Shannon Mcnally

“The Waylon Sessions,” an album released back in August, celebrates the music of Waylon Jennings, pioneer of the outlaw country movement, perennial Nashville iconoclast, a gruff vocalist with a string of chartbusting hits, part of the legendary Highwaymen with his pals Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, and a man with a well-noted image as the epitome of macho cowboy hellraiser. It’s no surprise his music still resonates with new generations of rock and country fans.

Five years ago WMOT flipped our format to American Roots music after nearly 50 years as a jazz/classical station. To celebrate five fabulous years of American Roots music WMOT is throwing a party to honor the music and raise funds for the future. You can join the party at home...

Shannon McNally has shared a new video from her highly regarded new album, THE WAYLON SESSIONS. The Nashville-based artist takes on Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night" with this vulnerable rendition that captures the original's raw yearning for intimacy. Shannon told Popmatters, who premiered the video, that the song is “a masterpiece. A mountain of a song.

Shannon McNally will stop by WTJU this Thursday afternoon, July 15, at noon (edt) to go track by track through her new album, The Waylon Sessions, out now on Compass Records. You can listen at 91.1 FM, streaming at wtju.net, or by asking your smart speaker to “Play WTJU.”. Thom...

This soulful singer does justice to the Waylon Jennings catalog, with help from Rodney Crowell, Buddy Miller, Jessi Colter, & Lukas Nelson. This soulful singer does justice to the Waylon Jennings catalog, with help from Rodney Crowell, Buddy Miller, Jessi Colter, & Lukas Nelson.

Program #249 (June 25 at 8:00pm and June 26 at 3:00pm) Singer/songwriter Shannon McNally first emerged amid the roots rock and Americana revival of the early 2000s. A crafty mix of soul, blues, rock, and country, McNally established herself with releases like 2002's Jukebox Sparrows and 2006's North American Ghost Music while also seeking out interesting collaborations with the likes of Neal Casal, John Hiatt, Charlie Sexton, and Dave Alvin.

Her speaking voice is like a low, purring viola, rich with overtones and rosin, made even more magnetic by a relaxed Southern drawl, picked up one suspects after she left her hometown of Hempstead, NY. Since then, Shannon McNally has been a traveler, a troubadour, a student, a visionary and a collaborator. Now she’s an interpreter, lending that gamine voice to the music of one of the most masculine figures in country music history, Waylon Jennings.

With her new album, The Waylon Sessions, the prolific and wide-ranging Shannon McNally set out to revisit the songs and spirit of Waylon Jennings, a legend with whom she’s always had an ongoing fascination. But her collection of tunes ended up being not so much a tribute as it is a recontextualization; a nuanced, feminine rendering of a catalog long considered a bastion of hetero-masculinity. That’s not to say McNally has a softer, gentler take on Jennings’ songs — in fact, just the opposite. Over and over again, she manages to locate a smoldering intensity, a searing hurt buried deep within the music’s deceptively simple poetry, and she hones in on it with surgical precision on this new album, which features special guests like Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, and Lukas Nelson.

Shannon McNally performs "I've Always Been Crazy", "Black Rose" and "We Had It All" for WMOT's Finally Friday From Home. DL Rossi performs "Don't Wait Up", "Tumbling", "True Blue" and "Whiskey" for WMOT's Finally Friday From Home. Finally Friday From Home: Danny Burns and Parker Millsap. By Val Hoeppner •...

In the U.S., Lulu was pretty much a one-hit wonder. She topped American charts for five weeks with the terrific “To Sir with Love,” one of the most likable mainstream hits of 1967 (and one of the best-orchestrated pop records of its era, right up there with the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)” and Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”). Three of her other singles made minor dents in the Top 40 in 1968, 1970, and 1981, but they rarely receive any airplay today.

