The Exact Wrong Person: An Interview with Michelle Shocked
[21 September 2007]
Michelle Shocked attempts to meld her politics, her religion, and her art while taking the scorn and criticism.
You can go ahead and try to find a moment in the 21-year career of Michelle Shocked when she bowed to conventionality or predictability, but you’re really wasting your time because those are moments don’t exist. The Dallas native singer/songwriter has never had much interest in pursuing. Ever. Her m.o. has always been to exist in a perpetual state of risk; artistically, culturally, politically—which even included taking Mercury records to court (and winning). She has always challenged herself and the listener on numerous levels with her music and far beyond.
With her new release ToHEAVENuRIDE, Shocked has captured a moment in her career where her Christian faith, artistic vision, and passion for political activism all merged into one. The album is—much like any Shocked release—a courageous leap into the unknown for both her and her fans who have followed the controversial folk/blues artist/activist since her 1986 debut album The Texas Campfire Tapes.
Faith is a topic that has dramatically changed Shocked’s view on life and how she approaches her politics. But, ironically, her press release states that “few ever ask her about her religion”. If we were ever going to get to truly knowing the how’s and why’s about the album then we have to ask her about her religion and more specifically how her faith has changed the way she approaches her activism, and how it has caused her to undergo much scorn and discontent from long-time fans.
Recorded live at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2003, ToHEAVENuRIDE is more that just a live gospel album, and from the very first moments of our conversation Shocked offered to take the easier and more acceptable artistic route when asked about the inspiration of the album. “I hope you understand that it’s going to be nearly impossible to talk about this album without the topic of faith coming into it,” says Shocked, “...if you’re comfortable with talking about that then that’s fine. If you’re not, I still have some remembrance of what’s it like to not have faith. I can try to borrow on that.”
I let her know that I understood that talking about her faith was completely necessary to truly understand the album and where she was in her musical career. To make the discussion of faith even more poignant, our phone conversation followed just minutes after a Saturday afternoon choir rehearsal at her church in Los Angeles so the setting and mood were prime for the conversation.
Once Shocked understood that talking about her faith was okay to do during our conversation, she regrouped her thoughts and responded to my initial question about the “vision” she mentions towards the middle of the live Telluride set. “I am very grateful to have the musical talents I have and when I think about that day at Telluride and what it means in the context of my career and my faith I ask myself, ‘Where did this vision come from; why was I given this vision when I was the exact wrong person to be manifesting this vision?’ That’s the question that just overwhelms me on a daily basis. And when every day is a walk of faith and you’re no longer doing what you’re good at or what people expect you to do, I think, I really think that I wouldn’t wish the kind of a vision I had on anybody.”
What the “vision” means to Shocked is still being fully realized as each day unfolds, and she is honest about not having had the necessary time to think about the true context of the album and what it means to have such a recording released four years later in 2007.
Shocked explains how she went about the difficult task of expressing her Christian faith and politics in a secular setting of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which she points out was made up largely of people she believed didn’t share her Christian faith. Hearing her talk about the setlist planning leading up to the festival, you get the feeling she was drawing from a life that has been full of moments where she has been faced with adversity as a political activist and a musician. Now with both her faith and music career having blended on record, it’s the bigger spiritual significance that she’s still sorting out.
Shocked explains that she remembers wanting to give the audience a little bit of the expected so she turned to the universal swell of emotions brought on by the classic gospel spirituals utilized during the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras. Along with the Band’s “The Weight” she mixed in a few of her own gospel originals, too. What you hear is Shocked and her band being themselves and delivering a set that is an inspiring and emotionally moving mix of prayer, politics, and spiritual poetry that keeps Shocked’s reputation for sticking to her guns firmly in tack without alienating the audience, who to Shocked’s surprise began shouting praises right along with her and the band.
