Treasure aisle: Musical duo shops for success

Published: Thursday, February 15, 2007
By Brent Hallenbeck
Free Press Staff Writer

Apparently you can get anything at Costco -- even singers.

This is the tale Ryan Malroux and McKenna Lee tell of how they found each other and started the country-pop band Rumble Doll; it's a story that'll look great on a record label's promotional material one day.

Malroux, preoccupied with finding an appealing vocalist for his planned group, was shopping at the Colchester mega-store about three years ago when he noticed a particularly attractive clerk. "If I could find someone who looked like that and could sing," he told his wife, "I'd be all set."

A little while later, a friend of Malroux's told the Vermont native, "You've got to meet this girl from California." She was quite the vocalist, the mutual friend said. Malroux did in fact meet the girl from California. Turns out it was the very same Costco clerk he had noticed a few weeks earlier and wished, if only, that she could sing.

With fate like that, how could Malroux and Lee not form a band? The story even sounds like a country song, for Alan Jackson's sake.

If they can come together in such an improbable way, is it too much to expect that the Burlington group can do something else improbable, like, sign a major-label record deal? If only you could find those at Costco.

Rumble Doll is starting slow but sure, with a 2005 CD, "Another Fine Undefined Life," a second self-released disc on the way in a few months and a series of local shows, including one tonight at Higher Ground in South Burlington. Soon it will be time for the radio-ready, photo-friendly group to take its next big step. Malroux wants a record deal by fall. Then the group will be ready to make it nationally. Then internationally.

"We'd like to take over the world," Lee said, smiling. "Keep our dreams small."

Global domination aside, Rumble Doll certainly has the ingredients for a big career, starting with that strawberry-blonde girl from California who can sing and including a country sound burnished with a mass-appeal pop sheen. Some bands present a false humility when talking about their hopes, dreams and aspirations -- "We just want to make music and be happy," they say -- but Rumble Doll is right up front. They know exactly which brass ring they're reaching for, and how to get it.

"I read somewhere that 50 percent of it is music, 50 percent business," Malroux said. "You have to have the package. There is really something to be said for having an angle and a plan."

Malroux and Lee have been toiling for awhile to find the right musical formula. Lee, 27, grew up in Louisiana and moved to Los Angeles at age 19. She married and divorced on the West Coast, and tried but failed at a career in music. She sang not in a country group but an aggressive pop-rock band, and rather than citing Trisha Yearwood or Wynonna Judd as her musical influences she lists the hard-rocking bands Primus and Tool.

Malroux, conversely, is a soft-rock devotee, as the Olivia Newton-John hat and T-shirt he wore during a recent chat at a Burlington restaurant attest. While he and Lee might not share musical backgrounds, they do share geography -- Malroux, now 32, graduated from Burlington High School before heading west to Southern California.

"I got that whole rude awakening," the guitarist said, after discovering the music industry was more interested in appearances than music. "I was lost. I was absolutely lost."

He returned to Vermont about five years ago but never abandoned his hopes of forming a successful band. Lee, on the other hand, arrived in Vermont with her boyfriend and assumed her musical dreams were done.

"I had some qualms about moving here," she said. "In the back of my mind I'm thinking, 'Will I ever be able to do music again?'"

The music they're doing sounds familiar -- there's that Olivia Newton-John gloss in the production and just a hint of Cher's less bombastic moments in Lee's voice -- but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone else in today's music industry doing just what they're doing. They are, as Donny and Marie Osmond famously sang a generation ago, a little bit country and a little bit rock 'n' roll.

Malroux said about 75 percent of those who've heard the band's sound tell him it's country and another 25 percent say it's pop. "It could be country, it could be pop, whatever you like," he said, though he leans toward country.

He admits sheepishly that the group's sound is "very mainstream." Rumble Doll is working with a company based outside Nashville, Tenn., that's distributing the group's songs to radio stations nationwide.

"We think the group is very commercial," said Ray Roberts, national promotions director for RCI Music Promotion in Franklin, Tenn. "We feel as though they are top-notch."

Malroux and Lee agree. No false humility here.

"We're smart, and we're focused," Malroux said. "We could do well in this business."

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 802-660-1844 or bhallenb@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com