SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE: Shannon McNally lets the best songs win on 'Black Irish'

Shannon McNally couldn’t have picked a more appropriate venue for Friday’s concert than Goshen’s Ignition Music Garage.

Her new album, “Black Irish,” comes out that day, and Ignition doubles as both a record store and concert venue.

“It’s exciting,” she says by phone from her home in Mississippi about releasing a new album. “It’s the realization of a project that you’ve spent months and sometimes years putting together and seeing it all be released is huge.”

Produced by Rodney Crowell, “Black Irish” comes four years after McNally’s last album, “Small Town Talk,” a superb collection of 14 songs written by the late New Orleans-based songwriter Bobby Charles that she toured behind with one of the best concerts of 2013 that this area saw, also at Ignition.

“He’s an incredibly thoughtful musician and lyricist and a great producer,” she says about Crowell. “He puts an incredible band together and he’s very communicative. He listens deeply. … He has a real vision, but that vision is distinctly built on me and what I do — for this record.”

Crowell had asked to produce McNally in 2012, and the two of them stayed in touch via email.

But after her marriage ended and she and her young daughter moved in with her parents so that she could care for her terminally ill mother, McNally found herself too depressed to write.

“A lot of artists like chaos,” she says. “To me, chaos is chaos. Writing brings me peace.”

Instead, McNally sent Crowell a recording of Emmylou Harris’ “Prayer in Open D” that she had made at home, and the two started to suggest other songs to each other.

Eventually, McNally did write or co-write three of the album’s 12 songs (including one with Crowell), and Crowell contributed two more.

An older, previously unreleased song, “Banshee Moan” chronicles McNally’s difficulties as a woman in the music business.

She wrote the slinky blues song “I Went to the Well” with Garry Burnside, one of R.L. Burnside’s children.

“The blues is really a long memory,” McNally says. “As much as you have to let go of things, there are things that shouldn’t be forgotten and a lot of that is how things feel. The blues remembers certain things, good and bad, and I think going to the well is important because it remembers these powerful emotions and experiences … so that the good are repeated and the bad are not repeated.”

“Roll Away the Stone” is a rock ‘n’ roll anthem, McNally says, that celebrates “guitars played loudly” and the important “release of a party and dancing. … (Life’s) all about trying to do things and remain in some sort of productive state. But you’re born to boogie-woogie and you’ve got to let that boogie-woogie out. There you have it.”

The album’s seven other tracks include standout covers of such songs as Stevie Wonder’s “I Ain’t Gonna Stand for It,” The Band’s “It Makes No Difference” and J.J. Cale’s “Low Rider.”

“For a lot of people, it’s important to write songs,” McNally says. “I get it. But I also think there’s something egomaniacal about it.”

She points to Harris as someone she admires because she is as comfortable interpreting someone else’s songs as writing her own.

“It’s important to sing certain songs,” McNally says. “It’s how we keep them alive. I doubt a lot of the songs recorded out there are all that great. Let the best song win.”