Press for 'Theives'

COUNTRY UPDATE MAG December 2016 by Gareth Hipwell
Best Of 2016 – Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife, Thieves

Country is a style more often celebrated for its earthiness and down-home textures than for broad, sweeping, cinematic strokes and swathes of nostalgic, quicksilver instrumentation. McNeil and her enviable band achieve the latter effect while retaining the essential storytelling bent of the country greats. Thieves is a glorious dose of short-wave AM brilliance – a dusky reimagining of the classic sounds of the Seventies greats carried by McNeil’s spellbinding voice. The track I can’t stop playing: ‘Blueprint’.

THE MUSIC December 2016 by Jeff Jenkins
Albums Of the Year: No. 11 – Thieves
Elegant, exquisite alt country.

LISTENING THROUGH THE LENS December 2016 by Rob Dickens
Best Albums 2016: No. 18 Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife – Thieves
Tracy McNeil‘s Thieves is her fourth studio release and it is replete with personal, mature and engrossing songs. It comes after memorable highs in 2015 where she toured solo in Canada, supported talented L.A. rock band Dawes and played at AmericanaFest in Nashville TN. All of these events, however, were over-shadowed by the loss of her father, musician Wayne ‘Mac’ McNeil and the album is dedicated to him. The tragedy has led to some cathartic and brilliant writing. McNeil wrote all ten songs on which were penned across three countries.

The opening track is remarkably good – the gentle and reflective ‘The Valley’ is an ode to writer’s block, when you’re lacking a spark and looking for inspiration. It was recorded live in just a few takes and has McNeil in fine voice. ‘Middle of The Night’ is gritty alt. country and is another well-crafted song (‘so we burned these wheels right through, like there was nothing else we’d ever want to do’). The single ‘Paradise’ is a catchy Fleetwood Mac/L.A. rock track about the space between strangers and is eminently likable.

The title track is an absolute highlight – it’s quiet but with immense strength. I could spend hours just listening to that song over and over. The pace quickens for ‘White Rose’ which was recorded in two parts – the first was layered in the studio while the outro section was recorded in co-producer Shane O’Mara’s living room.

TIMBER AND STEEL December 2016
Artists’ Top Albums Of 2016
Leah Flanagan – Thieves is such an enjoyable record to listen to. It’s poppy and catchy yet underneath the veneer of fun singalong good times the songs themselves incredibly well crafted and arranged. Tracey writes a damn good song and if you’re lucky enough to see her band live, you’ll see them play those songs damn well too.

Gretta Ziller – I’ll be the first to admit I’m late to the game when it comes to Tracy McNeil & The Goodlife. I caught their set at Out on the Weekend and was captivated! Their 2016 album Thieves is just so dang easy to listen to, I will confess it is turning into a “chilling on the deck summer favourite” of mine! Please, if you haven’t already, pick up or download a copy of this album and chill!!

OFF THE RECORD December 2016
Best Of 2016 Listeners Poll
No. 5 Australian Albums – Thieves
No. 2 Gigs Of the Year – Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife @ Caravan Club


5 FEET HIGH AND RISING December 2016
Best Local Album 2016 – Thieves

THE INTERNATIONAL AMERICANA MUSIC SHOW December 2016
Best Of 2016 show

BASEMENT DISCS December 2016
No. 2 Best Of 2016 Australian Releases – Thieves


ROLLING STONE AUSTRALIA July 2016 by Gareth Hipwell
✯✯✯✯ Dazzling fourth LP from Melbourne alt.country traveller

A masterful follow-up to the much-admired Nobody Ever Leaves (2014), Thieves mediates assuredly between free-wheeling Hollywood-and-Vine country-rock circa 1976 and the set-in-the-bones feeling of peers like the Delines (“Ashes”).

It’s a technicolour West Coast dreamscape: the sound of sunrise over cedars and noonday Joshua Trees and high desert dusk. Guitarists Dan Parsons and Luke Sinclair pair so many keening, arcing licks with crisp rhythm parts (“White Rose”), while McNeil herself is the very embodiment of Seventies indulgence, chanelling Fleetwood Mac with “Paradise” and sweltering country-soul in closer “Finer Side”.