At the time of the recording she was trying to figure out the ever- tricky undertaking of weaving the secular performance with Christian musical worship with her political activism. It’s a process in which her current thoughts on how to blend the artist/activist with her Christian faith are continually developing. “Right now, I would say, I’m a picker poet pondering the politics of preaching, which means that I’m realizing more each day that politics has never really changed anyone’s mind, and I went into that set differently than I had up until that point in my career. And looking back on that live set, although it was the Sunday morning gospel hour set, there was nothing about the festival that would lead anyone to believe it was a worship service. The set was very much in the context of what they were doing the rest of the festival, which was music functioning as entertainment.
“I choose two great sources of inspiration for music in that type of setting. I used Sister Rosetta Thorpe and the Staple Sisters because both, especially Tharpe, were scorned by the church for taking the gospel music into the nightclubs and the theaters. I chose their songs in hopes that the audience would get an idea of where I was going but so I could also have the opportunity to have a real epiphany moment if they wanted to. It so happened that I had an unexpected swell of ground support from the audience. I was so surprised to get that kind of response.”
But like the initial clandestine recording of her debut The Texas Campfire Tapes there is still some hard feelings about how the bootlegged recording of ToHEAVENuRIDE came to be.
“I’ve been growing more and more bitter about that whole thing. Because I feel like I’m getting hit from both sides. I feel like I’m caught in this eternal cycle where my work is not my own. My work goes into the world and the world somehow thinks that it is their property. That being said and going back to the vision discussion, this whole thing just confirms that I am a part of something that is bigger than myself. It is clearly not in my hands because the festival contract clearly stated that no recording was allowed but it didn’t seem to stop anybody.”
During Shocked’s career there has never been a sense of conformity. She has always embraced controversy and hardship like a close friend, and in the process has blazed a career trail that few would dare to follow. In June 2005, all on the same day, she released three full length albums Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Got No Strings, and Mexican Standoff—all different styles, all about personal accounts of where she was at that time in her life, including dealing with the aftermath of a recent divorce.
Feminism, politics, and her Christian faith might all appear to be irreconcilable, but Shocked sees each of them as serving a necessary and interdependent purpose through the lens of her faith.
“Politics was my platform in the past to speak out about an issue of race and hypocrisy. And what I’ve come to realize is that politics have never really changed anyone’s mind, heart, or life. Politics serve to confirm that which you already thought or believed. When you look at the politics of preaching, it is a bit of a contradiction, but it’s a contradiction that has the power to change someone’s mind. Preaching holds forth the promise—only that alone has the power to change. Even the preacher has no real power; it’s the Spirit that has the real power to change a person’s mind. The fact that I’m pondering the politics of preaching either means I’m very slow to get up and do some actual preaching or that I’m not a rock ‘n’ roll messiah but one who’s in the wilderness or who’s at least a voice in the wilderness [trying to] make straight the path.”
So how does Shocked reconcile her Christian faith with being an advocate for feminism? She laughs and says, “You know, I’ve sort of exempted myself from that contradiction of gender and faith. Only because the first anomaly is not that I’m a woman but that I chose to practice my Christianity as a white person in an African-American setting. I objectively put myself in the minority and it’s through the eyes of a white woman that I do and say what I do in an African-American tradition. And I’ve taken advantage of this and deferred the issue of male dominance in the Christian tradition and taken the patriarchy and rejoiced in the opportunity to turn the paradigm on its head and to be a minority in such a rich spiritual heritage.”
You can’t get to the heart of ToHEAVENuRIDE with out going through the heart of gospel pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. And there’s a reason why Shocked opens the set with Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s spiritual song “Strange Things Happy Every Day”.
“I’ve been reflecting lately on how [Tharpe] is almost entirely forgotten. Besides being the first gospel superstar, she was so famous that she was married at National Stadium in D.C., in 1951, and people paid to come and see her married. People actually paid money to see this lady—a gospel singer!—married in a stadium, that’s how important she was! Now, less than fifty years later if you ask someone one who she is and most people don’t know. How does something like that happen!?”
Shocked says, “I want to take her example and apply it to my own life. I know that there have been moments in my career where I have been much more notorious, recognized and celebrated. But I know that I am at a point in my career where I have been a through a type of degradation not unlike what may have happen to Tharpe, but for me the scorn comes from the secular.”
