5 Questions with Zachary McLellan on latest album, Little Raven

Zachary McLellan is a young musician with a lot of talent. His music is like dream folk with an underpinning of classical from the range of instruments in the mix. He plays with a cadre of high end musicians and friends. His humors shows up in the answers below.

Please tell me about yourself and your music.
I’ve always been an artist.  Throughout the years, my art has taken many different shapes, from oil painting and charcoal pieces to poems and video game design… and most recently, music – but it still feels like a new pursuit for me.  I’m 23 and I hadn’t picked up a guitar until I was 19.  I started teaching myself, learning scales and chord shapes – then, over the course of the following few months, recorded my 2021 album The Gyres. In 2024 I released my album Little Raven, and with more of a catalog of songs under my belt, started playing shows around the Midwest here.  I also spent half of 2024 living in South-Eastern Alaska, playing a handful of shows throughout the Kenai Peninsula, which was just wonderful.

I’d describe my music as… wistful?  Maybe a little dreamy?  The term “indie-folk” comes to mind, whatever that really means.  There’s a lot of alt-tuning acoustic guitar and strings, but I occasionally dip my toe into the world of post-rock and shoegaze.

What inspires your music? Greyhound and New River, off latest album Little Raven, tell such raw stories. They are evocative and tender in a weird way they make a cold day colder but in a grounding way.
What inspires me is pretty fluid… in that it changes a lot.  Recently, I’ve been interested in the whimsy of old Greek myths like The Great Bear and Pandora’s Box.  I found an old book at an antique store called The Biography of a Grizzly, which follows the late-19th-century legends of a bear named Wahb.  That was a great read, and has inspired a lot of my current songwriting.  Otherwise, I take a lot of inspiration from the natural world.  I find it fun to ambiguously blend the human experience with an anthropomorphized version of the natural environment around me.

As far as the songs you mentioned go, Greyhound is written about being young and realizing I will someday dream of being young again – in a strange, sort of self aware and grateful way.  Growing up isn’t always easy, yet youth is invaluable…

New River is written about a village in Iceland named Vik.  It’s a city of about 3,000 inhabitants built near an active volcano which happens to reside underneath a glacier.  If the volcano erupts, it’ll melt the ice, sending jökulhlaups (a cascading glacial river) through the town.  In 2023, I went on a hitchhiking trip along the south coast of Iceland.  One day, I climbed Reynisfjall in Mýrdalshreppur, and was given a tremendous view of Vik.  The idea of calamity striking such a beautiful place sort of haunted me as I climbed down into the town, so I decided to write a song about a dramatized version of that event in which I too got steamrolled and just sort of floated away with everything… talk about making a cold day colder!

3) Tell me about the rest of your band. You play so many instruments; I can only imagine handing over a piece of the art that you could do – if you were cloned. But it’s nice to hear it all together.
Well, for starters, I absolutely could not do everything on my own.  I dabble in playing a lot of different instruments, but dabbling doesn’t usually translate to proficiency…  And I think being surrounded with people who know what they’re doing sort of masks the fact that I don’t. *wink*

Celia Sieckert is a friend of mine and my go-to for cello; James Acampora is another session musician I frequently work with.  Both of them are leagues beyond me in terms of musical proficiency, and I’m just honored to be around them in any capacity.  Every time Celia and I play together, I get absolutely awestruck by her ability to perform and I just have to stop and take it in… I’m beyond grateful for her contributions to my songs, and am so glad I get to call her my friend, too. 🙂

I’ve also worked extensively with my pal Jayden Peterman.  He and I have known each other since high school and have collaborated on a number of projects – most notably, four of my music videos.  Our ability to work and communicate with each other about our ideas is really special… The majority of the music video for Greyhound was shot in one day – and we were both tapped into such an organic and synchronized creativity that it made working on that project one of the highlights of my entire musical experience.  That’s all thanks to Jayden.  On top of the cinematography, he’s also a multi-instrumentalist and has crushed it on bass, harmonies and drums for a few of my shows.

A kindred spirit of mine in the music world is my friend Alex Podesta – who flew out from the West Coast to play with me at the Arthouse gig.  He’s the only guitarist I’ve felt comfortable playing my songs with.  He and I are in very consistent communication with each other, sending demos and song ideas back and forth, featuring each other in various elements of the songwriting process.  He’s a wildly talented artist with a few releases under the name Podesta – people should really check him out.

Additional shoutouts to my buddies Levi and Kyle Petersen – who spent many long hours learning and writing new bass/keyboard parts for the Arthouse show.

And shoutouts to Bryn Perry, Bryce Bennyhoff, and Erick Krueger for dedicating many hours to completing the sound of my first performance at the lake.

So that’s the band – or, more accurately, “a list of some of my friends that also do music with me sometimes”, haha… Oh, and there’s one more: none of this would be possible without my producer, Scott Morrisson.  I walked into his studio with a handful of (horrible) demos when I was 19 years old, and he clearly saw something in me.  He’s been so instrumental to my creative evolution, and I can’t thank him enough for his encouragement, patience and guidance.

4) Please tell me about Numb Kite in a Thunderstorm. I may be obsessed with it. It’s very moving.
Oh, you dove pretty deep to discover that one!

I’ve always been fascinated by the release structure of albums… they’re like collections of moving pieces of art, organized in a way that paints a larger picture.  So, when I was 17, I wanted to make an “album”, but didn’t know how to play any real music.  My way of circumnavigating the required skill set entailed recording ukulele loops on my mom’s laptop and digitally stretching them to create ambient noise.  I added a few flares here and there, but the project was largely devoid of conventional music, so I’ve always been conflicted about whether or not to call Numb Kite in a Thunderstorm my “first” album.

That said, I uploaded it to rateyourmusic.com and received some direct messages from fans that listened to it for sleep and classified it as a dark/black ambient or noise album.  Moral of the story: apparently, there’s an audience for everything.

Shoutout to Levi Petersen for contributing the only real melodies to that project.

5) I saw that you recently played The Arthouse. How often do you play publicly and how can we find out in advance?
The Arthouse show was SO much fun.  We played a 2+ hour set of originals, and filled up the main floor with about 70 attendees.  Can’t wait to play there again.

That said, I’m unfortunately pretty elusive.  I only play out every couple of months.  I’m also a bit of a pretentious contrarian in that I have no social media accounts, neither professional nor personal.  Not very conducive to productive marketing, I know…  I’m working on getting some pages up, as I’d like to be able to share these things with people that want to follow along.  For now, you can track updates on the streaming services – Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music… and I believe they announce upcoming shows for me. 🙂