Two nights ago Mikky Ekko was out having a night cap in a Shoreditch hotel when he overheard Hakushu being ordered by a woman at the table behind. Hakushu is a potent strain of Japanese whiskey and Japanese whiskey so happens to be Mikky’s favourite drink. “So I turned to her and was like ‘that’s a great choice and so is the Yamasaki if you ever get around to trying that.’”
By luck or by fate, she happened to be an American, not from Nashville or the south like Mikky but Baltimore; where she found a start in music. Whether it was their shared nationality or their shared vocation the two clicked and after a few minutes of passing conversation the stranger revealed that she sings lead in Beach House. “I’m like oh you’re Victoria, I love you.” Like Mikky, Beach House were in town on promo having arrived from Berlin three days back. Their schedule had been blacked out with interviews and label meetings; the only down time afforded was a Sunday night in the hotel bar. “I set my phone down on the table and hit record. Then we just started interviewing each other after five minutes,” Mikky laughs. “That was such a fun evening.”
These things just seem to happen to Mikky Ekko. One day he is in a foreign city sharing Japanese Whiskey with his favourite vocalist, the next he is steeped in profound discussion about the law of attraction with a magazine writer. His life is a perpetual series of unplanned events that without warning manifest into the kind of tales you share with your kids over Sunday roast.
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When I meet him in RCA Records London headquarters he’s warm and unguarded, as if eternally buzzed on a can of Red Bull. We’re on the journalistic version of a date. The lights are dimmed and there is a low round table topped and bottomed by a pair of sturdy leather chairs. A platter of sushi is untouched in the middle because instead of gorging on salmon and rice balls, the thirty year old is reasoning on chaos theory and new thought philosophy. He talks with a drawn-out southern twang, reeling off a scattered bundle of beliefs. It’s endearing, even if his mind can at times move too quickly for his speech to keep chase.
“I think it’s all mathematical but I think it’s all also not. In a way that I can realise it, make it a tangible accomplishment and then use that to create a spike in the chaos, but if you create a spike in the chaos you leave a weight, like a boat. And as the weight gets wider and wider its impact diminishes but it spreads out.”
He pauses for a moment and screws his brow. “Does it make sense what I’m saying? I don’t think I’m making sense.”
He nicks at his forehead with his index and gazes at the sushi, engrossed. After a few seconds he tries again:
“You’ve got to constantly find momentum to keep the rocket moving. It wants to be brought back down to earth. And that’s one thing that’s so interesting about people like Rihanna or like stars who are really able to see their potential and manifest it. I believe that anyone can manifest who they want to be. Most people just don’t know who they want to be.” Is it a spiritual thing for you? “I think it’s a spiritual thing, a physical thing. I think the hardest thing is just staying tapped in. When you’re going all the time it’s kind of easy to lean on muscle memory and it just becomes the thing that’s in front of you rather than the thing you are creating. That’s what’s hard because if you go to long without creating consciously the trajectory changes.”
He pauses again, “I don’t really know what I’m trying to accomplish with this comparison.”
Did you have this mind-set from the onset or did you only start believing after things started to take off?
I’ve always been interested in the universe and time travel and, you know, real like sci-fi shit but at the same time there’s a lot of that that just feels really natural to me. As a singer it’s all vibrations, it’s all math but that math so easily gets put in a numbers box rather than a water box. It’s the same thing because water is math.
You have it as fixed thing normally?
It would be this equals this, like a very angular thing. But yeah, I don’t know. What did you ask me? [Laughs]
I was asking which came first…
I think that’s the great question isn’t it? Did you choose it or did it choose you? Or when did you realise or did you just know? I think it has always been in me. It found me. And when it knocked, I answered. And here we are, having bad sushi. *pauses* What have you been listening to lately?
There’s an interesting thing happening with the spoken word scene in the UK at the moment, so that and the Kendrick album.
He’s so good. I feel like you cannot do an interview and not talk about Kendrick Lamar. It’s kind of annoying. [laughs] But he’s so good. Everybody knows how important he is you know? And he’s not taking it for granted; he’s just trying to own it. And it’s kind of badass to see for my generation you know what I mean? I think it just fucking cool.
