Singer-Songwriter Doug McKean's Sixth Solo Effort Is His Most Cohesive Yet

A veteran local musician who played in the punk band the GC5 until it split up in 2003, singer-songwriter Doug McKean released his first solo album back in 2006 and has steadily released solo efforts ever since. His latest endeavor, Enduring Freedom , arrives on July 5, and Doug McKean will play a release show at 8 p.m. on Friday, July 12, at the Beachland Tavern . Local indie rock act Kid Tigrrr will open.

As McKean explains in a recent phone interview, he penned the tunes on his new album in much the same way that he wrote the songs on his previous release, 2020’s The Second Golden Age of Piracy .

“In 2019, I got an eight-track and started writing on it,” he says. “I didn’t have to write on acoustic guitar or piano. I could have a simple rhythmic idea and then build it up. I started writing songs like that. I liked what came out of it, and then COVID hit a few months into the process, and that accelerated the amount of time I spent on it. The Second Golden Age of Piracy came out of that, and the songs kept coming. I had 30 songs or so — what I felt was two-thirds of three different records. I wrote 'I Couldn't Be Any Happier,' and at that point, there were 10 that fit together musically and thematically, and I knew that out of all those songs, I finally had a record together."

The title Enduring Freedom refers to the second Iraq War, but the songs' sentiments aren’t that specific.

“The songs are about things slowly crumbling a bit and losing some people and having some deaths around me and having a sense of resilience," says McKean. "They're about wanting to focus on getting things in order around yourself and wanting to hold close to the things and people that matter to you."

McKean recorded the album at home, and Los Angeles-based Wallflowers drummer Mark Stepro, who grow up in Galion, OH about ten minutes from where McKean grew up, played drums on it. Don Dixon mixed the album.

"I couldn’t have asked for more," says McKean.

One album highlight, the shimmering album opener “Wildfire Sun,” has an R.E.M. feel to it thanks to an acoustic guitar that McKean tuned to sound like a cello.

“I wanted a cello section, but I don’t have a cello, so I tuned every string on an acoustic guitar to the same note, and I found that if muted it the right way it could sound like cellos,” says McKean when asked about the track.

Thanks to its woozy guitar riff and handclaps, the jangly “Stiff Flag," another album highlight, sounds like it came out of the '60s.

“It’s like a more rocking version of ‘Revolution’ by the Beatles,” says McKean. “It’s a blues, but it has no five chord in it. It has a lyrical twist too. I wanted to use the form but also subvert it a little bit. I like those traditional forms, but I am in no sense a blues guy.”

For the upcoming release show, McKean has assembled a terrific band that he calls the Stuntmen  because "they play the parts that are too dangerous for me." Even though this particular lineup only came together two years ago, it consists of local musicians he's known for years.

“The band that’s been playing since the summer of 2022 is me and [guitarist] Bobby Latina and [drummer] Brent Kirby," says McKean. "Andy Leach, who plays in [the Gram Parsons tribute act] New Soft Shoe, is playing bass with us. It’s weird to be up there with a guitar. I’m at best the third best guitar player in the band, and if Brent is having a good day, I might be the fourth."

Mike Abbadini, who plays in the garage at the Rock Hall and with Orefice Roth and is a fantastic singer and piano player, will play keys, and Mike Allan, formerly of the Dreadful Yawns and currently playing in the Cleveland soul group the Day Nites, will play cello and rotate to bass when Leach plays mandolin.

"It’s a six-piece band," explains McKean. "We’ll do some of the quieter songs and some of the atmospheric droning stuff, but the core of the band is a rock band, so we’ll get people out of their seats too.”

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