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By Phil Reser
Contributing Writer

“I’ve been three times a sinner and two times a saint
And the quality of mercy is not strained
Love, if it’s love, is changing but unchanged
And the quality of mercy is not strained”
- Michelle Shocked

One of the most engaging Texas blues women since Janis Joplin, Michelle Shocked is currently riding a wave of down home gospel fire.

This incredibly talented singer and songwriter has switched musical styles constantly in her career and if you are familiar with her most recent record release To Heaven U Ride you know it captures her Christian faith, artistic vision, and passion for political activism.

She is a fiercely independent artist who has refused to be claimed by any one audience or make music based on career considerations.

Raised in a strict Mormon household by her mother and military lifer stepfather, she rebelled, running away at age 16 to live with her hippie father in east Texas.

Later, with a degree in literature from the University of Texas at Austin in one hand and a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in the other, Shocked headed west to California and then on to Europe.

After hitchhiking throughout the planet, she become an international sensation in 1986, when her first album, The Texas Campfire Tapes — a field recording of Shocked at a festival in England that built her reputation as the American vagabond singer, became a hit.

At that time, she chose to use her newfound fame and music to further her political activism, championing against homelessness, advocating for the environment, global justice as well as a world without war.

Her photo struggling with police at the 1984 Democratic National Convention landed on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner, which she would later chose as the cover shot of her 1988 Grammy-nominated album, Short Sharp Shocked, a mix of blues, rockabilly and punk.

After several hit albums, she began struggling against misappropriation of her music, filing a $1 million suit against her record label, PolyGram-Mercury, citing the 13th Amendment, which forbids slavery.

A settlement before the case went to trial, resulted in her gaining control over her back catalog, the re-release of key titles on her own Mighty Music label plus the release of a set of new albums, each with a distinct identity and style of its own. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was folk rocker, almost an update of her previous and popular, Short Sharp Shocked. Mexican Standoff explored her Texas/Latino roots, half blues and half Latin. And on the third album, she re-created Disney film songs in a western swing-style in Got No Strings.

As she continued her exploration of American roots styles, she discovered gospel music offered the purest form of music she had explored. That discovery ended up resulting in her becoming a member of the African-American West Angeles Church of God in Christ choir, located in South Central Los Angeles.

Her involvement with the church led to her singing with the choir, a spiritual awakening and producing her gospel recording ToHeavenURide, recorded live at the 2003 Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

Synapse: How would you describe your Texas musical roots?

Michelle Shocked: I took growing up there and the music that surrounded me for granted, that’s for sure. I suspect that it was deliberate on my father’s part that he introduced certain music to my brother and I at a young age. For example, his taking us to bluegrass festivals and encouraging my songwriting abilities which grew out of a natural background from our exposure to my dad sitting around the house on the weekends playing lots of music with his friends. But I also realized even more important than the styles of music that my dad and his friends played and enjoyed was the attitude that I grew up with that music was a utility thing. My dad was by no means a professional musician but he had the spirit of craftsmanship from his years as a carpenter, which he also applied to his approach to music. For instance, when he built a boat, he got a book and read what kind of construction, materials and tools you needed and put those together and started following the directions to accomplishing the project. My mother had a similar bent, they weren’t married as I was growing up, and they had divorced when I was quite young, but they really shared a lot of that utility approach to the arts. Music was democratic to them, it just wasn’t mystical, and it was very utilitarian.

Synapse: So most people were being influenced mainly by radio when they were growing up, but you were receiving somewhat of an alternative homespun exposure to music?

MS: And like, I said, I believe that was deliberate on my father’s part. I, later in my career, brought my brother, Max Johnston, out on tour with me and introduced him to the musicians in Uncle Tupelo, which was later to become Wilco and he was to become a member of that band. Well, one day the band was riding in their van on tour and this song came on and my brother flipped out wanting to know who was playing this certain song. They looked at him like he was joking because the song was “Free Bird,” the rock anthem by Lynyrd Skynyrd. But to my brother, it was a complete revelation in music. So I do realize that my father was trying to keep us from being taken into the consumer culture during our youth.

Synapse: In your travels and studies what do you see as the most interesting aspect of American roots music?

