Taking us South of the border but not super south, so more middle, basically Ohio… well, literally Ohio was Micah Schnabel a singer songwriter from Ohio who lives in Ohio. I was mesmerised by his set of hoarse, rapid vocals ofter cascadingly rampant guitar. His voice was like butter icing escaping from hit at an alarming rate, like he was channelling this nihilistic yet liberally optimistic documentation of his life and experiences from another world, behind the veil.
There was a melancholy to his words but a balance to his songs. Each one a perfect blend of negative or potentially unsavoury life moments reflected against the positive and exciting moments, there was a down-to-earthedness to these words that made it all the more relatable, like he was the Billy Bragg that I needed to reflect my life against and conclude that ‘hey this guy has ended up in some fucked up places that sound similar and he’s doing okay, that helps’. There was a depth to all of it but before you could drown in nostalgia and hindsight related sadness based on your own shitty life the tempo and that exquisite voice would drag you out of that swamp and make you think ‘Fuck it! Fuck yeah! Fuck!’ and you’d be jigging and jiving and being livid at stuff.
Post performance and poised with pad and pen I commenced my ‘that was awesome’ awkward conversation which, some seven milliseconds in served to confirm what a genuinely nice and down to earth person he is, further evidence and affirmation that things are never that bad, no matter where we come from or what happens, if we stay positive and remain united with other positive people things will be fun and exciting.
Then a friend of The Shonk and I bombarded him with information about The Chartists and went off to drink more!
His Facebook music page is here!
Read part three here
