33 Things You Should Know About Macy Gray

1. Macy Gray made her debut on August 6, 1969.
Her first memory was a musical one and typified her life to come: “Me and my mom lived in the projects. I was sitting on a floor, and she had ‘Everyday People,’ by Sly and the Family Stone, playing on the radio. She was on the phone and she had this sheer gown on, the radio was blasting, and I could see all her body parts. My mother likes to walk around naked.”

2. Born out of wedlock, she was christened Natalie.
Her mother, a math teacher, never married her daughter’s biological father. When Mom married Gray’s stepfather, a former steelworker named Richard McIntyre, 7-year-old Natalie took her father’s last name.

3. The former Natalie McIntyre took her stage moniker from a Canton, Ohio, neighbor.
Riding her bike as a kid, she would see the name Macy Gray on a local man’s mailbox. When she got to Hollywood in her late teens, she jacked the name as her own.

4. For a brief time in her career, she wasn’t even Macy Gray.
She recorded an unreleased album for Atlantic Records in the mid-’90s and was dropped from the label. When her managers finally convinced her to give the music biz another shot, they sent out her new demo tape under the name Mushroom. “I want to do more records under different aliases,” she says, mentioning “Mite B.” as one possible handle.

5. Gray’s official debut, On How Life Is, was released just before her thirtieth birthday.
Inspiration came in unlikely places: She wrote the words to “I Try” in the bathroom of the health-insurance company where she worked; she wrote “A Moment to Myself” while on an acid trip in Old Town Pasadena, California. On How Life Is went on to sell more than 3 million copies and won Gray a Grammy Award for Best Female Vocal Performance.

6. It is generally assumed that Gray’s loopy demeanor at various awards shows is drug-induced.
“I don’t remember,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like I’d say, ‘Oh, I’ve got to smoke some weed before I go out on the Grammys.’ Not necessarily, I mean.” She does remember blazing up the night she went to the launch party for Madonna’s Music with George Clinton last year. They arrived in a horse and carriage. And they definitely inhaled.

7. At a family reunion when Gray was 11, two older cousins tried to show her how to smoke reefer.
The first doobie gave her only “a mad contact high. I didn’t really start smoking weed the right way until after college. I was a real late bloomer.”

8. Gray’s crackling new CD, The Id, has a song called “Relating to a Psychopath” that includes the line “I try to walk away/I choke and I stumble.”
Sound familiar? “I’m quoting myself!” Gray cheerfully admits (the chorus from her first hit, “I Try,” goes “I try to say goodbye and I choke/Try to walk away and I stumble”).

9. “Oblivion,” another song on the new LP, is not, as one might assume, about being self-destructive.
“It’s important to have an escape,” Gray explains. “I think you’d be miserable if you always had to get with the real world and didn’t have a place to go in your head, didn’t daydream or didn’t do drugs.”

10. “Weed and birth-control pills are my regulars.”
She won’t try crack or smack, though. “I’m scared of that shit and I don’t like needles. I’ve seen people who do it and they’ve got real bad acne. I’m too vain for that.”

11. Growing up was hard to do.
“I was real skinny,” she recalls, “and I used to have all these awful growing spurts. I’d go to bed, and I’d wake up and all my clothes would be too little.”

12. A football-playing tomboy, Gray didn’t have a boyfriend until eleventh grade.
His name was Pete, and he taught her about the birds and bees. The first time they made sweet love, it was to the strains of Eric B. and Rakim’s “My Melody.”

13. Many people have noted that Gray sounds like jazz giant Billie Holiday.
She keeps a photo of the singer in her bathroom. “She had, like, a really thin voice, but she explored it and turned it into a style.” Critics have tried to top each other describing Gray’s pipes. Her favorite? “Betty Boop smoking a joint with Sly Stone.”

14. The first man to turn her head, however, was Michael Jackson.
This was “before he fucked his face up,” she says. The first CD she bought was by Prince. Gray liked Purple Rain so much she painted her bedroom magenta.

15. As a musician, Gray is a triple threat.
She started piano lessons at age 7, hated every minute of them, and quit when she went to boarding school at 14. Today at Chez Gray are guitars, a piano and two drum kits. Macy plays them all.

16. Stately Gray Manor is located in suburban Encino, California. “Beverly Hills is overrated,” Gray notes. “The houses are like $8 million, and they’re two inches from the next house!”

