Taos Fest headliner Michelle Shocked has been around the way.
"Music is nothing more or less than a constant source of growth," Michelle Shocked told SFR during a recent phone interview. "I don't handle relationships with people that well, but music is a relationship I've always had in my life, that's always grounded me."
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She's discussing, specifically, her new three-CD release, an ambitious and disparate trilogy comprised of a rock album (
Don't Ask Don't Tell
), a border music album (
Mexican Standoff
)
and an album comprised of Disney songs-yep-rearranged into Western swing (
Got No Strings
).
Shocked may be specifically discussing her new trilogy, but her vision of music also reflects an overlapping, sometimes contradictory, I-don't-have-all-the-answers-
but-I'm-trying view of the world.
Whether or not another artist could pull off such a musical project is dubious. Whether anybody could hold so much complexity without alienating people is questionable but Shocked (one of the headliners of this weekend's Taos Solar Music Festival), as usual, pulls off both feats with aplomb. And, as usual, she explains why she's capable of tying things together in a way that transcends music while at the same time recognizing music's deep significance. "I like relationships that have complexity," she says. "Say if these three albums were people and I just had a relationship with one of them. I could go deeply into it, but once I start going into all three, I'm not really dealing with the complexities of each one individually but the relationship between them."
Shocked has a famous story that simultaneously intertwines relationships with people and her own independence from them. She spent much of her childhood in a tiny town in East Texas with her strict Mormon mother, took off at age 16, ended up in Austin at the University of Texas, then hit the road to live as an activist/troubadour/folksinger. Along the way, she was raped by a Green Party comrade, arrested at the Los Angeles Democratic Convention protests and committed to a mental institution (where she stayed 'til her insurance ran out) by her mother. And that's just the beginning. Whew.
Then she moved to Los Angeles.
And then she found God.
Along the way, Shocked ripped and snorted like an ornery bull, first gaining a bit of notice when a recording of her impromptu fireside song session while camping at the Kerrville Folk Festival was recorded on a Sony Walkman. The tape, unbeknownst to her, made its way to England and was made into an album, where its raw, folksy intensity made
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it an underground hit. Unfortunately, she didn't reap any monetary benefits from it. But
The Texas Campfire Tapes
got her some major label attention.
Mercury Records offered her good money to sign with them, and Shocked said, nah, I'll sign, but keep the dough-just gimmie the rights to my music. And what music it is, running the gamut from quiet, intense folk to sashaying swing, with stops along the way touching on blues, rock, rockabilly-you name it.
The unifier of her prodigious catalogue is the theme of sources, of
origins. "In this day and age of marketing and soundbites and narrow demographics and really just lowered expectations, we don't demand of our art the complexity that it's capable of," she says. "So I try to compensate for that by saying 'If you want to know who a person is, you've gotta know about their roots and their sources and where they come from." For Shocked, where she comes from provides a deep reservoir of material, a resource for her rich lyrics, simultaneously poetic and down-to-earth, and a musical heritage that just keeps expanding.
Shocked lives, oddly enough, in Los Angeles, a place known for rootlessness and a shallow, asphalt lifestyle. "LA has certain stereotypes portrayed in movies or sometimes by experience," she tells SFR. "That megalopolis, that urban sprawl, like we're thinking of Hong Kong, where there's no depth or no humanity. In fact there's many little villages, and you just find your little village."
It was the nexus of finding a village, loving music and expanding relationships that finally led Shocked to, of all things, born-again Christianity, when she began attending a local church, at first just to hear the choir. "It's an African-American denomination, so if you have any interest in gospel music, you have a sense of what I found so compelling. In that sense, I know how this sounds, but I don't think this conversion would have happened had the congregation been white. I think there was something about it that opened my mind to new possibilities."
So there you have it. From East Texas to Amsterdam, from anarchist to evangelical follower, from skateboard punk rocker to regular church-goer, Shocked's wanderings seem to have ended, though her story is definitely not over. It's just staying put. "I feel like I've come to a place in my life where I don't have to wander around the world looking for a home," she says. "I'm real content just seeking inspiration in my own neighborhood."
