Bonnie McKee Looks Back on the Decade-Long Road to Her New Sophomore Album ‘Hot City’: ‘I’m Finally Seeing My True Calling’
“I think I found the name of the album that Bonnie did with Epic,” wrote a user named Muri on fan forum PopHatesFlops in Dec. 2016. Muri was referring to “Hot City,” the lost sophomore album from pop singer Bonnie McKee that her label at the time, Epic Records (a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment), shelved after the release of her 2014 single “American Girl.” At that point, McKee was industry prevalent for her cowrites on five number-one singles for Katy Perry plus smash hits for Britney Spears and Taio Cruz. But as a solo artist, she became known as a casualty of passive pop consumption, tossed aside when “American Girl” peaked at No. 24 on Billboard’s Mainstream Top 40 — apparently not high enough to convince the label that she was worth the investment.
On PopHatesFlops, “Hot City” became a holy grail. Today, the post has stretched to almost 600 pages of comments from fans searching for a glimmer of hope that McKee would one day unleash the collection of grandiose, chewable pop music, some of which had trickled onto the internet in demo form. So it came as a surprise to McKee when one fan showed her the site during the pandemic in 2020. She’d already come to terms with the trauma of losing the entire album to Epic, which owned the masters, and that she was a mere casualty to the sinister trappings of the music industry.
“When I started to see all this enthusiasm about the songs, I was like, I love those songs, too,” McKee tells Variety. “And I was so, so heartbroken to have to grieve those and move on… But music had changed. We went into bedroom pop and everything wasn’t sparkly, maximalist pop music anymore. It was dated at that time. It really is all about timing because I started seeing people talking about, ‘We miss the Katy Perry days, we miss Britney Spears, we miss traditional pop.’ I was like, I have a whole ass album, some of my favorite songs I’ve written, just sitting there collecting dust.”
McKee talks about that time with unassuming alacrity on an orange chaise in her Los Angeles backyard, next to a pool that overlooks Hollywood Reservoir. Peering out from behind her shades, she’s bright, engaging and, most of all, very forthright, recounting the time with Epic as a learning lesson. And when her manager at the time, Troy Carter, got her out of her contract with Epic, she left empty-handed, unsure how to navigate her aspirations of becoming a pop superstar.
But the forum posts in 2020 sparked a renewed interest in what she thought was lost forever. While in lockdown, McKee decided to “pull a Taylor Swift” and rerecord the entire album, working hand in hand with producer David Mørup to recreate the aged songs — all unfinished, all demos — in a contemporary context. Now, a decade after the cotton candy buzz of “American Girl” gave a false start to her solo career, McKee is releasing “Hot City” this Friday, finally on her own terms as an independent artist with full control of her vision.
“I learned a lot about myself and thinking about how much I’ve changed since I wrote this album, but the theme is consistent, and that is perseverance,” she explains. “And as much as I don’t really love being the poster child for perseverance, because that means that you had to fail a bunch, I feel like I have a responsibility now to be like, you just keep going. I wish there was something else that could be fulfilling to me, but I’m an artist whether I like it or not. So I feel like I’m finally seeing through my true calling or whatever.”
“Hot City” burns bright and fast, from the Cherelle-sampling single “Jenny’s Got a Boyfriend” to the sugar-soaked “Don’t Get Mad Get Famous” featuring Sophie Powers. Indeed, it’s a callback to the early 2010s when pop music with oversized abandon dominated the radio, but reconfigured with the sonic sheen of modern studio technique. Only one song, “Snatched” featuring drag queen Priyanka, is entirely new, while the original versions of “American Girl” and French-touched “Sleepwalker” sidle up to the rest of the rerecordings.
McKee embarked on the road back to “Hot City” while working on a separate album. She spent a year cold-emailing people at Sony Music before she finally connected with the catalog department, where her demos lived among the archives. No one at the company was there when she was on the roster, so it didn’t take much convincing to get clearance and begin toiling on the new version of the album.
