Mike Kane Takes Us Inside The Stories Of His Sawdust World EP
Mike Kane is a lifelong drummer, particularly in blues bands, who made the decision to bring his original songwriting to life a few years ago, and has now released the EP String of Lights, and more recently, his second EP, Sawdust World. Both were produced by Michael Dinallo (The Mercy Brothers, The Radio Kings) and Tim Carter and were recorded at The Treehouse Studio in Nashville. Kane found that having an unconventional life and many experiences traveling with bands made him observant in ways that inspired his songwriting, and many of his new songs are inspired by personal elements infused with storytelling. But the hardest road he faced to bring his songs to life was becoming a guitarist and a vocalist, neither of which he’d ever thought would be his forte.
While he still defers to other guitarists on the record, and even to other drummers, he has become confident enough as a vocalist to share his own stories directly, a big leap into connecting with audiences. After hearing from Mike about the inspiration behind some of his songs on Sawdust World, it’s easy to see why these stories are best delivered in his own voice, guiding us into the moods he envisioned when he wrote them.
Americana Highways: I know that you’ve been working with Michael Dinallo on this album and your previous one. I understand that you two go way back.
Mike Kane: It all starts in a barroom back in Providence a long time ago.
AH: It’s amazing how these things work out, because you can’t really tell how these friendships and connections are going to influence your future. But it seems like keeping those connections is creatively necessary just to encourage you.
MK: Right. You’re right. There are a lot of people who are creative but you need a prism, and you need to know people. You can’t do it alone. You need people. Having a friend like Mike is a real game-changer just for that reason. It’s not a solitary process. You need other people to make it happen at all. I remember when we were first playing together, and he was running down to Nashville once in a while, and working with a Norwegian pop star.
Back then, I had started writing songs, but I didn’t play guitar, and I didn’t sing. I had been performing all my life behind a drum set. I remember thinking, “This guy is doing a lot closer to what I want to be doing someday.” When I was writing songs, right up until the time we started recording them, I wasn’t writing them with any intention to perform them myself. That wasn’t why I was writing. In my mind, I was working on an older model where you write songs and maybe you got through a middle person to license the songs to someone who records them.
Then I was making demos for Mike, and I didn’t think of myself as a singer, and I didn’t start playing a guitar until I was maybe 50 years old. And that was only to start putting stuff to chords and arrangements that I was hearing in my head all day.
AH: I find this pretty fascinating because there’s the time and energy that it takes to become able as a singer or instrumentalist, but I think a lot of it must also be psychological. There’s the psychology of how you view yourself, like you said. You never thought of yourself as a singer or guitar player, and you had to get past that. I think that’s really brave.
MK: Thank you. I don’t think of myself as courageous, but there is kind of an identity thing that goes on. It’s not just your own sense of it, but everyone around you who has their idea of who you are or what you do. Going beyond that was a thing, and I had some pretty funny moments along the way with that. The stuff that Mike and I were doing was kind of under the radar, but as it began to emerge, people I was close to for years were raising an eyebrow, saying, “Wait, what?” They didn’t know that I sang, or wrote, or played the guitar. Introducing it was an identity shift. I’ve worked past that now. I said to Michael at the time, “It would actually be easier to introduce all this to a world of strangers who don’t know who I am! Then I wouldn’t have to explain it to anybody.” [Laughs]
AH: These songs have specific stories in them, that’s for sure, and some of them may well be very personal. How do you decide what stories to tell?
MK: Well, the players on there know how to work in service to the song. That helps. There’s a song on there called “Helen of Troy,” and that, of all the stuff I’ve written is really the most personal one. They are kind of like snapshots. They are almost like short stories. “Cordelia” is like that. But “Helen” is a song that’s my life and my world. The pedal steel and the fiddle on that! Michael and Tim both have to pull me backwards once in a while because I want to put pedal steel on everything.
AH: I think those elements turn that song into a kind of anthem. It suddenly becomes really timeless with those qualities. We associate anthems with electric guitars, but here it’s more of a rolling quality. You include so much detail of a real place and a real time that it feels totally anchored in that way.
MK: It’s kind of a strange experience that it’s talking about. It’s the experience of learning something that’s tragic and deeply personal in a crowded place, where nobody knows this is happening, and the world keeps on turning. And I’m writing this song and publishing it, about something that I would never have a conversation about, and I’m processing that. I’m a pretty private person, actually! But it meant enough to me that I felt that this person deserved her song. It’s kind of like Greek mythology meets minor league baseball because I was at McCoy Stadium when the phone call in question came through. It was that experience of being in a crowd.