Tribute albums are always a suspicious breed in that you wonder about the real motivation behind their release. Are they cheesy filler until the artist has enough material for the next album? Or is the artist that sincere about honoring their coveted icon? In the case of former New Orleans denizen Shannon McNally, it’s definitely the latter. It’s not the first time she has paid homage to Waylon Jennings, one of the ’70s outlaw country movement pioneers. On her 2009 Coldwater release, she covered “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” and “Freedom to Stay.”

As a singer-songwriter who performs any American roots music of her choosing with panache, Shannon McNally reinterprets one of outlaw country’s founding rebels with the recent release of The Waylon Sessions. In the 1970s, Waylon Jennings and his compadres Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson staged a successful coup against the sli...

Shannon McNally honors one of her greatest musical heroes, Waylon Jennings, on forthcoming album The Waylon Sessions (out May 28 via Compass Records in partnership with Blue Rose. The album, which includes reimagined versions of Jennings' classics, from "I Ain't Living Long Like This" to "You Asked Me To," features Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, and Lukas Nelson.

In Their Words: “‘This Time’ was written by Waylon. He didn’t write all of his songs. In fact, he probably didn’t write most of them, but the ones he did write were his best. I believe he was talking about a personal relationship with a lover, but as I sing it, I think of it as my relationship to the music business and my personal struggles with it as a woman and an artist. I particularly love the Wurlitzer intro and how the kick drum and acoustic guitar come in sounding like a sunny day. All of Waylon’s grooves remind me of horse gaits. This one is a full canter and the harmonica is the river running beside it. This song is the high point or key to me getting into the headspace that permits me to sing the rest of the album. For me there is relief in its directness. It’s my favorite song on the album.” — Shannon McNally.

Shannon McNally is a honky tonk hero on her new album, a dream project comprised of classic outlaw country anthems and personal favorites from the catalog of Waylon Jennings. The Waylon Sessions features a superior band of country music sophisticates as well as guest shots from Lukas Nelson, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, and Jessi Colter exploring the aura of one of American music’s biggest icons. Drawing on her own extensive career and experiences, McNally imbues each track with a fresh style and attitude while accessing a new dimension of Ol’ Waylon’s legend. The Waylon Sessions rolls out on May 28th. Pre-order now!

Shannon McNally isn't an Austinite, but the singer-songwriter who currently calls Nashville home has ties to the Live Music Capital. She's spent much of the past few years singing Texas songwriter Terry Allen's band alongside prominent Austin musicians such as Lloyd Maines and Charlie Sexton. And South Austin venue Sam's Town Point has became a local home base of sorts for McNally, a place for her to work out new material with her band in an intimate setting.

“This is high art right here —cotton field disco perfection, the first generator in the county. The chorus on this song may be the best chorus of all time,” says Shannon McNally of Waylon Jennings’ “Black Rose”—a Billy Joe Shaver-penned tune she just cut with Buddy Miller for her new album, The Waylon Sessions. “‘The devil made me do it the first time, the second time I did it on my own.’ Talk about the fight for good and evil and staring the devil down at the crossroads.” The grooving, lazy two-step feel of the original is magnified in McNally’s new version, accented by blasts of harmonica and Miller’s slinky baritone guitar. Today, Relix premiered the “wry, playful video” for “Black Rose,” noting that it “complements McNally’s warm, winning take on the tune."

On her forthcoming album, Shannon McNally shares her perspective on the many moods of Waylon Jennings. McNally enlisted Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, Lukas Nelson and others to evoke the spirit of the country icon on The Waylon Sessions, which will be released by Blue Rose Music and Compass Records on May 28 (and is now available for pre-order). She reveals, “I have always loved his defiantly existential but immediately accessible common man’s music and how it boogies.” McNally, who covers 11 tunes on the record, both compositions written by Jennings and others long associated with him, adds, “My goal wasn’t to force anything onto the music that wasn’t there already. There’s a feminine perspective hidden somewhere inside each of these songs. My job was to find a way to tap into that and draw it out.”