"Renaissance" not only is the title of her 2021 debut EP but is also a very apt description of her style, her life and the way she conducts both herself and the business of her music.
McKenna Michels may be considered a "Late bloomer" when it comes to being a musician and songwriter given that she began writing songs in her late teens but this young talent has lived a life well beyond her young age. A life affected by autism, abuse and much more, yet she conducts herself with a maturity that is far past her actual age.
Her latest EP, "Revolution," is scheduled for release in the early Spring of 2025 and this, coupled with a coinciding comic book, yet another in a series called, "Survivor" have McKenna very excited.
"Well, I have been a singer/songwriter full time now for about three years," she started, "I started writing when I was 19, I found my passion for music really, really young; my grandmother used to play "Phantom of the Opera" in the car (laughs) and when I was about three years old, I decided that I had to be able to sing like that one day. So, I joined the choir in middle school; I'd always sang before that but when I got to high school, there was an opportunity through the choir to do voice lessons independently. I chose to pursue Opera through that and ended up performing at The Kennedy Center in 2017 at the end of my senior year of high school. When I went to university I kind of switched gears and became a business major and I was also on the rowing team and I got injured my second to last year of college. I realized how much I missed music; I now had no outlet and at that point I realized that I needed to do something about my passion and started writing. I talk very openly about being autistic and also having gone through an abusive situation in my childhood; I was taken away from my mom when I was 15 and I guess I didn't realize how much pain and resentment I had built up within me; she and I are on good terms now, we talk all of the time and we've kind of worked through that, which I feel very fortunate for but a lot of my early songwriting and still songwriting that comes up every now and then is based off of that and I talk very openly about it as a way to kind of open the door for other people who have been through traumatic situations to feel like they have a voice as well. So, that's what I've kinda been doing since I was 19."
Readily admitting her love of music; she doesn't shy away from the reasons that she got started a bit later in life; in fact, she seems to have turned the turbulence around her into a catalyst for achieving better things.
"I've been playing piano since I was six, I've been singing since I could talk, I did solo performances when I was nine and ten, I'd get solos in choir and I was big into musical theater, especially in middle school. I did one or two productions in middle school; my great-grandmother was a nationally competing singer in the 1930s and I grew up with her and her piano and her music. So, I've always been very musical, always very passionate about it but something I talk about on my platform, publicly and on stage is, when you're in an abusive situation, you don't have the same opportunities as someone who is not would have. So, whereas I would have maybe liked to have started when I was 12, 13 or 14, there were a lot of factors that made that really difficult. When you're just struggling to survive everyday in an emotionally turbulent environment, you don't really get to have the same creative expression that someone who has a stable household would. So, when I was 19, I was fully on my own at that point other than my step-mom and my dad who were helping with my college but I wasn't really speaking with them at that point either and it was the time in my life when I started making decisions for myself instead of what I was being told to be or told to act like; in a short amount of time, I've lived a few lives (Laughs)."
One of those "Lives" she's lived and still lives is dealing with autism. When that word is mentioned, our human natures take us to different places with different visions of what austism is and/or means but for McKenna, it's a daily struggle and one she seems to have come to manage quite well.
"I think, when I was a kid that I didn't know, because even when I was growing up in the early 2000s, a lot of people assumed that autism was strictly for men or could only affect men. There have been a lot of studies recently; I was diagnosed right around the pandemic and it was interesting to learn some of the differences that they are finding between male and female presenting autism. There are exceptions to that rule because there are a lot of crossovers, that's why it's a "Spectrum" but for me growing up as a kid, there is something that autistic people do called, "Masking" and it's a really present theme in my upcoming EP. Women are more likely to; this is just a generalization but where men will be more quiet and awkward and not really social, women often create mental checklists in their brain to be able to fit in and be more emotional because that is what is expected of women in society a lot of the time. So, often growing up, what I found myself doing is, my personality would entirely change depending on who I was talking to and I would constantly be anxious and constantly have these obsessions with different things; whether it be a video game or a cartoon or sometimes a specific person in my life and those things; I guess characteristically, where men may be more infatuated with trains, you hear of that with autistic people all of the time, trains, airplanes or cars and for me it was "Dr. Who" (Laughs) or "Phantom of the Opera" or dressing up and watching Anime or any of those things to the point where it would take over my everyday life and because of that I still had issues with social situations because people could only get surface level because the person I was presenting myself as to them wasn't who I actually am it was who I thought they wanted me to be. So, I struggled with friendships my whole childhood and my whole life. So, one of the things I still struggle with is learning to know when I'm masking and being consciously aware of the fact that I am not being authentic. Also, overstimulation is a big problem. Whereas, concert halls, I'm fine being on stage but if I were in the middle of a crowd, I will have a panic attack. Autistic people may call it a "Meltdown;" where a panic attack for a normal person may be brought on by a bunch of anxiety triggers or something, for an autistic person it is either a short extreme exposure to overstimulation or a prolonged build up of overstimulation that the autistic person isn't aware of and it affects them negatively. I still struggle with those things; a lot of things, because of my diagnosis, I've been able to find coping mechanisms for but the inner personal relationships with people around me and the overstimulation aspect where sometimes I just will breakdown; there is ways to avoid it for sure but sometimes they are unavoidable. I have a great team around me that helps me make sure that I stay kind of level-headed (Laughs) especially on the road or in music videos with high intensity filming situations where it's long days and uncomfortable outfits; autism is one of those things that you can manage but never cure."
