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Macartney Reinhardt's Country Music Star is Shining Brightly |
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She continues, “We moved so I could be in the midst of the music scene
here.
“It was hard, because I was still in school Then I went to virtual
(school) the last two years of high school. That was the main
adjustment. It wasn’t bad getting adjusted to living in a different
state, because we had been here so much, and we had stayed in hotels for
a week every month. That wasn’t very hard for me. It was harder for me
not going to public school and just sitting at home and doing school.
That is when I started playing out multiple times per week.”
Now Nashville feels like home and as a nod to the city, Macartney
Reinhardt co-wrote the song “Coming Home,” with Allie Colleen.
“I wrote it before I moved to Nashville. I met Allie at a songwriters’
round here in Nashville and she was so good. Her songs are amazing. I
feel like she was one of the first people in town who took a chance on
me. I went up to her and said I would love to write with you. She said
okay, let me get your number and we can setup a co-write. We did and it
became “Coming Home.” I remember she asked me what I wanted to write the
song about and I said I don’t know. I said I have just always felt like
Nashville was home, but I never knew it was home until now. That is
where the line ‘I’m coming home for the first time,’ came from.
That is how I felt about Nashville that this was the first time it ever
felt like home,” she says.
As for what she learned during that co-write experience, she says, “I
felt that co-write with her gave me more confidence in who I am as a
writer. I really started writing a lot after that. I felt that gave me a
boost of (assurance) that I didn’t know I needed, but looking back I
certainly needed at the time, being a fifteen-year-old girl walking into
a city with thousands of musicians. I think more than anything that gave
me the confidence that I could write with people that I wanted to and
that if I set my mind to it, I would be able to do it in Nashville.”
As for video that accompanies the song, “The purpose in taking that
angle with the video was so people would know that is the skyline,
that’s the river and people would know that I was definitely in
Nashville filming that with my photographer Justin. He did such a great
job. He always does a great job with all of my album covers and
everything. I had put out four or five singles by that point and I
decided it was time to have a music video. I wanted that to be the one.”
It almost seems that Macartney Reinhardt was destined to find a career
in music. “I started guitar lessons when I was five, but really, I
started singing for as young as I can remember.
I tried to play guitar at that age, but I wasn’t good enough with it at
all, because my hands were so small. I couldn’t even reach around the
guitar. That was the first lesson I ever did, but I decided I didn’t
want to play guitar at that time. It was just too hard for me, so I
asked the guitar teacher if he would teach me voice lessons. I did that
with him for a few months and then I got an actual voice teacher. She
was my foundation. Her name was Raquel Rae. I would always need to tell
her a story first. She was so good and so kind to me. She was always so
patient with me and then we would get into voice lessons. I am really
grateful that she was so kind, for my first voice teacher, because that
can really change how you feel about things.”
Then came the struggles every parent experiences at one time or another,
in trying to get their child to bed. It wasn’t making those milk and
cookies last fifteen minutes longer, but rather the fact her father (Joe
Reinhardt) is a musician, playing the electric bass guitar, to be more
precise. He had a recording studio in the basement of their home.
“I would always like to go down there and listen to whoever was playing
and singing. My mom had a hard time getting me to go to sleep, because I
wanted to go down there. I was always surrounded by music, so that also
built my love for music. I think if I hadn’t been around, it so much, I
wouldn’t have known it from such an early age. Everybody on my dad’s
side of the family is music oriented. It made me realize at a very young
age what I wanted to do,” she says.
When she was fourteen years old, in the year 2020, she was just one of
five artists nominated for Teen Artist of the Year at the Georgia
Country Music Awards. In 2001 she was back once again for the same
event.
Her roots in Georgia are captured in the song “Bones,” and she explains,
“I wrote “Bones,” about my family and where I grew up and came from. I
wanted a song for my hometown. I wanted to mention my grandparents who
passed away five and seven years ago. I wanted a song dedicated to the
town I grew up in and that made me the person I am today. I feel it is a
heartfelt song, but storytelling at the same time. It has orchestrations
in it. I didn’t know that my producer was going to put the
orchestrations in, but he did. I think they add so much to the song.