And then I realized that this was something that was happening to everybody in that crowd. Everybody has some kind of internal experience, some kind of internal monologue, yet we’re all like these little islands sitting out in the stands. It was trying to capture all of that, plus the sense of personal loss. It was a tough target to hit, and I surprised myself by hitting it.
AH: I do think it’s difficult to bring together such different elements. You’re reminding me that I had an experience in college where I was at a very lavish formal party late at night and I found out while there that a family member had passed away. It was quite a contrast and gave me some similar thoughts.
MK: That’s the thing. The contrast. It’s a sentiment that lingers in my mind. When you’re driving down the highway, every one of those cars on the highway is carrying someone who is carrying something. It’s like that R.E.M. song, “Everybody Hurts.” That was a masterful song capturing that idea, as well as the video.
AH: Songwriters have to have that mentality, I think, when they are looking around themselves at the world. Because that’s also the mentality that you need to have when you get up on stage, even in a small venue. You need to connect to the people in that room. You have to believe that you have that connection.
MK: Yes, and that sense of the thing that’s very personal, but also universal. My favorite songwriters are the people who can knit all that together with weird details.
AH: Everyone is always very insecure about the weird details that they include! They wonder, “Is it weird that I said what my dress looked like that night?”
MK: That’s the funny thing. But all those details are what make it universal. Those are the things we worry about. The things that John Prine would drop into his songs, like the broken radio, or the light that shines from the kitchen into a bedroom. These tiny little details are so relatable. That must be the thing, that it’s relatable.
AH: It seems to me that it’s really special when a writer can take a really ordinary detail and suggest that it’s significant. That suggests that these ordinary things in our lives might actually have a big significance to them.
MK: Yes! And they do. Maybe it’s a matter of saying them out loud. When you think about it, when you’re looking at every song lyric on a page in front of you, they don’t seem very dramatic. A lot of great song lyrics look pretty mundane sitting on a page. But when you put a chord behind it or a melody behind it, it elevates it. It honors the simplicity of a thought by giving it more body. It’s also really fun and gratifying to do it, even if you swing and miss. Of course, we miss more than we hit. I have a total of ten songs with a full studio treatement, but I’ve probable written 80 to 90. Most of those will never see the light of day. There’s the subset which you take through the whole process that become your babies.
AH: Can you articulate the feeling that helps you choose those? Is it that they have something going for them that’s more compelling? Or is it a more intellectual process?
MK: I think it comes down to the song that’s most complete. It’s the songs that maintain their structure and integrity all the way through. Especially with the earlier stages of stuff, you’ll have a great stanza, or a great line, and you’ll build the rest around it. But not all of that might necessarily have the same gravity as the key phrase. As you go along and you do it more, it becomes more likely that you can maintain that tone from beginning to end. That’s part of it. You can also write a really great set of lyrics, but not necessarily have it be a great song. If it doesn’t have propulsion, or a melody that really defines it. I’ve got a couple where I feel like, “Man, that’s really well written!” But it still feels like it would fall flat on its face if I tried to record it.
AH: I wanted to mention another song, “Heading West,” which has a lot of piano in it. That has a lot of musical variety within one song.
MK: That’s Jim Gambino. That was Michael’s idea to put piano on there and I really love it. I think one of the things that really makes that track work is the backing vocal from Anita Suhanin. I love what she did with that. I come up against the edge of my vocal range, but she carries it. It really serves the narrative, too. The piano does that also. It carries that ballad vibe.
AH: It has a more traditional or classic feeling to it.
MK: It almost feels like a 50s ballad. I got to work with so many good musicians on that track. That song is really an invention. I saw a photograph from around the turn of the century of a group of Ringling Brothers performers in grease paint. They had these horrible fake smiles painted on and they looked miserable. These were nomads. I remember thinking, “This is a subculture within a subculture.” The isolation within that was almost alarming to me.
I tried to imagine what that must be like, and the bonds that must exist among the people trapped within that isolated island. That’s what that song was about. It’s about the closeness of people who are isolated together. So much happens in front of you in the session. I’d written it to have a crescendo, to build, and build, and the musicians totally understood it and played to it. Michael plays the guitar on that, and does these guitar stabs that totally elevates it.
AH: It feels more like a rock song, and your explanation makes me think that’s the darker undertone that was needed to handle this material, like in the photograph.
MK: Yes, it has a kind of defiance, and almost a simmering anger in it. That’s what that photograph really emanated. That’s the vibe I was going for. That’s the trick. You look for those weird elements in things and you try to translate them into words and music. It really is a translation. That’s how I think of it.
Thanks very much for the conversation Mike. Folks can find more details here on his website: https://mikekanesongwriter.com/