Q&A with Carmel Mikol

Carmel Mikol (Photo: Cherakee Photography)

Halifax singer-songwriter, Carmel Mikol shares an intimate collection of songs, recorded with the warmth and honesty of a living room performance on her latest album I Used to Know, out now wherever you listen to music.

In our chat with her, Carmel opens up about the decade-long journey behind the album.

the album has a more stripped-down feel compared to your other music. What inspired this shift in approach, and how does it reflect your current creative journey?

My new album is very acoustic, very stripped down, and simple compared to the other albums I've made. I have wanted to make an album that sounds like this for years. I'm not sure if I wasn't ready to be that vulnerable, honest, and unadorned or if just the songs I wrote in previous years lend themselves to more production. Still, I've been collecting songs that belong on this album for a decade. I also had a bunch of brand-new songs that felt like they needed to be delivered this way, and I felt like I did my best performance when I was just sitting in my living room by myself or with a friend or something. I wanted to capture that. That's when I felt like I was being the most honest and true, and where I felt like my voice was doing what I wanted it would do. As soon as I would get into a bigger space or on a bigger stage, I sometimes felt like I would lose myself. This album was just about telling the truth, being totally present, letting things not be perfect and making sure that is what beautiful would be to me. I felt like I accomplished that, so I'm really proud of it.

Your latest single, Don't Take Me Back, has been a long time in the making. You wrote it over 10 years ago. What kept it from being recorded previously on other albums? How did you know this was the time?

Almost all of my albums have a real mixture of something I wrote that week or that day and a song from a few years ago. I don't write to make an album. I'm just always writing. And when it comes time to make an album, I sort of curate and go through all my writing books and search for the thing that feels like part of that album's story.

Can you share more about the evolution of this song and what it means to you now that it's found a home on your new record?

Don't Take Me Back is a song that was super real when I wrote it. I almost never performed it for years because it was so raw, and I didn't know how to do it. Now, with the separation of time and everything, I felt like it was a story I wanted to share because I think many people have experienced this in their relationships - that push and pull. That's something that I struggled with, and I know many of us have gone through this, so I figured out a way to say it. It feels weirdly comforting, even though it's a sad song. I think it just needed all those years to mature and find itself. Many of the other songs on the album also have this lyrical style that's a little different than what I've done in the past - there's a lot less metaphor. The lyrics are a lot more direct, kind of cutting through, which was very intentional. For this album, I felt like there was so much noise in the world and complexity in our lives. I wanted to say the thing in the simplest and most direct way so we can all feel things because a lot of us are going through life surviving and trying not to deal with the big emotions of life, and sometimes we just need to. I feel like this album is about sitting down, saying the thing honestly, feeling the thing, then getting back up and moving on in life, you know? So that's kind of the goal.

Are there any recurring themes on the album?

I named the album I Used to Know because it's about unlearning things and admitting that the older and more mature I get, the less I know about the world - and the less I know about myself… And that's sort of great. When I was younger, I made a lot of judgments and assumptions, and I felt like I had to solve everything. I'm learning that there's a lot of beauty in all the paradoxical truths of life and love. You can love someone and also leave them. Both of those things are true. Or you can have had a lot of pain in the past and be a joyful, fully living person now. Both of those things are also true. I feel like the theme of the record in a lot of the songs is everything I thought I used to know and say that I knew it didn't really matter. Life is a lot bigger, more varied and more paradoxical, and that is okay. There's peace in that.

In addition to being a talented musician, you’re a filmmaker and writer. Do your other creative ventures influence your music? 

I think music has been the art form I've spent the most time on. So I started writing songs when I was six or seven, and I have never stopped. Everything else that I try is informed by music, like my short story writing. It's super informed by how I think about lyrics and rhythms and how a song's structure informs how I write a story. It’s the same with filmmaking. I love the super nitpicky process of editing music. I've done a lot of editing work and stuff on my albums in the past, and I love that work of structuring every beat and every second of something. In film, it's very similar, except you have this whole other angle of the visual. Everything that I've tried has sort of informed itself, but at the core is always the same motivation, which is wanting to connect, and I want to try and be honest and share an experience of mine that I think maybe could be useful to someone else because I don't need to make things. I just do it as a process of how I survive in the world, and it's nice to share it when I think it might help someone else or create an experience for someone. I always come back to music no matter what. I'll take these diversions into other projects, but music is the core thing that I know will never go away for me. 