MS: Well, it’s probably a no brainer for me because the criteria that you measure that by is a value system made up of native or inherited and seems natural to people, the kind of music that really isn’t studied as a style. I think that I have found the deepest form of American roots in gospel music. Even though as people practice it, it is sophisticated and evolved but still has in its roots, the deepest democratic self-expression that exists in music. That’s just me but I find it interesting that any survey of contemporary Americano would not include gospel, they would tend to stop somewhere around the Rev. Gary Davis, maybe if your lucky, the Staple Singers, Mahalia Jackson or Sam Cooke, but that’s about as far as they’re going to go with it.

Synapse: You have never been shy about taking stylistic leaps with your music. How do you explain your free spirited musical style exploration?

MS: Well, it’s a bit of a contradiction but I say the ability to live with contradiction is a sign of maturity. On the one hand I’m a traditionalist, in that I look for the classical values, the things that are going to hold their weight over time that aren’t trend or fashioned based. And then on the other hand, I’m a true believer in the spirit of an iconoclast, a rebel and that has kind of made it easy for me. However, I don’t always think it’s been easy for my audiences just me, it makes it easy for me to follow my instincts. I know where I come from; I know what my influences are. I was willing to take a huge leap in faith to see where that kind of destiny would lead me. I didn’t ask anybody’s permission or consult anybody’s rulebook about what the officially sanctioned music styles are or how far you can push things. I have just followed my own instincts and I’m pretty happy where it’s led me.

Synapse: That’s interesting because I think that people that like and follow your career, like myself, expect the un-expectable from Michelle Shocked.

MS: I think that’s fair, but sometimes when that takes place, listeners understand it as a constant reinvention of your work. But, for myself, these have been logical choices in the context of my American roots interests. I do think that my musical choices have made for an amazing adventure, I just haven’t had the benefit of the mainstream culture behind me and it’s been hard for some people to follow what I’ve been doing.

Synapse: In what ways would you say personal politics and background in radical activism has been central to your music career?

MS: The truism that I heard a long time ago is that you get more conservative as you grow older. I could never really understand why that would be conventional wisdom because as you get older, you have more experience, more resources and connections. If anything, you should be more dangerous, even more radical. So, I’ve never understood why they would think that just because you were getting older that it would make you sell out because you might have interests that would be affected, so you’d change your point of view on things. So, I’ve set myself up through sort of a bread crumb trail, that says, here’s how I got to where I am today and this is why I remain radical, even though it might not conform to what some people think is defined as radical.

Synapse: You experienced some hard times with the music business, what were the big lessons for you and the positive things that resulted from it all?

MS: When things started out with my career, the launch of my music was involved in an extreme acceleration of things and at a certain point there was a demand that I stand on a principle and I don’t think anyone really faulted me for compromising that principle or negotiating my way around it. I made the sacrifice and stood on a principle and I bear the consequences of it. There is a freedom in choosing integrity; it’s the foundation of your identity and principles. It’s priceless. And I’ve had more creative freedom; I’ve been able to do exactly what I want, when I want to do it. I don’t think it gets any better than that. You know, the commercial success, the name recognition, I don’t really want any control over that but the things that I do have control of, I’ve been able to exercise with more freedom since that experience, pretty soon, I’m going to burst into the song, I Did It My Way. I don’t really think that Elvis did it like I did.

Synapse: Give us the scoop on what your own record label, Mighty Sound has been able to accomplish since you started it?

MS: It’s allowed me to have my own control of my music, to make sure that my catalog stays in print and it’s allowed me to kind of experience this brave new world that we are living in as the music business has taken a hold on the artist. I’ve gotten to be a sort of first hand observer because I’m in that position of being an independent artist and label, I see it from that side. I also had the advantage of being one of the last musicians that were brought through that major label system. I don’t really like running an independent label; it’s far too much administration. It’s kind of like having a kid. When they’re babies, you want the very best for them, experiences, education, opportunities, but it has a way of wearing you down. You end up a lot of times feeling guilty about missed opportunities.

Synapse: Would you talk some about your motto, “Music is a lot like politics, it’s too important to be left to the professionals?”

