By Matt Kite

In a word? Mary, Me, Mr. Blackwatch’s forthcoming album, is ambitious. It’s the Tacoma band’s first album. It took years to write. And it’s being released online and on CD by Olympia’s Green Monkey Records as a double album, which means two discs, extensive liner notes, and a 24-page lyric booklet. The artwork, created by Andrew Dimitt, had been rendered as a mandala, complete with geometric design, local iconography, and lyrical themes portrayed in physical form.

Doug Mackey, the band’s lead vocalist, guitarist, and chief songwriter, is the mad engineer behind the project. He recorded and mixed it at Moon Yard Recording Studio, his backyard studio, and had it mastered by Steve Turnidge at UltraViolet Studios in Seattle. Mackey got plenty of help from the rest of the band, which features Kevin Fraser on bass and Joe Wood on drums and vocals. The album is scheduled for release Tursday, August 13—Mackey’s 60th birthday.

“I’ve always come up with grand notions,” says Mackey, who considers the new album a rock opera in the vein of The Who’s Quadrophenia and Pink Floyd’s Animals. “I like to try to connect all the things into one grand thing. That’s sort of what I do in life.”

A concept album, Mary, Me is broken into two acts, each eight songs long. All told, it totals 67 minutes of music. The album follows the story of Mary Dun, who flees her abusive family in a dusty cow town, escapes to the big city, meets a similar fate, on the grim streets, and returns to her hometown, resolute and transcendent.

“It sort of wrote itself in a way,” Mackey explains. “It’s the story of a woman from her birth through her life to her death, mostly in the eyes of the men she encounters. If there’s a theme to it, it’s overcoming toxic masculinity.”

The idea behind the album came to Mackey years ago, but it took time to develop. Most of the drums were recorded a decade ago, and the rest of the album—the instrumentation, the lyric-writing, the vocals—was finished in stages, with mixing done along the way. Mackey even retreated to his friends’ beach house to tackle some of the writing.

“The first stuff I demoed was in Orlando about 1993,” Mackey says. “Some songs were just phonetic sounds my mouth was making, and from those, I started to diving lyrics that seemed to be connected in some way. And then when I became conscious of these connections, I started fortifying them so they became an arc. And then once I recognized the narrative arc, I wrote about three or four songs to bridge the gap.”

Mackey wrote all but one of the songs, but Mr. Blackwatch is anything but a one-man show. Wood, who has been playing drums with the band since its inception in 1996, adds his guitar skills to a few tracks and even takes the lead on vocals for one song. And Fraser, who has been with the band for ten years now, holds down the low end on all but one song. The album, meanwhile features 17 guest musicians—including horn players—and five female vocalists, plus the vocalizations of one dog named Bernie.

Mary, Me is a quirky, bold work that takes itself seriously. The liner notes include a famous quote from author Joseph Conrad: “Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.” There’s even a foreword, written by Craig Awmiller, a University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum. But the album also toys with cheeky themes, the most predominant of which is bovine in nature. Familiar phrases like “How now, brown cow?” and “The cow jumped over the moon,” pepper the lyrics.

Musically, Mr. Blackwatch is doing more that playing rock and roll. Americana and folk blend with old-school rock tones, and the combination might be at its best in the opening track, “See the Cow (Part 2)” which sounds a bit countrified thanks to a banjo, pedal steel guitar, a growling bass line and gang vocals. Mackey’s vocals. delivered with an earnest vibrato, range from forlorn to a full-throated growl.

A bevy of sounds are thrown at the proverbial canvas, from horn stabs to finger snaps, with the musical mood shifting from plodding to punchy, depending on where we are in Mary’s story. The performances are tight, the tracks layered deeply. Cliff Colon’s saxophone solo on “Being Used (The Ballad of Mary Dun)” is reminiscent of something you might hear on a Roxy Music album, even if it finds itself in a playful folk ditty, and Reilly Rosbotham’s violin soars on “Turn Me Out,” the closing number of Act I.

Act II opens with “Pleased to See You,” its upbeat chords sometimes echoing Grand Funk Railroad. “I Hurt Her” drifts toward the dark, dreamy soundscapes of Pink Floyd, making use of triumphant crescendos and a tin-can radio effect on vocals, before the music is allowed to die down and rise again. When the song resumes, Mark Wuesthoff’s pedal steel guitar takes it in an entirely new direction.

Lyrically, Mary’s story begins in a painful place. “Maybe Love” explored Mary’s abuse: “My daddy had me from the start. He let his fingers do the walking, talking. That’s how he touched my heart.” But in “Does It Show?” the story arc bends toward inner peace: “Over the moon, who’d believe I’m back in this cow town? Studded, scabbed, scarred, black-tattooed. Was lost, now I am found.” The final track, “See the Cow (Part 1)” shows Mr. Blackwatch’s penchant for turning things around. The album ends on Part 1 of the song—it started with Part 2—and the final lines leave a murky impression:” I’m designed to kill ‘til I’ve lived. To hold that thought. Hold that thought. Hold that thought.”

Mr. Blackwatch hopes you’ll do more than listen to the music. Mackey, Wood and Fraser want you to experience the tactile sensation of studying the artwork and poring over the lyrics. If you get lost along the way, that’s probably a good thing. The band will be hosting an album release party at The Valley in Tacoma on Sunday, August 18, and performing select songs from Mary, Me. On stage, Mr. Blackwatch is known for tossing cow paraphernalia into the audience and delivering a motley collection of cover songs by artists ranging from Patsy Cline to Black Sabbath. A Marry Poppins tune often makes the cut too.

Mr. Blackwatch CD Release Party and Birthday Celebration

August 18th 3-7pm at The Valley (No Cover)

1206 Puyallup Ave, Tacoma, WA