Exclusive Interview with 'MICHAEL KIEL CASH'

Folk singer-songwriter Michael Kiel Cash, who is currently based in New York City, incorporates tradition, authenticity, and years of performing into his brand-new, roots-inspired solo project. Since becoming a full-time musician more than 15 years ago, Cash has toured more than 20 nations, primarily as an upright bassist, while co-leading and supporting numerous projects. However, his most recent attempt at songwriting and recording represents his debut as a self-sufficient solo musician.

Michael Kiel Cash has created an entirely original and alluring approach to modern folk music by fusing themes of mythology, philosophy, and the esoteric with well-known images of the American landscape and way of life. Cash’s music can be listened to honestly because of the tastefully minimal and traditional instrumentation (guitar, accordion, and vocal harmonies feature prominently on Cash’s tracks). The poetry and intention are at the forefront. Cash’s debut album “Shores of Mercy,” released on July 21, 2022, explores the enduring themes of longing, love, loss, and union from a place of familiar yet expansive American folk songwriting. It is rich with imagery, metaphor, and a sense of the sublime. Check out the latest album & exclusive interview below:

1. Can you tell us a bit about where you come from and how you got started?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

I grew up in the Boston area and have lived most of my life in and around New England. Early musical memories include singing in the car with my sisters on road trips, singing in church, and the family stereo playing the likes of Willie Nelson, Mahalia Jackson, Elvis, the Mamas and the Papas.. For some reason I fell in love with the upright bass at an early age. I asked for one from my mother and she said I could get one only if I studied a year of piano first. I kept close track of the time and when the year elapsed I immediately reminded her of the agreement. She followed through and got me a half-sized bass. I was so small that for the first few years she carried it around for me. What a mom, I am blessed and lucky.

In my high school years I played electric bass in a rock band with my buddies, learned a little guitar and piano on my own and made little recordings on a 4-track TASCAM recorder late at night in the attic.

In my twenties I gigged primarily as an upright bassist and taught music in community music schools in the Boston area. I toured extensively with several groups including Ameranouche, Capillary Action and Cesni Trio. I continued to write songs and toured and recorded with a group called Sol & Kiel that featured three songwriters: myself, Tobey LaRoche and Jesse Hanson. As a bassist I was playing many styles including Jazz, Western Swing and Honkytonk, Classical, Contra Dance music and other North American Trad styles, and began studies in Turkish classical music and North Indian classical music that continue today.

2. Did you have any formal training or are you self-taught?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

I live several different musical lives and have significant formal training as an instrumentalist, but as a guitarist and singer/songwriter my path has been the informal one. I think the phrase ‘self-taught’ is misleading, there really is no such thing. None of us create ourselves and our art in a vacuum. We’re raised by the culture, our musical loves, other musicians, the instruments themselves and by the voice within that demands to be served and aided in its process of becoming. Without these things we would have nothing to say, no forms with which to work and no meaning to invest in those forms. I’ve learned and am continuing to learn the art of the singer/songwriter by living within this multidimensional cultural ecosystem and imbibing the language of fellow artists and poets, the people on the street and my inner daimons and genius. God willing, over time these perspectives, forces and entities become more integrated and conscious and my body speaks them freely. I simply attend to the process and–if lucky–get a little insight into myself and the cosmos along the way.

3. Who were your first and strongest musical influences and why the name ‘MICHAEL KIEL CASH’?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

Michael Kiel Cash is the name I use when wearing the singer/songwriter hat. Kiel and Cash are the maiden names of my grandmothers, from Wisconsin and Louisiana respectively. Writing songs is akin to giving birth and the name helps me to connect to the feminine creative force. The name also points toward the greater familial project: the multigenerational aspirations, loves and tragedies that live within us.

Where to begin with influences? To make it short: Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Islamic mystic poetry and life itself.

The Band, the Beatles, Grateful Dead and others were there early on and they laid a foundation in sensibility and approach and started me on the path to where I find myself these days.

In my early twenties my ears turned toward the Texas troubadour ethos and its related circles as espoused by such artists as Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Lucinda Williams, etc. This was spurred by working in a family band with one of my best friend’s parents. We played Country, Honky-Tonk and Western Swing and I found it awakened in me a latent, yet deep connection to the places where my parents came from in Texas and Louisiana. Though I wear it in a relatively subtle way, it gave me a place to stand and to move from. To me, the Texas troubadour aesthetic exists in a stripped-down, open space that is tinged with a distinct mix of melancholia and mischievous humo, part dream and yet so clear-eyed in its distillation of things to their essences.

Concurrent with this familial reconnection in my early twenties, was the remembering of something deep within myself. With the aid of Islamic mysticism and cosmology and Sufi love poetry I also found a place from which I could be and have a perspective.

4. What do you feel are the key elements in your music that should resonate with listeners, and how would you personally describe your sound?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

The sound is a relatively straight ahead combination of North American folk, roots, soul, pop, blues and Gospel. On the record we tried to have an expansive and spacious sound without sacrificing too much of the rootsyness and rawness. We tried to find that threshold where the grounded and human meets the cosmic. Lyrically, the songs attempt to do the same thing. One finds familiar images and references giving way to dreamlike spaces and vice versa. If the tunes are successful they are making things one: the mundane sacred, the ecstatic balanced, the tragic beautiful, etc. A tall order, but this is the project of all things here in creation, so it is not anything special really. It’s up to the listener to see how successful this tiny, most insignificant piece of the cosmic project turned out.

