Mackenzie Roark: A Gleaming Star with a Sliver of Darkness

by Charles McGuigan 06.2025

When you look to the heavens on clear nights in the small hours of the morning and spot a shooting star—short-lived as a wink—it is as if the universe itself had just sent you a gift. But there is another astronomical event that upstages even a falling star. It happens in the east, just before daybreak. You can see it creep up above the horizon until it becomes the brightest light in the sky, and though it is actually the planet Venus, it is known as the rising morning star and seeing it unexpectedly can take your breath away. Richmonders may well be witnessing another sort of rising star. With flame-red hair, precisely penned original lyrics with melodies to match, along with a voice that is but “ain’t” country, Mackenzie Roark’s star seems to be rising at meteoric speeds.

Up in Frederick, Maryland, before the Roarks moved south to Virginia, Mackenzie, who was in fifth grade at the time, had a dream that was more than a little prophetic, and was a sort of cosmic nudge. At the school she attended, fifth graders got to put on a play each year, and it was the hope of every student to secure a part in it. One night, well before the play was announced, Mackenzie dreamed that the play that year would be the musical “Annie.” Sure enough, that’s exactly what the school decided to perform that year, and Mackenzie, in part because of her curly red locks, received the leading role. But something happened to this little girl who was extremely shy and did not know that she could sing. She learned she could not only sing, but she could project with her voice, using her diaphragm. 

“Before in the elementary school choir you would just sing in your head voice,” says Mackenzie. “Doing musical theater I sang with this louder voice and everyone said, ‘You can really sing, you should continue this.’” 

When the Roarks settled in Chesterfield County, Mackenzie attended Richmond Christian School on Belmont Road, and the family joined the congregation at Cornerstone Assembly of God. “I was doing community theater and then it kind of transitioned into church band and stuff,” Mackenzie says. 

Mackenzie took classes at SPARC, and at the Christian Youth Theater where she would meet a girl four years her junior who has since become a Richmond music legend. “That’s where I met Lucy Dacus,” she tells me. “We actually carpooled together and I went to her sixteenth birthday party. It’s a funny connection.”

It was in middle school years that Mackenzie really began getting into music. In seventh grade she started listening to a lot of eighties music. “I loved the oldies station,” she says.  “It started with Wings and Styx and Steely Dan.” 

And then in eighth grade, her older brother, Patton, who was a high school sophomore, turned her on to The Beatles.  “So from The Beatles I started listening to the Mamas and the Papas, and Simon and Garfunkel, and The Beach Boys—all this music from the sixties and the seventies.”  

The following year, Mackenie traveled further back through the corridors of classic rock.  “I just really got attached to all this older music,” she says. “On a local radio station every Sunday night they would have the rock and roll hop—music from the late fifties and the early sixties, basically pre-Beatlemania stuff. Really early rock and roll.”

In her junior year she had a Road to Damascus moment that would change her life and provide a sort of guiding light for her.   

“The really big turning point for me was eleventh grade when I discovered Bob Dylan,” says Mackenzie. “That was my big transformation in terms of really appreciating music for the lyrics and the imagery. I was obsessed with Bob Dylan for years. He was my idol and my crush. I just loved him. I would have dreams about him. His songs really made me think differently about music and the power of music and the power of imagery and how songs can make you feel.”

After entering James Madison University where she studied English, Mackenzie fell head over heals for another other singer-songwriter. “Leonard Cohen was my next big love,” she says. “He was a very special soul. Music at that time was a huge part of my identity, not necessarily as a performer, because I really wasn’t performing.” 

But she was writing songs, and would sometimes do open mike nights.

It was during her time at JMU that she found her third singer-songwriter love who introduced her to a different brand of country music, the underground sort, that appealed to her.  “I discovered Townes van Zandt in 2015 and really fell in love with him,” she says. “And that sent me down a rabbit hole to Emmylou Harris and Dolly and Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson and John Prine, And I was really drawn to this whole sound.”

On about the time she was graduating from JMU, Mackenzie decided to study creative writing overseas in the land of happy wars and sad love songs.  “I went to Ireland to get my master’s degree,” Mackenzie remembers.  “It was a one-year program at the University of Limerick.” The man who headed up the program was Joseph O’Connor, Sinead O’Connor’s older brother. 

She considered focusing on poetry. “I figured out the reason I was drawn to poetry is because I’m drawn to music, I’m drawn to songwriting,” says Mackenzie. “That’s the thing I wanted to do.”

Turns out, she was in the perfect place for it. 

The creative writing program at Limerick was fairly small, just a dozen students, and during the first class everyone presented a work they had created. Instead of a poem or a short story, Mackenzie performed a song she had written called “There Will Be Blood.” The response from her classmates overwhelmed her. “Everyone was really blown away by it and at first I didn’t really know if they were just blowing smoked up my a** or if they truly were blown away,” she says. Turns out they loved it.

And in Ireland she began performing regularly. She did open mike nights, and late night sit-ins at pubs. They would lock the front door after last call and people would just pass around a guitar and begin playing. One musician after another would perform and Mackenzie began to feel at her ease as a performer.  “That experience was so amazing to me,” she recalls. “Anytime I did something here at home, like a little gig or something, it got to me because I’ve always been kind of shy. But there was something about being anonymous in Ireland. I was reinventing myself and no one knew me so I felt more boldness to do open mikes and got just a lot of positive feedback. And in Ireland I was writing my own music.” 