RHYTHMS MAGAZINE July 2016 by Chris Lambie
TRACY MCNEIL & THE GOODLIFE – THIEVES
While previous releases by Melbourne singer-songwriter Tracy McNeil heralded a notable talent, Thieves confirms that promise. Raised in Canada by musician parents, she echoes the best of their likely influencers (CSN&Y, Mamas & Papas, Linda Ronstadt). All the elements are there: catchy and original tunes, seamless vocal and instrumental harmonies, lyrics perfectly matched to the rhythms. First single ‘Paradise’ is instantly memorable. The GoodLife features Dan Parsons on lead guitar, Luke Sinclair on rhythm guitar, drummer Bree Hartley and Trent McKenzie on bass. Co-producer/engineer Shane O’Mara nails the cool ‘LA dreaming’ sound – smooth, driving and hypnotic in turn. Written on tour in the wake of grief, the reflective content remains uplifting. Guitars once played by McNeil’s late father add their own warmth in tone and mood.

Touted by some as alt-Country meets West Coast pop/rock, Thieves qualifies as a ‘classic album’ just waiting to be heard. McNeil grew up listening to Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles. If either released any one of these songs today, they’d return to the top of the charts.

PBS FM (106.7FM) Feature Record for the week beginning Mon June 27, 2016
The new album from Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife is an absolute stunner – beautiful harmonies, melodies and clever arrangements make Thieves an album that you will listen to over and over again. Tracy started writing the album in Canada, around the time her father passed away. As a result, you can hear that each song comes from a deeply personal place. For Tracy that emotion has come out in the form of an album packed with raw energy, where punchy songwriting is met with driving rhythms and accentuated with gorgeous harmonies to create something that feels like the start of a new beginning. In there you can hear an early 1970’s California sound, but Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife have put their own stamp on it to make this one of the stand out recordings of the year. Cat – The Breakfast Spread

STACK June 2016 by Jeff Jenkins
Artist: Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife – Thieves
Tracy McNeil doesn’t make three-minute pop songs; as she sings on her fourth album, “We took the long way.”

Six of the 10 tracks clock in at more than five minutes, with producer Shane O’Mara allowing them to stretch out, showcasing the dexterous guitar-playing of Dan Parsons and McNeil’s husband, Luke Sinclair. But these songs are also filled with hooks and harmonies that will keep you warm on a winter’s night. “The heat of the summer is never made to stay,” McNeil sings in Ashes, a tribute to her father and the centrepiece of a beautiful record filled with moving meditations on family and friends.

THE MUSIC June 2016 by Chris Familton
“CSNY and Fleetwood Mac fuse in a gentle Americana sound.”

Tracy McNeil showed flashes of brilliance on her previous album Nobody Ever Leaves and she’s taken that one step further with a more consistent set of songs on Thieves.
There’s a laidback smooth quality to McNeil’s music that recalls US west coast FM rock of the late ’70s, with warm harmonies, swaying guitar lines and a general uplifting quality, even in her darker moments. CSNY and Fleetwood Mac fuse in a gentle Americana sound as McNeil sings of love, heartache, loss and distance via styles that range from the crazily catchy Paradise to the atmospheric epic White Rose. There’s a new sense of maturity and confidence to McNeil’s writing that finds her expanding her songwriting palette with rewarding results.

JOLENE: THE COUNTRY MUSIC BLOG June 2016 by Sophie Hamley
Album Review: Thieves by Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife
Thieves – not Tracy McNeil’s first album but her first with band The GoodLife – opens with an invitation in the form of a song called ‘The Valley’. The music, Tracy’s voice, the pace of the song all beckon the listener to come closer. The song suggests that good things await if the listener will just hang around; they’ll be fun things, interesting things, perhaps beautiful things.

That song doesn’t lie, for Thieves is all of those. That’s not to say that all the songs are like ‘The Valley’. In fulfilling its promise, McNeil and her band deploy a range of moods, stories and instrumentation to deliver an album that has moments of musical exquisiteness as well as of toe-tapping joy.

McNeil’s influences range across country, rock, pop and folk; she seems to be able to intuit what’s right for each song without forcing any phrase or lyric, chorus or bridge into an awkward place. All the pieces fit just where they should and not always where you’d expect. For one thing, McNeil is a Canadian now resident in Melbourne, but this album has a distinctly Californian feel to it: a sonic illustration of canyons, winding roads and convertibles, deserts and palms.

One of the reasons why this laidback feel never slides into laziness is McNeil’s voice: she sounds like a person who’s not interested in wasting time, or in spending time on things that aren’t important. Her tone is mellow yet direct; there is depth and empathy. She’s there to entertain and to tell a story. She sounds like she could stop at any moment to crack a great joke or share a sad tale, and both would be appropriate.

Thieves has layers that reveal themselves with repeated listening, and it can also serve as an album to float away on. McNeil’s experience as a singer, songwriter and performer – and the high calibre of her band – have resulted in a creation of easy complexity: a contradiction in terms, and a wonder to behold.

