Metro Pulse/Music/Mary Alice Wood

What:
Mary Alice Wood

Where & When:
Patrick Sullivan's (with Robinella & the CCstringband), Sunday June 22, 8 p.m. Free.
Patrick Sullivan's (with Hayes Carll), Thursday, June 26, 10 p.m. $5.

Mary Alice Wood returns from a hiatus

by Matthew Everett

When Mary Alice Wood was 12, growing up in South St. Louis, all she wanted for Christmas was a guitar from the Sears catalog. She was obsessed with the two records she owned—Meet the Beatles and another by the Monkees—and wanted to learn how to play along with them.

On Christmas morning, she waited and waited, until the only unopened package was a gift-wrapped box shaped like a guitar. She grabbed it and tore off the paper, only to find a cardboard cutout of a guitar underneath.

"I bawled my eyes out," she says. "My brother had taped a note to it that said, 'Ha! Ha!'"

The real guitar turned up a few seconds later, but Wood had to be coaxed out of the bathroom where she had locked herself to accept it. "I can't believe I ever played the thing."

She eventually overcame that initial trauma and by the early '90s, after stints in a couple of power-pop bands and the release of her 1993 self-titled solo album, she became one of the most popular and critically acclaimed songwriters in St. Louis, with a taste for tough-minded but upbeat country and roots rock. But the demands of performing and her full-time job as a graphic designer took their toll, and in 1995 she stopped writing, playing live and recording.

"I played out for seven years straight. It got to me after a while," she says. "I couldn't do it all."

Now she's back at the age of 39, with a second solo album, Daisies in My Hand, a solid collection of well-crafted country rockers that she hopes will mark the belated start of a full-time career in music.

Sitting at a sidewalk table in St. Louis' crowded Loop neighborhood on a warm night in late May, Wood recalls how her family inspired her to become a singer and songwriter.

"I was the seventh of seven brothers and sisters," she says. "We were really into music, but not in a formal way. My sisters and I would sing three-part harmony while we were doing the dishes to keep from arguing. We'd sing in the car to keep from fighting. My parents were smart—my older sister took piano lessons and then taught the rest of us. That's how I learned to read music."

Wood first started writing her own songs after the death of her older sister in 1992. "I think I wrote songs when I was a kid, but they were just typical bad teenager stuff," she says. "Right before she got sick, I joined my first band, and when she got sick I wrote a song for her. Our first gig was right after Christmas, and she died in April."

But trying to tour and make a go of the music business while holding down a full-time day job was too much. By 1997, Wood was burned out and took a long hiatus from music. Eventually the songs started to build up, and by 2001 she was writing again, but with no intention of doing anything with the results.

"But then my fiancé really started bugging me, because he had never seen me play live," she says. "He was like, 'You've gotta play out, you've gotta play out.' That was it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back."

By the end of 2002, she had recruited a new band from St. Louis' alt-country scene and recorded most of the songs on Daisies. She started playing local clubs and gearing up for a major promotional push in the spring.

Daisies, released independently, has gotten significant airplay in the Midwest and the South, and had overwhelmingly positive, if small, reviews in alt-country magazines and weekly newspapers. The obvious comparison is Lucinda Williams—Wood says the Texas songwriter has been one of her biggest influences—but Wood's outlook is generally more uplifting, if no less tough, than Williams'.

"People are totally digging it," Wood says. "A lot of stores are sold out, and I think I'm huge in Belgium and the Netherlands. I'm on eight or nine radio programs there. It makes me feel like David Hasselhoff. A lot of older people are into it. I've heard from people who are buying it for their moms. But my 2-year-old niece, all she wants to hear is Aunt Mary Alice."

Wood will be out this summer supporting the record, hoping to land a record deal or at least get some bigger distribution for Daisies. It's the first time, after more than 10 years of playing and recording, that she's made an effort to do it full-time.

"I have the best life of anyone I know," she says. "It just keeps getting better and better. I've known since I was 5 years old that I was going to do something really big in life. I still know it. I don't know if this is it or not, but I know I'm doing the right thing for me."