There is a little graveyard in Georgia near where I grew up. It is the
oldest church and cemetery in the entire county. My grandpa went to
church there and he always said he wanted to be buried in that cemetery.
That is where my grandparents are buried and that is what that song is
about.”
The song “Bones,” was co-written with Macartney Reinhardt’s producer
Sean Rogers and Hannah Diones.
At the time of our conversation Macartney Reinhardt had just returned
from a tour of Oklahoma and Texas and we wondered what types of venues
she plays, since she is eighteen years old admission to bars and clubs
in most American states is limited to those twenty-one years old and
older).
“For some reason I can usually get booked at places like that, but I
have a hard time getting in still. They usually don’t ask your age when
they are booking you, but it is trying to get into the club. The
bouncers are really strict about it. Luckily, here in Nashville, I think
the earliest club is five o’clock when they start twenty-one and up.
Almost any club you can do during the day, she says.
As for her recent tour, “It went great, I toured Oklahoma and Texas. We
started in Oklahoma for a couple of days and then we went to Texas for
the rest of the (time). We were there for a whole week and it was fun.
We got to see tourist attractions there in between the radio stations we
stopped at. We went to Dallas and Fort Worth.”
Musically, the song “High Horse,” is worth listening to just to salivate
over the electric guitar solo by Baggio from the Netherlands. It is
however an important song lyrically, because of the message that
Macartney Reinhardt wanted young girls to hear.
“I wrote this song in February, and I wanted to write a song about my
life and friends. I have always had friends, but never close friends and
(the friends I had) never “got me” doing music. I was bullied really
badly when I went to private school. I was in middle school, and all the
girls in my class bullied me really badly. There were only seven other
girls in my grade, and I couldn’t get away from it. I wanted to write a
song about how I was treated by them. I wanted to say they could get on
their high horse, and I didn’t really care if they did. They could go on
and do whatever they wanted. I was over it and it didn’t matter to me.”
Let’s talk about your song “Hey Girl.”
“It was the first song I put out with my producer Sean. We wanted a song
that could speak to a lot of people and no matter what you are going
through and no matter who you have in your life or who you have lost you
are strong enough to make it yourself.
For any young
person who is or has been bullied (this writer is a double survivor of a
domestic home and being bullied), the words speak to you, “One day
you’ll look at this with a smile / Knowing brick by brick it built you
mile for mile / And all that’s worth remembering / You’d do it all again
to be / This girl.”
The three main things we wrote it (the song) about were heartbreak,
grief and friendship issues and about mental illness. I struggle with
anxiety and depression, and I wanted a song that could speak to other
people in a way that I wish songs I would have heard at the time when I
was very anxious or depressed could speak to me.
I wanted a song that can uplift girls, and I know how hard it is being a
girl in this time. It is really, really, difficult with social media.
You are constantly comparing yourself to people and you difficult
feeling beat down by other people. I just wanted a song that girls could
listen to and anyone that feels like that, but I feel girls are compared
a lot to other people. I wanted a song that they could feel that and
relate. The idea of the song is to empower girls. The past year since
the song came out, I have been through a lot. I have gone back and read
the lyrics to the song to empower me and to help me get through the
tough times in this past year,” says Macartney Reinhardt.
The music industry is tough and even some of the most talented people do
not get their chance to shine in the spotlight, but Macartney Reinhardt
is already shining and her star is only going to get brighter. Remember
we told you that.
Please take time
to visit
the
website
for Macartney Reinhardt and you can also follow her on
Instagram.
You can
listen to
her music
on YouTube.
#MacartneyReinhardt #NashvilleSinger #NashvilleMusic #WomenInMusic #RivetingRiffs #RivetingRiffsMagazine #CountryMusic #NashvilleWomenMusic #EntrevistaMusica #MujeresEnMusica
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Macartney
Reinhardt is four years into her Country music career, but here is the
thing, she is still only eighteen years old. She grew up in a small town
forty-five minutes from Atlanta, Georgia, before moving with her parents
to Nashville when she was fifteen, after travelling back and forth
between Georgia and Nashville for a year. Spending a week in a hotel
each trip gets expensive. Now if venues want to book her for gigs as she
says, “I wouldn’t have to say I am in Georgia, sorry I can’t do it.”