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD June 2016 by Bernard Zuel
Tracy McNeil follows in her father’s musical footsteps
There’s an album on Tracy McNeil’s shelf that she isn’t ready to play yet, even though it was finished a year ago in Toronto. She will play it eventually. Probably. But the circumstances of its making are too raw for the moment.

It isn’t her new album of quality country rock peppered with buoyant pop – think ’70s California – Thieves. Though in some ways it directly informed Thieves, which was part written at the same time in her native Canada and finished in Australia, her home of nine years.

This untouched album is the last one made by her father, a country rock musician who was touring North America in the early ’70s before anyone thought the Eagles were cool, kept playing for decades when cool didn’t matter, and introduced his daughter to the music, the guitar and the passion.

“I’m just not ready. On the surface I might be, and yes I got some songs out of it that helped with the process of grieving but I haven’t gone there yet,” says McNeil, half jokingly adding, “Maybe I should talk to someone.”

Maybe, though, the lessons already seemed to have been learnt. McNeil is married to Luke Sinclair who is in her band and Raised By Eagles, and has a 13-year-old step-daughter. Both she and Sinclair work full-time outside music – she works for the education department – much as her father worked for General Motors all his musical life, and both record and release regularly as well as run their own label.

“It is exhausting,” she says. “We were rehearsing last night and the night before and when Luke’s not involved in those rehearsals he’s starting to write for their next record. It’s a wave, I’m on the top of the wave [at the moment], he’s on the bottom and then it reverses itself.

“Maybe at some point it has to break, but for the moment we are just head down and do it.” But then, having watched her father do it for decades makes it seem normal, if not necessarily sane.

“I thought, ‘I can do that’,” says McNeil. “I noticed he didn’t have much money but he was doing what he loved.”

Even after she moved to Melbourne, McNeil and her father would exchange ideas via Skype or tapes sent back and forth, with her encouraging him to write again as he was encouraging her to keep going. He kept recording on the side with an old bandmate, plugging away for about a decade without an end, until McNeil’s return home for what turned out to be the final months of his life.

“My dad’s dying, I want him to hold this f—ing record in his hand, what are you doing, it’s taking too long,” she recalls thinking. “It might go on forever and I thought I am not going to let that happen so I went out and became [the bandmate’s] sidekick, one track at a time, 14 times.”

It was three quarters done when he died, artwork as well, but at least he’d had a chance to hear and see it. A year later Thieves has arrived to join it. Not necessarily a companion piece but maybe a continuation of a musical line, an honouring of him and what he inspired in her.

“Of all the albums I’ve made I think he would have loved this one the best,” she says. “I don’t know that there is a connection but I do miss the fact that I wasn’t able to share it with him and he never got to hear Ashes [which is about him], but when I get the vinyl on Wednesday, holding that in my hand I’ll be thinking ‘thinking of you Dad, we got it done’.”

Getting it done in Australia, where quality country rock can’t break through the conservative country industry and the equally conservative radio, takes some kind of dedication.

“I watched him not lose heart, to his last breath. Here was a man lying there and the nurse is waiting for him to pass away and saying ‘I can’t believe this guy’s supposed to have a weak heart, he’s holding on’,” says McNeil of her father. “And I watched him to the last second still want to get that record done. He still had that light in his eyes like, ‘fucking get this thing done already’. And I definitely have that drive.”

NO DEPRESSION June 2016 by Rob Dickens
TRACY McNEIL’S PERSONAL TRIUMPH – Thieves
There have been some great Australian releases this year. The bold and polished Before Darkness Comes A-Callin’ by The Weeping Willows, Sweet Jean’s dark and atmospheric Monday To Friday, Bill Jackson’s colourful The Wayside Ballads Vol. 2 and the dirt-road imagery of Shiner by Sean McMahon & The Moonmen come to mind straight away.

Now we have another gem.

Tracy McNeil‘s Thieves (SlipRail Records), is her fourth studio release and it is replete with personal, mature and engrossing songs. It comes after memorable highs in 2015 where she toured solo in Canada, supported talented L.A. rock band Dawes and played with her excellent band The Good Life at AmericanaFest in Nashville TN. All of these events, however, were over-shadowed by the loss of her father, musician Wayne ‘Mac’ McNeil and the album is dedicated to him. The tragedy has led to some cathartic and brilliant writing.

McNeil wrote all ten songs on Thieves which were penned across three countries and McNeil & The GoodLife combine seamlessly on these tracks.

