The modest hubbub that greeted this then-teen prodigy’s 1997 debut played up the, well, teen prodigy angle, notably his “serious” side — his early obsession with putatively old, weird antecedents such as Skip James, Taoism and the Carter Family. A writer for Entertainment Weekly even dubbed McGee, now 23, the “anti-Hanson,” a dig that was unfair to both parties, particularly now that we have this tuneful wonder.
Disregard the Hanson plug if you must, but don’t let it prejudice you against McGee or the diffidently titled Anonymous, a prodigious yet unassuming roots-rock record that nods more to “Wild Horses”-era Stones and the Grin of 1+1 than, sigh, “Mmmbop”. Echoes of Dylan, Bruce, Neil and The Band (Levon plays drums on the luminous leadoff track) are here as well, yet none of these touchstones eclipses the singer or his songs, which still manage to sound new-ish and, refreshingly, far from weird.
Lightly mystical and amply romantic, McGee privileges humanity and hooks over cleverness and experimentation. “Don’t be flip/It ain’t easy/Being me or you,” he exhorts in a languid though pointed drawl at one point. Elsewhere, striking a more aphoristic note (and sounding a good bit like Jerry Garcia), he sings, “Hope is a hungry game that we play/We lose it every time that we wish for something we can’t have.”
Anchored by the rhythm section of neo-gospel acolytes Ollabelle (Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth also plays on four tracks), Anonymous is just the sort of empathetic, precocious album some hoped Ryan Adams would make while still in his twenties. Indeed, McGee’s record smacks of a single-disc answer to Wilco’s Being There nearly ten years after; there’s even a Mermaid-ripe Woody Guthrie cover.