MS: I just realized at a point that my life was too important to be left to professionals. And I feel like one of the roles that I have to play now is that I’m one of the people that have a career and make a living as a professional musician and that part of my responsibility is to all these kids who are making music and have the benefits of technology that wasn’t available twenty years ago, that have distribution networks and yet they don’t understand that having a career in music isn’t the point. They will spend their adolescents trying to make the connections and networking for opportunities and breaks. They will sell their youth and do everything they can to make a career, when that is the time in their life when they should be having real experiences, for traveling, vagabonding, hitchhiking, exploring, adventuring and hanging out and getting into some trouble and getting away with it. I feel like I have an important role to play in reminding kids that consumer society is not everything that it sells itself to be.

Synapse: How would you describe the performer you have become and the vision you have for your music at this time in your life?

MS: One example that would characterize it better than anything else, is that I put my set list on my website and have invited them to bring their instruments to the show, if they felt comfortable enough and know the songs and set in with the band. Other than that, I’ve been real spontaneous with my performances, for better or worse. Sometimes by not playing it safe, the consequences have been that I may not always be as rehearsed or at the highest quality of my performance. There is a level or standard that you want your music to not fall below but on the other hand things get so predictable with lots of performance that they don’t rise above that level anyway. So by keeping myself challenged, I’ve been able to reach some interesting highs and lows.

Synapse: What do you like best about song writing and what’s it like to give birth to a song?

MS: Well, songwriting has become a mildly degrading art form, in that I don’t hear so much story telling. I hear a lot of confessional and impressionistic stuff. But my favorite form of songwriting is story telling and personal experience, compels people the most. I do love and enjoy songwriting, but whereas at one time my writing came from a complete mystery, where the inspiration came out of nowhere, it just fell out of the sky. I felt like I had bottled lightning or something. I was invited to play The Bottom Line in New York City on New Year’s Eve of the new millennium. I thought about it and I didn’t want to be in a club on New Year’s Eve playing old songs. I turned it down but then I got an inspiration that if I write a whole new bunch of songs that would be a really cool way to kick off the millennium, but I had only got the invitation about a month before the date. But I did it; I collaborated with my guitar player and wrote thirty songs in thirty days. That experience was so good for me as a songwriter because I learned that rather than it falling out of the sky, it’s more like, it’s more like an archer practicing shooting at a target and gets better and better, hardly missing the target at all after awhile.

Synapse: Would you talk a little about gospel music, your spiritual side of your life and how it mixes with your creative and everyday living?

MS: Like the music, my faith came in a very organic way. I was pursuing an interest in gospel music, not because I’m a gospel singer and not because I was a believer, but I thought that the music itself was one of the deepest roots music. And so because it was one of the deepest roots music, having explored my own roots, I thought it really was natural then to explore what I both perceptually and then intuitively felt like is the deepest root of American style. I went to church for the singing but stayed for the song. I’d read a quote by the Reverend Martin Luther King, saying that Sunday morning 11 a.m. is the most segregated hour in America. My consciousness was fixed on racism, not on salvation. I was going where the black folk were. And what’s not to love about a gospel choir? I remember thinking, you know, this music would be so good if they’d give that Jesus crap a rest.

Let me just enjoy the harmonies, the energy, the passion. But it turns out the two are inseparable. I just went one Sunday too often. I looked down and my feet were making that walk to the altar, and I thought, Might as well join them. What it comes down to is that the spirit of God is being glorified during a worship service, whereas during a secular concert, it’s the artist that is being glorified. For me, finding what that balance is in my life is a major part of my journey right now. I’m not a rock ‘n’ roll messiah but a person who’s in the wilderness myself; I’m at the least a voice in the wilderness trying to make straight the path. With my spirituality, I try to be as direct and upfront as I can. But like a good artist, you work your way to the truth. I like it delivered in pithy one-liners. Metaphor and simile and other devices poets and musicians use in getting to the point. But if you have a truth to tell, in my case it’s the gospel of Jesus Christ, there’s no way of pussyfooting around it. And there are definitely four or five different issues where my political opinions are different from what you would say are my church’s doctrine. Some of them I’ve already tried to address. When I made my decision to accept this faith in my life, I decided that the good outweighed the differences that drove me away from God for so many years, so I’m just going to keep the good part. I’m very idealistic, and maybe unrealistic and my life has always been made up of contradictions so, I can deal with it.

More artist info at www.michelleshocked.com