In an interesting response to having been abandoned by many fans because of the potent mix of faith and politics, Shocked sees the rejection as a necessary and expected moment in her career. She’s taking the inspiration of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and solace in the fact that many before her—in rock ‘n’ roll and religious history—have been rejected. Fans and followers who once praised their favorite artists have quickly turned to condemn. The iconic Bob Dylan received double doses from the folk community when he plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival and then when he came to faith later in his career. Shocked doesn’t have to look too far, because the center of her own faith is Jesus Christ who, as the gospels note, was rejected even in his hometown, where he never performed a miracle.
“So what I choose to see it as is, ‘What fun is it to degrade someone if you have not first exalted them or glorified them falsely?’ I am personally experiencing that cycle of degradation much like Rosetta Thorpe experienced.
And please don’t think that I don’t appreciate using a vehicle like PopMatters to highlight some of those points because I do believe that certain elements of truth will survive the ages. I’m not going to be that word of truth; I’m only going to be a witness to it.”
Staying true to her inherent punk credo without losing any of her creative firepower or political concern, Shocked is keeping it simple and working just on changing herself, leaving the changing of others to the ones she feels can bring real change.
“What I’ve experienced is that I was changed because a preacher changed my mind and then the Spirit of God changed my heart and now leads me to change my life. That process alone [is] amazing to experience, and being able to still be who I am and play music that changes people’s minds is awesome.”
Before her career began Shocked struggled through long bouts of homelessness that often involved living on city streets as a squatter. At 22, her mother had her admitted into a mental institution and 30 days later she was released and changed her last name from Johnston to Shocked. From there she began to travel the world and develop her musical career. When Shocked reflects on her life, she says her faith is something that is both a part of her present and past as well as her future and she has no regrets about time when she didn’t have faith in her life.
“I wasn’t walking in faith during the time I was in the mental institution but I now look back at those times through the lens of my faith and it certainly affects how I filter those experiences. I have a testimony about the power [of] a radical transformation, and when you really let that take you and make you into a completely different person and take you to places you never thought you could go, really amazing places. Living in the grace and truth of God, I don’t have to be ashamed of the person I was.”
In addition to the personal context of the album’ recording, cultural context is just as crucial. At the time of the 2003 performance, the US was a few months into the invasion of Iraq and Shocked was thinking about the best way to meld her faith with her still fiery political views. She choose songs like “The Weight” and “God Bless the Child” to start out the set and then planned to move into more obvious songs like “Study War No More”. She recalls an astounding amount of fan hypocrisy as she tells what the previous months leading to the Telluride set were like for her on tour in 2003.
“I had already done a tour before the US went into Iraq ... and was doused with a very cold bath of reality that no one wanted to hear my message of non-imperialism or anti-war; even in the hallowed and sacred halls of rock ‘n’ roll. Playing even in front of my crowd that was following me my whole career, I was rejected, scorned, and met with contempt. The bloodcurdling cry for war was so loud. It’s one thing to go through what I did in 2003, and I knew that I wasn’t about to just allow myself to be swept into the dust bins of history.”
So when the angry mob of fan and music industry hypocrisy came at her, Shocked responded in true Shocked fashion: she changed gears and rethought her approach.
“During that time in 2003, I started to really experience the limitations of secular political protest and turned to the old spiritual songs of the Civil Rights and Vietnam era, like ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘Study War No More’. And for the Telluride performance, I knew the crowd would have an idea of where I was going with it, and after playing ‘Good News’, which talked about the merging of politics and prayer, I knew I had an open door.”
She also saw what she experienced as a lessoned learned on the shortcomings of her earlier involvement in bigger picture of political activism, saying, “And whatever heights of popularity I experienced, I now realize that we—Fat Happy Privileged American—were set up. Through the Reagan administration and at the end of the first Bush administration and heading in to the heady Clinton administration, we as Americans were all set up. The type of political activism we did was like taking an easy walk around the block and calling it military boot camp. We were so soft, man, we were so spoiled, blessed by abundance while the rest of the world was having a completely opposite experience.”
