I was lucky enough to play a bunch of shows with Mirah and set up even more for her in the early 00s. Great to be reconnecting to say the least! Mirah is a dream, and an underground hero. And she was gracious enough to answer a couple questions from me ahead of her sure to be fantastic show tonight! Appreciate and support her!
1) You live in New York City these days. How do you like New York? How does it inform your music (if it does)?
I like New York just fine. I didn’t mean to move there, at least not in any sort of permanent way. I thought I was going to be there for 6 months and then keep wandering, but I met someone and fell in love and it ended up making sense to stay. I’m not really a city person, and this makes it an interesting experience to live in such a giant messy one. But while there are plenty of things that I find challenging or unpleasant about living there, there are times when I find it so wonderful and amazing, and beautiful and full of intrigue. For me, the best part New York is the people, every kind of people, that we’re all there sharing space, subway cars, sidewalks. It seems so unlikely that it could work at all, but in its own cantankerous way, it does.
I’m not really sure how living there has informed my music-making. Probably in some ways that I’m not able to see, or differentiate from my experience of living my life and writing songs from within the ship of my body and personal world. I am the same place as I’ve always been.
2) Your current tour: Is there a new release coming? Working out new material?
Yes! I recently completed a new full length record and that will be out in September. I’m doing one new song from that on this tour. I am so excited to put this new one out. I think it’s great!
3) When I first met you and threw shows for you (way back when) they were at houses and other alternative spaces that seemed aligned with the community that you were coming from and part of. As you’ve found greater success as an artist the rooms you are able to play (and that probably suit you best) are larger and more removed from the aforementioned community. Yet here you are playing MakeShift in Boston in 2018. I love it! I’ve worked with a million bands and performers at this point, and this is a rare thing; to care about keeping this audience/ community connection alive. Can you speak to this, and whatever your philosophy on touring might be?
I have so many thoughts on this. I’ve been touring for about 20 years, the first 8 or so years of which were all booked in a DIY fashion, by myself or whoever I was touring with. We would occasionally contact a booker at a club but most of the time, the shows happened because of people like yourself, people who loved music and just wanted to make space in the world, in their town, for the music that they loved to happen. I played so many amazing and super fun shows during that time. The one thing that I couldn’t figure out how to make work, doing things that way, was to make enough money to bring a band with me. So I decided to start working with a booking agent so I could get guarantees that would ensure I had enough money to pay my band. I loved playing with a band, there were so many songs that didn’t work solo that I could do with a band, and it was so fun to have a whole crew with me. But there was something that got lost. There was a decidedly more transactional vibe to dealing with clubs and promoters and booking agents. Now, I have continued to have some really great shows throughout this whole period since I stopped exclusively setting up my own shows. Plenty of them. But if I can give an example- I recently played in a ‘hot new club’ in a big city. I had a really good guarantee, one that would help subsidize the shows on the tour where I knew I would barely earn enough to make ends meet. The show was ‘fine’. We played, people liked it, we left. But it felt like nothing, it felt like a job. A job that I wanted to be over so I could go home. That show was followed by a show in a smaller town that was put on by a volunteer-run collective. The audience was amazing, super attentive, the space was relaxing and everybody seemed super present and so happy to be there. I made a fraction of the amount of money at this second show, but guess which one I liked better, which one made me want to keep doing this and which one made me want to quit.
Basically, I need to play certain kinds of shows to pay the bills, and I need to play other kinds of shows to maintain my faith in my choice of profession. And just to lay it all on the table, I feel incredibly blessed that I have been able to continue making music, as my job, all these years, but oftentimes the math seems to be indicating that this has not been a sustainable choice. But then I get an amazing piece of fan mail from an 11 year old girl in Australia that makes me cry, or I play a show put on by kids in a town who are doing it because music saves our lives, not for any other reason, and then I can believe in continuing on.
4) Is music your life? Your job? What other pursuits fill your days, these days?
Music is a big part of my life, yes! It is my job, which, as I just described, sometimes feels like the craziest most quixotic thing ever. I started my own label and am now self-releasing my records and I have a web store. All of the Music stuff takes up the bulk of my time. I also own a house with my partner and have a garden. We’re involved with fighting reckless development in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. My family has a farm in Northeastern Pennsylvania where my aunts and cousins are all involved in various projects. Life feels pretty full!
5) I think it’s amazing that you are still working with K Records after all these years, and even when you haven’t you’ve strictly released records on independent labels (Kill Rock Stars, Mississippi). Has the sleaze of more commercial entities attempted to wrap its arms around you at times (any stories??)? Is the manner in which you release records super intentional, or do you just happen to be connected with some great labels and it’s just what works for you?
Well, for better or for worse, I never had any offers from any big enough music industry folks to be in danger of a sleaze squeeze. I think I’m just too idiosyncratic and headstrong to mess around with, or get messed with by that world. Starting with Changing Light I’ve been self-releasing on my label, Absolute Magnitude Recordings. I still get distribution through Secretly Canadian via K and that is extremely helpful, necessary in fact! I’m a very independent person, so it works out for me as an artist. I’m not the best business person, so I have to be careful not to go broke as a result of following my vision-quest of a life path, but even if I do, I will have certainly had a lot of fun and changed a lot of lives while doing it.
