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He was born in Bermuda to a Canadian mother and Bermudian father who realized a lifelong dream of raising their family on the seas. Living life aboard a 40-foot boat as they traversed the Caribbean and skirted South America, it was inevitable he'd develop a oneness with the clear skies overhead, the sea rollicking below and the sweet sent of her spray as she washed up on the sandy shores of the islands where they made landfall. It was a simple life, and a bucolic life, and it seems to have provided the ideal foundation for the soulful roots and ringing clarity of Mishka's music.
New Times: You really did have an interesting upbringing, living on
a boat and sailing around the Caribbean. Tell us a bit about it.
Um,
yeah, it's going back a long time now, I was about three years old when
we moved on the boat. It just seemed like a normal way of life to me,
you know? I didn't really realize that it was different until I was
older.
In a lot of ways it was idyllic, you know? It was
beautiful. We didn't have any schedules or anything. In other ways it
was tough, because we didn't have any of the modern conveniences that
you normally would, like a TV or a washing machine. It was a pretty
rustic lifestyle.
Overall it was a way of life I would prefer still to this day, though.
It
not only impacted you as a person, but as an artist as well, right?
Songs like "Coastline Journey" and "Mountains Meet the Sea" clearly
reference it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, "Mountains Meet the
Sea" really reflects back to that part of my life. Just sailing the
islands and seeing all those beautiful places. It's the story about
those experiences.
"Coastline Journey" is something more to do with more recent years, and just searching for waves, you know?
That island hoping was how you got into reggae and roots, right?
Yeah,
I mean, it came from Bermuda, where I grew up mostly the first years of
my life. There are many cultures in the Caribbean, and Caribbean music
[in general] is really popular there.
How does Above the Bones differ from your self-titled release and One Tree?
I
started the process of making that album in early 2000. I'd been on
tour for about two years opening some shows, and I became friends with
the guitar player Darryl Thompson, and he gave me an open invitation to
come and work with him anytime and I was like, "alright, you want to
come and produce some music with me?" And like a year and a half later
I went to Georgia, to his house, and just played a bunch of my songs
and we just started building the foundations together. Most of those
songs I'd written over the course of 10 or 15 years, you know? Even
before the oldest record I have. And some of them are new, that I just
kinda wrote on the spot.
There wasn't really any theme to the
album or anything. We just kinda went through and said, "alright, I
like that one. I don't like that one. We can do this to that one."
And we just kinda experimented and stuff, and that was the beginning of
Above the Bones.
Then Matthew McConaughey stumbled
onto you guys, signed you to his new j.k livin label and went in to the
studio with you to lend his two cents?
Almost a year later I
started working with Matthew McConaughey. When we started working
together he was like, "well, I like what you've got, but let's get a
producer to just kinda up the production a bit." So we went to a studio
in L.A. to finish the album. And we took what we had, which I'd say was
about half what it is now, and we just redid some of the tracks, some
of the instruments. We added a few songs, took a few songs off. Then
just mixed and mastered it.
It was an interesting collaboration. It was my songwriting and Darryl's production ideas, then Matthew's input.
If fans take just one thing away from your music, what would you like it to be?
Um,
I don't know, I guess just a sense collectiveness amongst humanity, you
know? I mean that's what the album's about, it's about honoring
ancestors.
Mishka performs at Revolution Live (200 W Broward Blvd) this Thursday, June 11 at 8pm. Tickets cost $12.