Even for Shocked, merging her political and spiritual beliefs with a public performance is something she’s constantly figuring out. When she reflects on how an artist who has faith could go about merging the secular performance with politics and faith, Shocked mentions how she’s learned from experiencing U2 live and sees Bono as a contemporary example of someone who’s also attempting to blend the secular with the sacred during a live concert performance while he simultaneously travels the world as a political ambassador.
“I went to see U2 once, but it never compared to the glory of a church worship service. They’re good at creating a scale of grandeur. Like the old European cathedrals did. But sitting backstage with Bono after the concert I saw that he has the same insecurities as all of us. His kid came up to him and said, ‘That [show] wasn’t very good, Dad.’ And then Bono cringes. He’s looking for his son’s approval like any normal dad would and Bono does show himself to be human all too often. But he also shows his ability to rise above his failures. As artists, I believe we’re either doing our work in the Light or in the Dark and I’d like to believe that Bono is doing his work in the Light. What it comes down to, I believe, is that the Spirit of God is being glorified at a worship service, and at a secular concert, it’s the artist that is being glorified. Finding that balance is part of the journey I’m on right now ... and at the Telluride show I know I took a big chance going to that spiritual and political level, and my band was gracious to follow me in that type of environment.”
NEW YORK MAGAZINE
July 2, 2005
Saved:
Remember Michelle Shocked? (You know: the punk-bluegrass artist with the big mouth.) She’s back—sane, sober, and rueful after years in the wilderness.
By Gavin Edwards
Michelle Shocked is telling me about how she got saved. “It’s just a real garden-variety, born-again, Evangelical Christianity,” she says cheer-fully. “But it does have the twist of my being a radical skateboard punk-rock anarchist.”
After 43 years of globe-hopping—and an equally peripatetic musical career that’s careened from bluegrass to hardcore to country—Shocked has found a home in the Koreatown district of Los Angeles. She worships at a nearby black church, where she sings in the 200-person gospel choir. “We go in Tuesday and learn the parts. We go in Saturday morning and learn the parts again. And then on Sunday we’re supposed to kick out the jams.”
Earlier, Shocked spent a few years living in New Orleans, where the congregation called her “our unique sister.” They vaguely knew she was a singer but weren’t sure what type. Then one day, Shocked appeared as a question on Jeopardy !—Alex Trebek identified her as having sued her record company by citing the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. The church’s phone started ringing off the hook: “Pastor, pastor, Sister Shocked on Jeopardy !”
After that lawsuit a decade ago, Shocked largely disappeared from public view. Now she’s returning with three new albums, once again demonstrating that she’s fluent in just about every American musical idiom. Got No Strings is a collection of Disney songs done in the Western-swing style. Mexican Standoff is half-blues, half-Latin music, with funny lyrics based on Shocked’s rudimentary Spanish: “Welcomes gringos / Yo hablo español poco, un poco / but I speak English mucho bueno .” And Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is her “secret divorce album,” an eclectic suite of songs inspired by the end of her eleven-year marriage to writer Bart Bull. On June 29, she’s doing three concerts at Joe’s Pub in one day, devoting one show to each disc.
“I do play favorites with them,” she confesses. “ Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the one I’d send to private school. Got No Strings , I’d let it be the baby, read it Dr. Seuss, and not pressure it to walk. And then Mexican Standoff would be the ugly middle child, the overachiever trying to get attention.”
Shocked, born Karen Michelle Johnston in 1962, grew up an Army brat; when she was 14, her stepfather retired to the small town of Gilmer, Texas. She describes her upbringing as white trash, although she knows her family isn’t overfond of that label. “Well, I wasn’t the one that let the cow come in the house,” she says drily. “We also had a pet goose that shat all over everything.” During summers, she went to Dallas to visit her father, who inspired her to pick up the bluegrass guitar.