5. For most artists, originality is first preceded by a phase of learning and, often, emulating others. What was this like for you? How would you describe your own development as an artist and music maker, and the transition towards your own style, which is known as Folk?

**MICHAEL KIEL CASH**:
When we cook a new dish, it is a good idea to follow the recipe closely. But once we try it a few times, we start to have a taste for the individual ingredients. Maybe we want a little more or a little less of a specific spice, or we want to substitute it for another one. Tiny changes can make a big difference. We may have an intuition that some change would make it better, or maybe we’re just restless souls who need to let our curiosity run free.
Like all of us music lovers, our love broadens and deepens overtime. After imbibing things for long enough we simply become them. Then we have a place from which to move from, experiment, incorporate new elements, or let some go.

My process through this is probably pretty familiar. You love what music does to you. You want to be a part of it. You learn a few songs. Sooner or later you have an itch to write your own. You’re not responsible for this itch, but you do have a decision to make: to scratch or not to scratch. Often however the itch only screams louder if we ignore it! For many of us songwriting isn’t really a choice, it is a compulsion. We’d rather write bad songs then none at all, but we can’t stand writing bad songs. So we’re compelled to try to write good songs. Hopefully we’ll get one or two before our time is up.

For me, I put songwriting and performing my songs to the side for nearly 10 years as I worked as a side musician and teacher. I thought I was OK without them, but I got to a point where the only way to make me feel better was to work on songs. Now I’m at the point where they’re asking to be played out in front of people. I’d rather do other things, but they don’t let me be.

6. What’s your view on the role and function of music as political, cultural, spiritual, and/or social vehicles – and do you try and confront any of these themes in your work, or are you purely interested in music as an expression of technical artistry, personal narrative and entertainment?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

Music is so many things. What an individual artist wants from or for their art varies greatly and these intentions can often be in conflict with other artists or the society as a whole. This does not make any work or approach invalid.

I am not purely interested in anything in particular. Music is the sphere in which I can let become what needs becoming. To claim knowledge as to the function of one’s art is to stand in its way. There are entities at work outside of the human ego-self and art provides a radical sphere in which these forces can vivify an individual or culture by piercing its self-containedness, its echo chamber of thought and perception. The artwork actualizes perennial images and modes of seeing in this time and place, and we experience this actualization as something ‘new’. If the message is political, cultural, spiritual, social or simply for entertainment, so be it. Artistically speaking, these domains of the human are invested with meaning only through open communication with that which is asking to become.

7. Do you feel that your music is giving you back just as much fulfilment as the amount of work you are putting into it, or are you expecting something more, or different in the future?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

It helps me to keep on, and keeping on is a great success and something I’m very thankful for. On the other hand, it could never provide fulfillment. Or rather it can only do so to the extent that it connects us to its source. Let’s leave it to Townes: “If I had a nickel I’d find a game/if I won a dollar I’d make it rain/if it rained an ocean I’d drink it down/and lay me down dissatisfied.”

8. Could you describe your creative processes? How do usually start, and go about shaping ideas into a completed song? Do you usually start with a tune, a beat, or a narrative in your head? And do you collaborate with others in this process?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

For me a song doesn’t really start until it shows its little jewel of meaning that shines of its own light. Most often that is an image from a dream, waking life or a stream of text, but it can also be a guitar lick, a chord progression, a snippet of vocal melody, etc. Everything before that is noodling and searching, but once the jewel makes itself known it becomes a process of uncovering. There’s a thousand subtleties that are born from the jewel. The question becomes: which ones to highlight and which ones to discard? Which individual elements of the jewel seem to point with the most clarity and efficiency out to the perceiver and back to the center of the jewel simultaneously? Of course they all do with perfect clarity, but which ones can the songwriter recognize with their particular aesthetic perception and personality? The jewel has an energy that powers the artist to the end of the project. Without its fire, I would have no energy to continue even an inch.

9. What has been the most difficult thing you’ve had to endure in your life or music career so far?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

The Song asks you to scoot up to the edge of infinity as closely as possible. It is wondrously painful to stare through their invisible forms to the swirling, gaping black hole mouth of Krishna behind them.

10. On the contrary, what would you consider a successful, proud or significant point in your life or music career so far?

MICHAEL KIEL CASH:

I’m thankful the songs chose me. If they are limited or lame, it is my fault. They came to me in perfection. I hope a listener or two can stand shoulder to shoulder with me and we all get a little peek of the infinite inside them. If they don’t do the job, we can stare at something else that puts us in awe. Then we all may feel a little more comforted in our madness. Come brother, come sister, let’s look together:

“On the shores of Gitche Gumee/Of the shining Big-Sea-Water,/Stood Nokomis, the old woman,/Point with her finger westward,/O’er the water pointing westward,/To the purple clouds of sunset.”