108. Single Review of Time Machine by Vivi McCracken
Originally Published on April 4th, 2025
About the Artist
Ok, I’m rolling up my sleeves for this one. There is SO MUCH I want to discuss…
Nashville, Tennessee. Known as the music capital of the world, Music City, USA, and so on. It is a Beacon for musicians. It is Mecca. It is a major step in the journey for so many musicians who are chasing their dreams.
That is just the first major step.
The rest of the steps are bigger, more challenging, and just when you thought you’ve got your feet on them, you learn that they can crumble and collapse beneath you the moment you step onto them.
Musicians pour into the city every single year. Every big fish in every little pond swims to Nashville and try their fins out in this gargantuan ocean of a town, full of sharks, squalls, and treacherous currents. They get a studio apartment they can barely afford, they start writing, start networking online, they make their ways to songwriter’s nights, live stream showcases, and livestream when they play a gig in a bar, club, or restaurant.
They start squeezing their way into smaller and smaller circles of musicians with the hopes of meeting that guy who worked with that girl who was on the radio two years ago.
You have to love it. And even if you do, it’s fucking hard.
“Starving musician” is a cliche for a reason. People are assholes. Especially if they even begin to think that they’re somehow important. Everybody is competing with one another. And for many, Nashville is a place that can be lived in but it just isn’t home.
So many obstacles and as the ones who “make it” can attest, the work gets harder as they go.
Some of these things might sound familiar to Vivi McCracken, a native to another big music scene; Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas where, at a young age Vivi would start showing an interest in songwriting; even before she could play an instrument. When she got her first guitar at 9, she started writing songs immediately.
At 13, McCracken would perform in her first open mic night. Discovering another passion, performance, she started playing shows in Austin and other cities that she and her family would travel to; Nashville and Chicago, even London and Paris.
In 2023, McCracken released her debut EP, Vivi McCracken, a 5-song, 15- minute collection of original work. She was 22 years old at the time of this release.
McCracken, if you want to pin her to the most basic genre, would be easily considered country music. But really, she is folk music through and through. One thing both genres share is the term “hook.” A hook is the chorus of a song and they call it a hook because it’s designed to “hook” the listener into the song they’re singing.
This is exactly how Vivi McCracken’s new single got me.
About the Song
Time Machine is the latest single by singer/songwriter Vivi McCracken. It was released on March 29th, 2025. It features McCracken on vocals and on the guitar. At a little more than three minutes long, this is her first release of 2025 and it is self-produced.
About the Music
Time Machine starts out with an acoustic guitar and Vivi McCracken comes in with the first verse after short introduction. Right from the start, this has a nostalgic feel to it.
As the song progresses, more and more instruments build and are incorporated into the song including drums, bass, fiddle, electric guitar, and backing vocals. The progression is tearfully joyful, if that makes sense.
McCracken’s vocal performance is sweet, soft, and emotionally dialed in to the context of her lyrics, which are incredibly profound. McCracken, not even 25, appears to have an old soul in the way she fondly cherishes each memory she revisits.
She opens by reflecting on her childhood and this is so vivid I can close my eyes and picture it. As she introduces her chorus “And if I want to go back. I turn on my childhood soundtrack,” a line that sets up an excellent chorus. It’s the hook I referred to earlier. McCracken is dialed in as she paints an eloquent picture of her fondest memories.
As the second verse begins, she confirms the changes in her life that the first verse and chorus allude to as she tells the story of courageously packing up her things and moving to a new city, living by herself. She references a bond with her family that was forged in these lovely memories that represent an unconditional love only a family could provide. I particularly love the lines about her guitar needing new strings and calling her family back home to sing them the new songs she wrote.
As far as her songwriting goes, her style is very comparable to the early country music days of Taylor Swift. There is a particularly relatable method to the lyrical content in her music. McCracken has found a direct link to connecting with her listeners, emotionally, with Time Machine.
Final Thoughts
Vivi McCracken is a songwriter. A song. Writer. I’ve listened to McCracken’s entire catalog of music a few times now and I think there is a lot of appeal to the music. I think the storytelling in Anne Boleyn is cleverly crafted and I think, once again, she has some staple musical movement to her vocal performance that resembles Taylor Swift; like the sweeping enunciation that she has as she delivers heavy lyrical story arcs and how the rises and falls of her melody all connect.
I know as an online “journalist,” (don’t laugh) I have some responsibility to objectivity and I take that responsibility seriously. For instance, I should be able to insert my opinion about this music in a manner that isn’t emotional. It’s ironic, it’s contradictory, and it is paradoxical, but that is what I am supposed to do. Even though MUSIC IS EMOTIONAL (among many other things).
All that to say, the song You Said. IN PARTICULAR the line, “You said I couldn’t sing.” I take issue with that line in that, I hope somebody didn’t actually say that to this artist because that person would be crazy.
Everybody is entitled to their opinion, of course, and musicians- especially in Nashville- have to have thick skin because this city will eat you alive if you don’t. But that doesn’t make these critics right! Based off of the rest of the song, it sounds like this is about a very challenging relationship that is with a person who has experienced some rough things in their life. The song also goes further by saying this person would memorize the lines of the narrator’s song and sometimes sing them. So, maybe it was a moment of anger. It makes for an entertaining song.
Which brings me to my original point. Vivi McCracken is a SONG WRITER!!! Hypothetically, even if she were a weak vocalist, her songwriting is so good that it wouldn’t really matter. Bob Dylan is famous for two things: having a weird voice and his genius as a songwriter. His songwriting is so good in fact, that he is the only songwriter in the history of songwriters to have won a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Im not being so forward as to say that Vivi McCracken is a genius songwriter like Dylan was. I’m also not saying there is anything wrong or “weird” about her voice that she has to compensate for it with more creative songwriting. What I am saying is that I hope somebody that close to her did not say that she couldn’t sing. Because it’s just not true.
The fact of the matter, which is the unbiased, unemotional opinion I have of Vivi McCracken is she is talented. She is a talented singer, songwriter, and when combining the two, she does wonderful things. And all before the age of 25. I am excited to hear what she does. I would love to see her play a show. For, as the saying goes,
I’m hooked.
You can check out her website where you can see scheduled shows, other press releases, and you can visit her merch store.
You can subscribe to her YouTube Channel and her TikTok profiles to see some cool media content like music videos and performances.
Time Machine released on March 29th and is streaming at all the places where you can stream music!
GO PRESS PLAY!
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