Shocked’s mother was a fundamentalist Mormon, but Shocked found the religion too bureaucratic. She ran away from home, was committed to a mental hospital by her mother until the insurance ran out, and after that, kept running. “I didn’t want to stay in any one place,” she reflects. “I didn’t want to be any one thing—not even to myself.”
“I’ve been in some amazing squats that had a real communal sense. But Jerry the Peddler’s was just a drug den.”
She became a political activist and hopscotched from San Francisco to Amsterdam to an Italian women’s commune, living with squatters all the while. From 1984 to 1986, she was often in New York City, living at “Jerry the Peddler’s squat” on 10th Street between Avenues C and D. She says, “I’ve been in some amazing squats that had a real communal sense—but Jerry the Peddler’s was just a drug den. There was plastic sheeting stapled to the roof, which meant the water would collect in puddles. I’d lay in bed and rats would be running across the tarps, looking down at you. It was a pretty degraded situation.”
On a visit to the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, Shocked was playing her guitar for friends by a campfire. An English producer recorded her on a Walkman—and, without her knowledge, released the result as an album. The Texas Campfire Tapes , with crickets audible in the background, hit No. 1 on the British indie charts in 1986. Shocked says she never would have tried to record an album herself: “I already had a direction with my life. The music was just a chronicle of the activism. And I didn’t have much respect for the role of the artist in society. I thought it was fairly elite and privileged.”
Nevertheless, inundated with six-figure offers, she signed a deal with PolyGram that gave her creative control and ultimate ownership of her music. Short Sharp Shocked , in 1988, had “Anchorage,” a conversational song about long-distance friendship that came close to the top 40. It also had a cover photo of a San Francisco riot cop with a choke hold around Shocked’s neck. After two more albums, the relationship with PolyGram soured. Shocked says an exec told her the label would never properly promote her records because she “had cut too good a deal for herself.”
Shocked spent two years embroiled in lawsuits, but in 1996, she ended up free of her contract and in possession of her catalogue. She put out a few homemade records, including Artists Make Lousy Slaves —but basically, she vanished. “I was just being a knucklehead,” she says, a little sadly. “That’s a full-time job, man. If I had kids, people would have accounted it to that; they would have said, ‘Her priorities changed.’ ”
Did she consider having children?
Shocked takes a deep breath. “That was the premise for the marriage, to start a family. But as a young firebrand, I made a very radical decision.” At age 22, she got her tubes tied—largely for political reasons. “I knew there was going to come a time in my life where I would want to speak vehemently about a woman’s right to choose without having it turned back on me, saying you’re acting out of guilt and shame because you had an abortion. I made the ultimate sacrifice.”
She later tried to get the surgery reversed, without success. After countless rounds of unsuccessful in vitro fertilization, she deeply regrets her choice—although she finds solace through the church. She says quietly, “I have to put my faith on it, because otherwise I really screwed up.”
Shocked describes her marriage to Bull as a pairing of co-dependent alcoholics. “He drank Coors Light, and that’s how he managed to convince me and himself that he wasn’t an alcoholic. But when I drank, I liked to know that I was drunk, so I’d hit the hard stuff—bourbon and scotch.” She got sober three years ago; the divorce was finalized last year.
While struggling with life over the past eight years, Shocked was stockpiling songs. She’s already halfway done with another set of three albums: a New Orleans record, a tribute to blueswoman Memphis Minnie, and a gospel-electronica record. She says that the vocals for the last are particularly vulnerable; she recorded them thinking they might never be released. “I didn’t have a label, I didn’t have a band, I was in a dead-end marriage. It was about as bleak as you could imagine.”
When I speak with Shocked, she’s on a US Airways flight from Pittsburgh, taxiing to her gate at LAX. We talk for an hour and a half; she cracks jokes and offers gentle wisdom while she collects her baggage and rides home. She ends up in her Craftsman bungalow, decorated in a style she calls “hillbilly minimalism,” which means austere design but sparkly colors.