For her thesis project in creative writing Mckenzie put together a five-track EP titled “Mother Tongue,” which was professionally produced and served her well stateside as a kind of booking tool.

“When I got home, I was really fired up to do music and perform and make money,” she says. One of her earliest shows here was at Urban Farm House.  For a two-hour performance she received thirty dollars in cash and a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to Urban Farmhouse. And whatever there was in the tip jar.

She played one show after another. Saude Creek Winery. Triple Crossing Beer. Hardywood. The Camel. “I’ve been doing this all over Richmond for about ten years now and eventually formed some bands along the way,” says Mackenzie. 

Her first band, called Pistol Sister, was formed a year after she returned from Ireland and lasted for almost two years. “That kind of grew my catalog and we put out a song called ‘Cigarettes and TV Dinners,’ and that song is on the new album,” says Mackenzie.

Throughout it all, she has always worked at other jobs to make ends meet. She has worked as a nanny, taught school, served as a virtual assistant, has worked at libraries, and is currently employed in the writing center at J. Sargeant Reynolds downtown campus. “I’ve also hosted kariokes, deejayed at weddings,” Mackenzie says. “I’m always kind of hustling.”

But music is always at the center of it all. 

She tells me a bit about her own music. “There’s a thread of darkness through all my favorite songs,” she says. “Look at Townes Van Zandt. The reason I always loved him was because he was able to balance levity and playfulness with this deep darkness, and marrying those two things together is such a perfect combination for an entertainer. He was tortured and he really made an impact on me.” 

And though Mackenzie didn’t struggle with the same demons that Townes wrassled with, she understands the need for that element of darkness in the creative ethos. “I have lived a very fortunate life, great upbringing, great family, great opportunity,” she says. 

She looks directly at me and then says, “But I’ve always had that sliver of darkness and sadness. And I think that really does drive songwriting. Honestly, I find when I’m really in a happy place, and I’m really content and happy in my relationships, I can’t write anything.”

Which makes sense. After all, if you are void of angst of any kind, you must be living in a fantasy realm, or stumbling through a life unexamined.

“I’m not really one for positive love songs. Songs that say, ‘I love you so much and I want to be in a field of flowers with you,’” says Mackenzie. “It’s not all flowers and rainbows. 

On June 6 at Get Tight lounge, Mackenzie Roark and the Hotpants released “Ghost of Rock and Roll,” a nine-track vinyl album.

Mackenzie fairly gushes when she talks about the band.

Billy Bacci plays lead guitar and keys. “He really produced the album,” says Mackenzie. “He added a lot to the album. He’s just an amazing sort of visionary when it comes to music, and hearing a song and then envisioning how it needs to sound.”

Matt Moran plays bass, and he and Billy work their magic seamlessly. “They come up with really cool licks,” Mackenzie says. And both Matt and Billy play in another band with the Hotpants drummer, Drew Barnocky. “So they are very, very tight,” says Mackenzie. “They communicate together very well.”

And then there’s Caroline Vain on fiddle. “She’s got her own band and her music is kind of a Indie folksy,” Mackenzie says. “She has a really pretty soft voice. And all of our vocals really work well together.”

Recently. the band added its newest member—Leigh Pinner. who does harmonies, plays tambourine and pinch-hits on keys.  “We are a big old band,” says Mackenzie. “Three girls, three guys. And the harmonies we’re locking in are great. You couldn’t ask for a better band.”

She’s already thinking of the next album. “We’ve talked about different sound directions we want to go in for the next album. I’d like it to be just The Hotpants and remove my name from it. I want us to all be a collective group that works on things together.  Everyone’s a songwriter in the band. We want to try some more interesting harmonic things, some Beach Boysey things. Now that we have four singers in the band we can do that. We can do some cool things like that.”

And she suspects the next album will have a different tone. “I want to write about more spiritual things,” says Mackenzie. “The nature of reality and the universe and questioning life, and blending that sense of spirituality with reality in those little moments in life.”

This is not New Age drivel; it’s more about the sacredness of the ordinary. 

“We all live within our animal self and everyone’s trying to ascend to a higher self and our band likes to talk about these topics,” Mackenzie says. “Things like consciousness and what happens after we die. We want to go beyond writing about just animal nature things like love and lust and frustration. We want to write about ideas and topics that are mind-bendy without getting too crazy: I want it to still be relatable.”

Right now the band’s focused on promoting “Ghost of Rock and Roll,” and gearing up for a number of out-of-town shows. They’ll be playing in Greensboro, Roanoke, Bristol, and the Floyd Red Wing Roots Festival in Harrisonburg. They’ll also be returning to Floyd Fest where last year they won the On the Rise Competition which got them a mention in Rolling Stone.

“We’ll see what happens,” says Mackenzie Roark. “We’ll see what this next year brings. The things that really keep me going are these little wins. I need these little glimmers of hope and these little wins and these little moments of success. Don’t we all?”