17. “I did therapy when it wasn’t cool.”
She was 14, at boarding school with a bunch of white kids. “I kind of bugged out. Then I got kicked out. That scared my mother. So I went to therapy. I don’t anymore, but it seems like everyone in music does. I don’t have a lot of faith in therapy. When things come up that I can’t figure out, I just avoid them.”

18. She was expelled from school.
Gray says a staff member busted a move on her. “Boarding schools are cesspools!” she warns. “Don’t send your kid to a boarding school.”

19. She has three kids of her own.
She has two daughters, Aanisah, 6, and Happy, 3, and a son, Mel, 5. Aanisah, Mel and some of their friends sing on The Id’s “Hey Young World II,” featuring legendary old-school rapper Slick Rick.

20. Gray’s dream duet will never happen.
Unless it’s one of those Natalie Cole?and?Nat King Cole deals. Gray’s preferred partner? The late Biggie Smalls.

21. At age 17, Gray wrecked her stepfather’s car three times in two weeks.
The last time she crashed, she plowed into a pickup truck. Not wanting to go home after that, she went to the bank, withdrew $200, threw her typewriter in the trunk and started driving to California. When she pulled over to sleep somewhere in Kansas, the cops found her and sent her home.

22. These days, Gray drives a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon.

23. Now that she’s famous, there’s talk of a Macy Gray cartoon.
It’s about her and a group of misfit kids who become the stars of their school; it would be a little like a girl-powered Fat Albert, she thinks.

24. Her long legs came in handy at school.
Gray ran the 440-yard dash on the track team. Now that growth spurts have stopped, she tops out at 6 feet in her Adidas. Her favorites are the suede ones, “but the catch is, if you wash them or they get dirty, it’s over.” That’s why of the 35 pairs she bought, only six are left.

25. On The Id, Gray preaches for a “Sexual Revolution.”
Is there anything that’s taboo for Gray? “Let me think,” she ponders. “Oh, yeah, I don’t swallow. Not ’cause it’s taboo, I just don’t like the taste or the way it feels.”

26. Ever had a ménage á trois? Macy has.
She won’t specify the third party, but she and her boyfriend broke up afterwards. “Threesy,” she cautions, “is a crowdsy.”

27. Gray’s favorite libation is red bull and malibu.
Malibu’s a coconut rum. “Red Bull is disgusting by itself, but it goes with anything,” she explains.

28. Gray was married once, in 1996. She won’t reveal his name, only that he was a mortgage banker.
“We were together for four years, and we were married for one. He actually kicked me out of the house. When we broke up, I was pregnant with Happy. I went back and I stayed with my mom, and I had Happy at home.” Her kids, Gray says, saved her life. “When I got pregnant, I was really disillusioned. I wasn’t going anywhere. I kept fucking up. I was having to borrow money from my parents, and I was sleeping in my car. Having Aanisah forced me to stay in one place and focus on getting my shit together. Don’t call me a single mom. Or a divorced woman. Those terms are depressing.”

29. She used to work at Mcdonald’s.
She also worked at Wendy’s and was a tour guide at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in her hometown of Canton, Ohio.

30. There is a phat Brady Bunch sample on The Id’s “Freak Like Me.”
It was Gray’s producer’s idea. Gray used to be a fan of the TV show, until, as she recalls, “I heard this really bad racist joke they did one time. Mr. Brady was saying to Bobby, ‘Maybe you could be Wilt Chamberlain someday.’ And then Bobby said, ‘No, then I’d have to be black — ugh!’ ” The tale turns out to be more urban legend than fact. Either way, Gray says, “ever since then I’ve hated The Brady Bunch.”

31. Gray’s favorite film is Goodfellas.
“It beats the shit out of all those Godfathers,” she reasons. If she were a criminal — and she thinks she’d be a good one — her specialty would be bank jobs. “There’s a real art to that. I’d be the mastermind behind the whole thing. And I’d have to hold the gun, and I’d have to drive the getaway car, too. I mean, I’d have people with me, but I’d have to do everything, ’cause I don’t trust nobody.”

32. Gray would like to visit Venus and be invisible for a day.
She’d visit Venus “to see why it’s called the love planet” and spend a day invisible “to do some spying and secret-agent government shit.”

33. Gray will require a very large headstone.
She wants her epitaph to read: ‘We’re just pretending she’s dead. She’s really somewhere else, chillin’. She’ll be back.’