She painted her bedroom to look like a jewel box: One wall is sapphire, one emerald, one amethyst, and one garnet. Lying on her gold satin bedspread, she confides, “I find that I have attention-deficit disorder in my prayers. I start praying to God, and the next thing I know, I’m worrying about all kinds of mundane things. I finally came up with a vision for what it’s really like to pray. I’m in my bedroom, but one wall is missing, and that wall is just clouds. The room is just a little particle in the big consciousness that is God. So when I’m praying, I face the clouds and I take a running leap.”
LOS ANGELES TIMES
February 6, 2005
POP EYE
By Steve Hochman
Special to The Times
Two albums at once? That's nothing
Michelle Shocked is putting together an all-female project to pay tribute to vintage blues great Memphis Minnie, with Lucinda Williams and Victoria Williams (no relation) joining as core participants.
The singer-songwriter has invitations out to a number of other women and hopes the album and related concert performances will bridge genres (from old-style blues to neo-soul artists) and generations.
Lucinda Williams is doing "When the Levee Breaks," Victoria Williams has recorded "Bumble Bee" and Rickie Lee Jones, Anne McCue and onetime Frank Zappa associate Alice Stuart are among others already signed up.
It's just one of three ambitious albums that Shocked plans to release June 7. She's also finished a singer-songwriter collection much in the mode of her 1988 breakthrough "Short, Sharp, Shocked" made with producer Dusty Wakeman and a collection of classic Disney songs done in Western swing style under the guidance of producer Nick Forster of bluegrass band Hot Rize.
The two completed albums were done in a one-week burst of activity in mid-December. The pace continued in January with work commencing on two more albums, one with songs written in what Shocked describes as "bastardized Spanish" and another an "electronica-gospel" experiment.
And soon she will start recording an album of songs relating to New Orleans, her home for much of the '90s. The second batch of three will be released together later.
This is all possible, she says, because she runs her own label, Mighty Sound, which has recently secured distribution by Rykodisc.
For better or worse, most of these projects would be anathema to a major label, let alone the concept of releasing three at once.
"We were originally going to release five at once," she says. "No one thought that was a good idea and are still not convinced it's good with three, but I'm running amok. But no one's telling me I can't. I'm working without adult supervision here!"
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
REUTERS (via YAHOO)
Michelle Shocked Kicks Out with 3-Disc 'JAMS'
Thu Feb 10, 5:51 AM ET
By Chris Morris
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "I'm just running amok," Michelle Shocked ( news ) says of her current burst of creativity.
The feisty Dallas-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter is getting ready to drop "the JAMS Project," a diverse slate of three albums -- that's right, three -- on her Mighty Sound label in June. The records are being distributed by the umbrella label group MRI, which is handled by New York-based Ryko Distribution.
"I've been backlogged," Shocked explains, perhaps simplifying the matter.
The musician hasn't issued a full-length album of new material through conventional channels since 1996. That release climaxed a tumultuous period for Shocked, who had previously been signed to PolyGram's Mercury imprint.
Shocked has been standing up for her rights as an artist since the mid-'90s, when she engaged in a protracted legal head-butting contest with PolyGram over her career. She says the company -- which later merged with Universal -- told her it would not promote her albums, which was "code for, 'Renegotiate (your contract), or go away."'
She chose to go away. In fact, Shocked sued to get out of her contract, citing the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. (At later shows, she sold an album, cut with Hothouse Flowers guitarist Fiachna O'Braonain, titled "Artists Make Lousy Slaves.") The suit was settled, and Shocked walked away from her deal with the rights to her masters, which were since rereleased on Mighty Sound.
Shocked's self-released "JAMS Project" now finds her cutting across musical genres and testing her mettle as songsmith, singer and interpreter.
Originals comprise "Don't Ask Don't Tell," inspired in part by her split with ex-husband Bart Bull, a veteran music journalist. "I said, I have a divorce record here, but if I've done my job, you won't know it," Shocked says. "It's too playful, too tongue-in-cheek, too whimsical . . . It was a spiritual journey, and the album reflects that."
