“I started by doing a creative pyramid,” McCluskey explains. “We would sit around a table, once a week for seven weeks, and say, ‘Alright, what do you need?’ Everybody would concentrate on that one person for a week. Everyday they would think of a way of hooking this person up. The next week we would move to the next person.”
     This same approach is what McCluskey is using on her second solo album, You Could Start A Fight In An Empty House. Calling it “Take Five”, McCluskey sent the album to a select 100 people, asked them to give it five minutes of their time. If anything touched them, made them think of someone else, or they thought someone else would like it, she asked that they send it to five other people. In this way, McCluskey is personalizing what the Internet has made detached. Within three days of Empty House’s digital release on iTunes last year, it sold 2,500 copies — and the ball is still rolling.
     Empty House follows McCluskey’s debut, The Things We Do, five years later. In the interim McCluskey has not been dormant. When she came to Los Angeles from Glasgow, Scotland, almost twenty years ago, McCluskey gained initial notoriety with the Wild Colonials.

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Buy this at iTunes.