"I think that I've been really lucky that music is one of my obsessions and always has been," she continued. "I literally remember; if I find a song that scratches that itch in my brain, I can't just listen to it once. I will put the song on loop for weeks at a time; the same song. I will never change the song, I will listen to the same song, over and over and over again and the same thing goes for my creative process. I love coming up with outfits; this last tour, I came up with themed outfits for the tour and shared them with my fans and they came dressed up in similar outfits and it was wonderful but my obsession with getting those outfits down to the last detail that I want. I planned these outfits for easily like four or five months because I'm doing everything almost entirely by myself in that regard; like sowing roses in a very specific way onto a corset (Laughs). Songwriting, there is a certain level where sometimes I can write a song super quickly and other times when I'm too overwhelmed with other things in my life, I have extreme writers block. I guess it's because my attention is fixated on, I don't know, outfits or a photoshoot or interviews and then I get too in my head about; what am I gonna say? What am I gonna wear? How's my make up gonna look? That I can't find the space to write music but when all of that clears away, I'll be fixated on writing songs and often I'll write six to ten songs in a week because all of the rest of it is cleared out but sometimes that will come after eight months of nothing (Laughs). One of my songs took me like; gosh, I wrote the initial melody probably three years ago but I finally finished it for the new EP and it's my favorite off of the EP but it took that long and the one that is already out was written in like 10 minutes; easy and super fast."
"Six to ten songs?" With that kind of writing ability and potential catalog; why only a second EP?
"I have a firm belief; I feel like the climate of the industry is not reflecting this in people right now and it upsets me because I function very similarly to how I feel like Adele functions where she will not release music unless she 100 percent believes in it, it's relatable to her and her life, it's authentic, it's pure; it's real music. I feel like, everyone right now is trying to pump out music to have that next Tik-Tok viral hit and I personally don't care about virality. I care about real connection with my fans, I care about the people who are hearing my songs and coming back to me and saying, "This song changed my life, I went through this situation and it made me feel like I have something to hold onto because if you can get through it; I can too." That's what I write for, I don't write for quick success. I don't write for dance hits in the club. I write for myself and my fans, for fellow survivors, for fellow people in the LGBTQIA+ community, I write for emotions and to me, to create that, sometimes it takes more time and less songs because I want to put out the most real version of myself and it's basically a timestamp of where I'm at in life each time I release something. I think that's so much more beautiful than just trying to be like everyone else on Tik-Tok right now. As a smaller artist, I feel like I could release something with "Filler" just to have content for the Spotify algorithum (Laughs) but I feel like the people who have longevity in their careers, whether that will be me or not, are the people who make real connections with people and you can't do that if you're not being a real person."
Along those lines, in a current climate where artists drop singles in our laps like hot coals and many songs lacking content with stamina; how important are lyrics to her writing process?
"Lyrics?" She asked immediately. "They are the most important thing to me. My first passion was opera and I found opera so beautiful bcause they are telling stories through music and the same thing with musical theater. Whether or not I like the melodies or the whatever, a lot of the time it's the storytelling; I also listen to a lot of Japanese music for the same reason. A lot of the time, real Japanese music like the more traditional or some of the independent artists I'll listen to, they'll tell stories. They tell stories through the whole thing; looking at the translations, there's a song I listen to where there is a lyric in there, "Thousands of cherry trees dissolve into the night, not even a whisper could be heard;" that is so beautiful! I don't hate music the way it is now, I just think it's become so; I don't know another way or how to put this because I don't despise the Kardashians but I feel like the music industry has become Kardasian-ized where it's about the beauty and the glamour, who is the hottest or has the most sexual appeal and all of these things and it has been refreshing to see people like Noah Kahan and Hosier or Florence & the Machine as well who just write beautiful lyrics and have success through that. I feel like storytelling is the most crucial aspect in my music and the music I listen to; lyrics matter because you're telling people who you are, what you believe in, what you've overcome, what you've been through and I feel like you can't do that if you're just saying, "Here's my titty..." I don't know (Laughs) or whatever the lyrics are they write. This is part of the reason that a lot of the time, I focus my songs on a first person narrative because I feel like it's necessary when writing a song, to make it feel lyrically impactful for myself; I feel I need to have some souce of empathy with the protagonist and to be able to write something profound, even if it's simple in content but profound in meaning, it needs to be an element of personal whether it's actually about me or I'm putting myself in the shoes of someone else."