The GoodLife are McNeil (vocals, acoustic guitar), Dan Parsons (lead guitars, pedal steel, backing vocals), Luke Sinclair (rhythm and harmony guitars, backing vocals), Bree Hartley (drums, backing vocals, additional percussion) and Trent McKenzie (bass guitar).

The opening track is remarkably good – the gentle and reflective ‘The Valley’ is an ode to writer’s block, when you’re lacking a spark and looking for inspiration. It was recorded live in just a few takes and has McNeil in fine voice, Suzannah Espie’s backing vocals and Parson’s impressive guitar work. ‘Middle of The Night’ is gritty alt. country and is another well-crafted song (‘so we burned these wheels right through, like there was nothing else we’d ever want to do’). The single ‘Paradise’ is a catchy Fleetwood Mac/L.A. rock track about the space between strangers and is eminently likable.

‘Blueprint’ was conceived in a hotel room in L.A. and has a beautiful dream-like quality with McNeil never singing better. ‘Wait on You’ has nice reverb guitar which propels this soul groove (particularly in the refrain) – there’s nothing to excess here – everything is just right.

The title track is an absolute highlight – it’s quiet but with immense strength. The guitar interplay between Parsons and Sinclair is gripping and the rhythm section of Hartley and McKenzie underlay it all with grace. I could spend hours just listening to that song over and over. A contender for Australian song of the year.

The pace quickens for ‘White Rose’ which was recorded in two parts – the first was layered in the studio while the outro section was recorded in Shane O’Mara’s living room (he provides a delightful guitar solo, reminiscence of the feel of Derek Trucks).

The closing ‘Finer Side’ has more twang grunt with Sinclair and Parsons sharing vocals, it’s a celebration and provides an appropriately aloha to a beautiful record that has me in its vice-like grip.

Co-­produced by Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife with O’Mara, recorded and mixed by O’Mara at Yikesville Studio Yarraville and mastered by Ross Cockle at Sing Sing Studios.

SOUND DISTRACTIONS June 2016 by Trevor Jackson
Sometimes you put a record on and you instantly know you’re going to love it. It’s almost impossible to rationalise why and there’s really no need to, it’s just a gut feel that says “yes”. I can’t think of a great album that doesn’t grab you from the outset and whilst the opening song from Thieves doesn’t leap out at you looking for attention it immediately creates a vibe that both captures your imagination and invites you to climb on board for the ride. The Valley has such a disarming feel and sweet melody, yet surprisingly was the ice breaker for a bout of writer’s block for Tracy McNeil: “There’s a quiet in the valley that I just can’t seem to hear, too busy drowning in the chaos from above that holds me here” but it’s not the chaos that’s holding you here, it’s the honesty.

It’s the combination of Tracy McNeil’s heartfelt openness and her ear for melody that really makes Thieves such an irresistible record. Middle of the Night swings into such an effortless groove that it just sounds like it belongs on the radio, though behind those jangling guitars there is still a vulnerability: “taking in the dark air dreaming of a place where somebody would get it right”.

From laid back retro rock to alt country with a dash of blues Thieves never loses the heart of the song and that’s the essence of what Tracy McNeil does best as a songwriter, she keeps it real. Perhaps on this album more than ever, as it was written when her dad was dying with cancer. Her father was also a musician and a big inspiration to Tracy and while his presence is there throughout the record it never succumbs to the obvious grief she experienced during this period of her life. Even the most tender of songs like Blueprint and Ashes which are clearly about her father are wrought with a poignant and at times ethereal beauty.

The first single Paradise has a familiarity that belongs to another time and place. Previously Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife have been compared to Fleetwood Mac, but this is so unerringly close to the mark that it sounds like the best thing Fleetwood Mac never recorded, right down to Dan Parson’s licks taking on a Lindsey Buckingham styled lead guitar as the song tails out all the way back to the 70’s and California’s west coast.

Parsons is one of 2 new members in the band (the other is bassist Trent McKenzie) and brings a whole new dynamic as he shares guitar duties with McNeil’s partner Luke Sinclair. Parsons is already an accomplished musician with a number of solo albums to his credit, while Sinclair also fronts the acclaimed Melbourne based Americana outfit Raised By Eagles. With so much obvious talent within The GoodLife it could so easily have slipped into a group of virtuosos playing for themselves, yet music this good could only have been created by a band in the purest sense of the word. They sound like they’ve been playing together as a unit for years and now with such a beautiful album to show for it we can only hope that they continue to do so.

Thieves is out on July 1st on Slip Rail Records. They’re touring Australia throughout June & July – you’ll find the tour dates here.

< Go Back