Your music and your film are both deeply confessional. How do you navigate the vulnerability of sharing personal experiences through your art?

One of the reasons I made the film last year was because I couldn't have made that any time sooner. I had never told that story to anyone. I had kept all of that secret and felt ashamed of it. It is really hard. Once you really open up about the truth of something, it's hard to feel what I like to call a ‘vulnerability hangover’ for a while, where I felt just so tender. Now I see that that was part of the process, and I've come through that feeling and am much more open and free to make art and live my life differently. But no joke, it's not for everybody. Stories I've told about my past - experiencing domestic violence and high-control religion… so many people have experienced that. But sharing that story isn't for everyone. You should be careful about whether you're ready to tell it. I felt like it was an important part of my process, and I wanted to try and do something to help others, but it comes at a cost. I've tried to learn to be a little bit more gentle with myself and know that if I'm going to do something like put out a song that's super real or create a film that's a part of my life that I tried to hide. I will live with that for a while, but there will be another side. You will come through. That's what I learned: I had a real urge to be real, and it can cost you something. You must be strong and healthy, build yourself up, and have amazing people around you. I'm super lucky to have some really core, amazing women in my life who keep me strong and real at the same time. 

You worked with several collaborators on the album, can you tell us about that?

I'm so excited for everyone to hear the whole album because there are a bunch of songs where my two very best friends and longtime collaborator, singer-songwriters Norma MacDonald and Kim Wempe, lend their incredible vocals to this album. They just make the songs that they're on. So very excited about that. I also had Avery Dakin, an incredible musician and songwriter, do the string arrangement for the song, Don't Take Me Back. It was so amazing to collaborate with her because I met her when she was kind of a kid, and I was teaching music at the time. She became my student and told me she wrote songs and was amazing as a 12-year-old. So we spent nine months or something working together, just songwriting. That's all we were doing. We managed to stay in touch over the years. Avery went to music school and learned so much stuff I didn't know, so I asked if she could write string arrangements. She's so incredible - Please listen to her music. She wrote them, and then many incredible musicians, including India Gailey, Sarah Frank, and Adam Fine, came in and played the string parts on this song and two others on the album. I'm so grateful for those people lending their hearts and souls to the album. It elevates it beyond me singing in my living room, which is what most of the album sounds like, even though it was made at Ocean Floor Studios. We did a lot of work to try and make it feel intimate and close.

How do you feel you’ve evolved as an artist? 

First of all, I hope I have evolved as an artist. I think it's hard to evaluate yourself because my ego wants to say, ‘Oh gosh, this album is so much better than my last ones.’ Still, I think it's much more about discovery and curiosity and, you know, I have no idea on a scale of ‘good’ art - which is so extremely subjective… how my albums have done, but I know that I've become more centred and confident. I know what I'm trying to accomplish when I walk into the studio. When you have good people around you, you can communicate that and work toward it. 

When the album is released, how will it feel to be out in the world?

Something weird about me is that my favourite parts are writing and being in the studio. Everything after that is terrifying, to be honest. Putting music out is such an important part of the artistic process. You do need to do that. It's kind of part of the loop of creation… but I don't need to do it. I do it because I think it's a way of honouring the work that all of my collaborators and I have done, but it's the part where I go hands-off as much as possible. I try to represent the songs the best that I can. Maybe make some videos or visuals around them that I think are cool, and then I just have to not think about it. It's really, really scary to put your music out there. I just have to trust that the people who need it will find it. My only requirement for myself is to be real and authentic, not fake it and let it go. There’s a bit of grief when you put out an album because it's like the ending of a big process that you've probably spent a year or more doing, but it's also joyful because now people get to hear it, and you get to celebrate all your friends who helped you, which is nice.

Stay up to date with Carmel Mikol on Facebook, Instagram and her website carmelmikol.com.