Shocked previewed the sassy material from that collection at a Feb. 2 show at Molly Malone's in Los Angeles, backed by her crack recording band, which includes producer-bassist Dusty Wakeman, Lucinda Williams' guitarist Doug Pettibone, former Dwight Yoakam keyboardist Skip Edwards and Dave Raven, the drumming mainstay of the club's Sweethearts of the Rodeo jam.
She also has worked at that venue with the Memphis Minnies, an ad hoc tribute group to the eponymous blues singer. Her Mark Howard-produced album by that unit will include tracks by her onstage colleagues Lucinda Williams and Victoria Williams, plus contributors such as Rickie Lee Jones, Alice Stuart, Lydia Pense and the formidable singer-guitarists Janet Robin and Anne McCue. Shocked says she sought a certain experienced toughness from her contributors: "I tried to limit the ingenues."
Finally, Shocked's friendship with former Disney illustrator David Willardson resulted in "Baby Mine," a set of Western swing interpretations of the Disney film songbook. Produced by Nick Forster and featuring guitar eminence Greg Leisz, the album offers sprightly interpretations of "I've Got No Strings," "A Spoonful of Sugar," "When You Wish Upon a Star," and other Disney standards.
"I think I've got a record for young and old alike," she says.
Shocked will be in the house as a panelist and performer during the South by Southwest Music Conference & Festival in Austin, Texas, next month.
ROLLING STONE.COM
Shocked Does Mighty Three
Singer-songwriter to release CD trilogy in June
Michelle Shocked will simultaneously release three albums -- Don't Ask, Don't Tell ,Baby Mine and The Memphis Minnies -- on June 7th through her Mighty Sound record label.
The eclectic singer-songwriter has been recording the material, dubbed the "JAMS Project," in her Los Angeles home studio since December. The dissolution of her thirteen-year marriage proved to be the catalyst for the most personal of the three albums, the rock-oriented Don't Ask, Don't Tell .
"Like many divorces, it was a fertile ground for creativity," Shocked says. "And by the time you get a divorce, you know it's over. The grieving is long passed -- it's just the inertia of getting out of a bad situation. Some people are like, 'I'm so sorry,' and I'm like, 'No, if you know anything about divorce, you'd say congratulations!'"
Baby Mine is a collection of Disney cover tunes fashioned in a Western-swing sound. Shocked, inspired by a new love affair with a former Disney illustrator (whose work she describes as "fine art meets Jackson Pollock") composed the songs after a trip to Japan, where a crowd gathered in awe of his portraits. Taken by the experience, Shocked plans to merge their artistic expressions in a performance. "While he's painting," she says, "I'm gonna be playing them."
Lastly, The Memphis Minnies is an all-star tribute to late blues legend Memphis Minnie. Fellow women of folk Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams and Rickie Lee Jones will each contribute a track, and Shocked is also recruiting R&B singers.
"It's my long-standing desire to build bridges between what I call the hipster blues crowd and the neo-soul crowd, because they have so much in common," she says. "Worlds don't always intersect, so I'm taking this opportunity with The Memphis Minnies to throw a party where everyone's invited."
Despite a rather tumultuous three years since her last album, Deep Natural , Shocked claims to have found a kind of peace two decades into her career.
"I've come to a resolve because I'm much wiser, certainly older," she says. "I've gone through the fire, and I learned the lessons I went in to learn. I didn't put my money on fame and fortune . . . I put my money on love."
Shocked will perform and speak at the South by Southwest Music Festival, March 16th-20th in Austin, Texas, followed by a tour in support of the June albums.
BILLBOARD MAGAZINE
February 19, 2005
THE BEAT
By Melinda Newman
SIMPLY SHOCKING: Michelle Shocked is enlisting friends for a tribute to Delta blues singer Memphis Minnie. Among those who have signed on are Rickie Lee Jones, Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams and Heart's Nancy Wilson. But Shocked is also targeting neo-soul singers like Angie Stone as possible participants. The project comes out in June on Shocked's Mighty Sound label.
The album is one of three that Shocked is working on: "Baby Mine" is a collection of Disney music filtered through Western swing, while "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is a rock album.
Mighty Sound is distributed through Ryko.
