A Country Song Written in Washington and Recorded Across the Atlantic
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Michi and producer Anto Vaquero layered handclaps on Whiskey
to make it feel like a crowded country bar. The song leaves someone alone with a drink and a memory, so the hint of a roomful of people changes the scene. You can be somewhere lively and still be thinking about the person who used to sit next to you. It’s a familiar country setting for a question that has followed Michi for more than a decade. If she’s thinking about the person she lost, is that person thinking about her too?
The Virginia-born singer-songwriter wrote Whiskey
after a breakup while living in Washington, D.C. It follows the relationship through the pleasure of first dates and the discovery of infidelity. Years later, she can recall how it began and still has questions about how it ended. “This song is about letting yourself feel everything for a moment,” Michi says. The drink gives the singer something to do with her hands while she lets the memories play out. She’s willing to go back over the good parts even with the knowledge of what came next.
Country was already part of Michi’s life when she wrote it. As a teenager she wanted to sing it badly enough to take the stage name Shelly Ray, which her aunt still uses sometimes. For a lesbian artist writing from her own experience, the bar and the drink are familiar parts of the genre that can hold her story too. The language feels at home in the song because Michi has lived with it for so long.
By the time Michi came to record the song, she was living in Madrid. She and Vaquero tracked her vocals and guitars there, working through takes until the parts felt right to her. In Virginia, longtime collaborator Lance Koehler handled drums, mixing and mastering. He had worked on her 2012 album Change. The two sessions bring the places where she grew up and where she lives now into the same arrangement. The handclaps came out of the Madrid sessions, where she and Vaquero were imagining the country bar the song could happen in.
Whiskey
follows the title track from Short Story, the album Michi began funding through listeners after losing her job and finding herself reaching for the guitar. Her press materials put the album in late spring 2027. In the meantime, the question in Whiskey
can stay where she left it, with a glass in front of her and the feeling of a crowd close by.
Photo credit: Marina Borshchenko
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