“We’re working together and I own these new masters because they’re all brand new, but there were a couple of moments where I was like, I can’t recreate this and I want to use this original thing. And they were kind enough to allow me to license ‘American Girl,’ which they fully paid for,” she says. Even then, “American Girl” wasn’t cleared until a few weeks before album release, and McKee spent late nights in the run-up to release putting finishing touches on the final product.
As McKee describes it, “Hot City” is an album curated by the fans. And in some ways, it is — McKee recorded an extended version of “Don’t Get Mad,” for instance, after fans complained that the version she put out in November was too short. But “Hot City” is an album for McKee, in an almost poetic way, marking the end of a very long chapter and the start of a new one.
When she inked a deal with Epic in 2012, she had already released her debut album “Trouble” eight years prior, signed to Reprise Records (via Warner Music) and “held hostage” for six years the contract. Her future looked promising. She’d already nabbed cowrites on Perry’s “California Gurls,” “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” “Teenage Dream” and “Part of Me” — all number one singles — by the time “American Girl” released. She was trying to break free of her reputation as one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, and “American Girl” seemed to be her ticket to stardom.
But in the end, having co-writes on songs that defined an era was a blessing as much as it was a curse. “If I had come out the gate just being Jane Doe from Minnesota or whatever and ‘American Girl’ had done what it had done, everyone would be very impressed,” she says. “But because I was coming at the tail end of an insane run, I was viewed as a flop. Even the label felt that way, where it was like, oh we signed Bonnie McKee and she’s signed to [Dr.] Luke and she’s done all this other shit. Why isn’t it blowing up overnight? Because I’m still new to the public, people don’t know who I am. Y’all know who I am because I’ve been behind the scenes and I’ve been making you money for years. But the average person on the street doesn’t know who writes these songs, so I needed help just like any other beginning artist, even though I was already a veteran.”
She was set to release her follow-up single “Slay” to coincide with her opening slot on the Jonas Brothers’ tour, and as luck would have it, the trio disbanded the day before it was supposed to begin. She regrouped and booked another tour with Karmin, paying out of pocket, but with the seemingly lukewarm reception to “American Girl,” Epic backed off from “Slay” and its backing in her as an artist.
“[Then-Chairman and CEO] L.A. Reid was just like, ‘Yeah, nah, I don’t think it’s a hit,'” she recalls. “I was like, you haven’t even tried yet. But also, even with just the ‘American Girl’ thing, I was like this is on fire, this is gonna go. And they were like, eh, we’re done spending money on that. I was like, we’re so close. So I definitely had a meltdown when I got that call that they were going to stop promoting it and I was like, why? Why?”
Over the years, McKee channeled her energies into songwriting. Her resume is long, with credits on tracks from Bebe Rexha, Charlie Puth and Ava Max. But she’s also found her voice as an independent artist. Her 2015 EP “Bombastic” debuted in the top five on iTunes, and she’s had numerous syncs for the title track, with one as recently as last year. When she began work on the new version of “Hot City,” she’d already been recording what’s shaping up to be her next album and was planning to shop it around at the start of the pandemic. But the record is heavier, dealing with the fallout from a bad breakup, and she felt it wasn’t the proper time for its release. Right now, it’s about halfway completed, and she says it’ll release when the timing feels right.
With “Hot City,” though, McKee is starting fresh. She’s been through depressive episodes, wondering if pop music — or music in general — was a path that she should continue to pursue. But without expectations for how it will land, she feels content giving her core fans what they’ve long been anticipating, one forum post at a time. “Right now, I just hope that it can be an escape for people, because times are tough for everybody that I talk to,” she says. “So I hope that I can be a bright spot in a dark world, and to inspire hope that no matter what, it’s never too late. And just do what you love and be who you want to be. It’s really about hope and joy and crying and dancing. That’s the goal.”
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