"Survivor" is more than a song; it's not only the title of her aforementioned comic book series but also a way of life but how this series came about once again points to her ability to rise from the proverbial ashes.
"So, I have been a Cosplayer for 10 years. I do primarily video game cosplays, recreations of famous video game characters, sometimes anime or superhero based stuff but mostly video games. I feel like that's such a real and authentic part of my brand is that I love Comic Cons, I've been going to Comic Cons since I was like 13 years old. Sometimes I'd sneak out of the house to go to Comic Cons, "I'm spending the weekend at Lizzie's" or some fake person and I'd really be at Comic Con (Laughs). I'm really obsessed with 18th Century fashion and that Marie Antoinette looking stuff and when I was coming up with a concept for my first EP, Halsey released her big hour long album, I think it's called, "If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power" or something like that; really well done and she was nominated for "Best Indie Pop Album" at the Grammy's that year but basically, the whole concept of that was everything I wanted to do with my EP (Laughs). My manager was coming up with ideas for me; we had just finished filming stuff too so we had this content and then she dropped that; what do you call that? A Zietgeist? Where it was just a massive coincidence which was a little bit disheartening but we were coming up with ideas on how to salvage that and make it my own and true to me. I have this song called "Survivor" that when I talk about this song on stage I note it as the song that saved my life because I was in a really dark place when I wrote that song and when I showed it to my manager, he said, "Oh, you've got to meet Michelle." Michelle is 26 years old, she lives in Austin, TX. She had a stroke when she was five weeks old and has Cerebral Palsy and Epilepsy as a result of the stroke and she is easily the strongest person that I've ever met in my life and when I met her, we decided that whatever we come up with, it needs to be about her. So, for the comic book, my manager was talking about how I love Comic Con and said, "What if we wrote a book?" In this book, Michelle is the main character, not me and she is basically the creator of my universe. She is an artist in real life, she didn't draw the comic book but she does do a lot of art which is her main way of dealing with her medical trauma; by being creative as well. So, in this book, Michelle draws me, McKenna, in this parallel universe where I'm basically this musical warrior in a Marie Antoinette style dress that fights her internal demons for her or whatever she decides to come up with. I felt like it was such a cool thing because one, it tells the story of a very real and mighty person and it also has opened doors to be able to support causes that I really care about. The first one is partnered with the National Epilepsy Foundation, this upcoming one which is coming out with this EP, I believe we are partnering with CASA and that's the center that supports children who are in foster care homes who have been through abusive situations. We have also partnered with the In Your Shoes Foundation which supports families who have children with congenital heart defects; all through this comic book and it has been amazing to hear that song with people who I wasn't thinking about at that time in my life because I was so focused on my own pain but to see that pain turn into something more resilient through them and it also leaves the doors open for Michelle to put me in any universe that she wants; if she decides I'm a pirate tomorrow, I guess I'm gonna be a pirate (Laughs)."
With "Revolution" due out in the Spring of 2025; what are her plans until then?
"I'm in Austin, TX. I was just on a European tour to promote the release of the first single and opening for Annie Mitchell, she's from New Jersey I believe but she's in L.A. now. We did nine shows together and I did tenth show, a headline show in Belgium which was wonderful and I had a lot of fans come out which was very exciting. That single came out on the very last day of that tour and we're hoping to put together another tour for early Spring or late Winter like February or March and hoping by the time the full EP comes out in the later Spring that I'll have enough traction and movement to do a headline tour. In the meantime, I have a scheduled show in New York City on November 29 at The Racket and maybe November 30; I'm trying to put a headline show together but I'll be opening for Annie again on Black Friday in New York City."
To discover more about Mckenna Michels, please visit https://www.mckennamichelsmusic.com/
That's it for this week! Please continue to support live and original music and until next week....ROCK ON!