We’re like the vessels for the universe and it’s always been the artists who are the voice of the people and it’s just coming at such a crazy time with stuff that’s been going on in the states. Tensions are high and I think he’s somebody who represents a really wise portion of hip-hop that’s informed. And I’m not saying that the other guys aren’t, he’s done a really incredible job I think of marrying consciousness with access. He’s on another level, he’s tapped in.
Who have you been listening to?
Kendrick. I really like Drake’s album. In hip-hop, Run the Jewels, Vince Staples. The mixtape is dope and he’s really intelligent. I was listening to the new Daniel Lanois record. I really like that. I thought it was shit at first but it was one of those that you go back and am like ‘I’m so embarrassed.’ [laughs]
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Does it get frustrating with fans consuming music so quickly? We seem to toss things aside after a week or so now.
It’s funny. It’s really hard. I listened to that album [Daniel Lanois] randomly doing whatever, I just kind of chucked it on. Listening to it, taking it in. Then we had to drive a bunch of my gear out to LA. So we drove from Nashville to LA and it’s like a 26 hour drive or something.
We put it on when we were nearly at LA. It was me and my drummer Gavin, he was like man I’m going to take a nap in the back and I was like cool and I put the album on. It was like nothing but mountains and desert basically and the sun was setting and I just totally lost it. I wasn’t crying but I just had this moment where I was reminded again about really taking time to make it precious you know? It’s so hard to do when you’re always going.
Onto your album. It’s rare for a big pop record like ‘Time’ to be so emotionally unguarded.
As much as I hate to say it, I really have Rihanna to thank for that. Not hate but you like to think that you do shit yourself and could see that far and have that vision. But after 'Stay' it completely changed the way I felt about what I needed to do with the album. I had it slotted it to come out that fall after we did the Grammy’s together but I told the label that I think I still have one more song to write. Then between January and March I wrote five songs, four of them are on the album. 'Watch Me Rise', 'Love You Crazy', 'You', 'Time And Loner'. And that was almost half the album. I found it quite a reflective piece.
Was it a case of sitting down and having a serious think about what experiences you wanted to channel into each track?
I mean, yeah. I wrote about 250/300 songs for this album. So there were a lot of days where it’s just like shit song, shit song, shit song, shit song. If you look at the calendar there are a lot of days marked in red. I whittled it down to what I felt like was just the most. More or less there were three things that were really important to me around the album.
One: Keeping it as diverse as the things I love to sing and love to listen to and not being afraid to let that show. Two: Trying to keep it honest. Trying to keep those songs at the very edge of what I needed to say and then outside of that I wanted to have some songs on there that were just I guess like giving people a window into who I am as an artists and just keeping them simple and more immediate. It was in that phase where I felt like I needed a few things to really complete the album. Because I just realised that initially It was really heavy emotionally and I needed some things to lighten the mood because I was like damn that’s not really me, I’m not that sombre all the time. I wanted to make sure that side showed. The more playful stuff like ‘U’ and other stuff like that.
You mention wanting to ensure that the music is a close reflection of you as an artist. Does that mirror up with who you are as a person?
I think so. For anybody who goes on the full journey of the album I think they’ll have a pretty good understanding of me as a person and that’s really what I set out to accomplish with the debut. Creating a trust level with fans and with the listeners that will kind of allow them to go wherever we want. I didn’t write anything down; it was all done in the booth to keep things natural. I was just making sounds or the melodies or whatever and the words find you know? That’s how that was written.
What’s your usual process?
It goes back and forth. I usually write stuff down because I like to see it but it just depends on what the song wants.
So you’re fluid with your work habits?
Depending on the point of inspiration. It’s mostly just catching a vibe and riding a wave you know? There’s a writer who once told, me and you really only need to write what people need to hear. That comment made me go ‘Oh damn.’ I was in a crisis. So I thought about it like that. It’s not just about being a dope singer or putting together an aesthetic that nobody else has, it’s really about marrying what you do with people. Trying to connect with people. I’m trying to figure out the right way to say this. [Pauses].
You have to find a way to make yourself more important so that you can give people what you’ve been given. You know what I mean? For me that’s what a lot of the journey is. I certainly don’t expect anything, but at the end of the day you don’t get many opportunities to make a difference.
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'Time' will be released on September 25th – pre-order LINK.
Words By Aniefiok Ekpoudom (@AniefiokEkp)
