who has played there several times, as well as at Paradise, the Burren, the Middle East and other Boston-area clubs in recent years. Listeners have often described her sound as "Kate Bush-meets-Celtic-Joan Baez," a comparison which McDonnell doesn't reject. "Kate Bush is certainly one of my major influences," she says, "I listened to her and to James Taylor, Joan Baez and Sally Oldfield a lot when I was honing my early songwriting skills. Her Web site: http://www.katiemcdgirl.com/
After graduation, McDonnell will work for the Ixtlan music booking agency (formerly Joan Sherman agency), which will allow her to remain based in the Boston area, serving as an agent and performer on their roster. She plans to spend a portion of the summer touring with other musicians on the Ixtlan lineup, promoting her new CD, and is scheduled to play the Philly Fringe Festival in Philadelphia and the Passim songwriter's weekend in Cambridge in September.
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