Jul. 18, 2012 - Issue #874: Musician’s Survival Guide: Songwriters on Songwriting
Jon Mick
After departing Edmonton a few months ago for the stand-up stages of Toronto, Jon Mick has made a summerlong return to the city. The offer of opening for Maria Bamford at the Garneau Theatre drew him back, and now he's found a few other reasons to stick around for the time being—though the worry of being seen as one of those guys, who departs the city only to return a short time later, isn't lost on him."It's the nightmare I envisioned," he kids of his return's stigma, before clarifying. "Nobody really cares. I blow it up in my own mind, as I do everything. It's good."
Still, future plans up in the air, Mick's making the most his time here: co-writing a show for the Edmonton Fringe, performing where he can, and soon recording his second live comedy album: Beardmilk.
Mick sees another album—his first, Who Knew?, was released last year—as a way of giving his current crop of jokes their final harvest, and forcing himself to write more material. Audiences may know him well here, but Mick's still striving to avoid complacency.
"Performing a lot to the same people is a great thing, 'cause your audience gets to know you, you know your audience, you know what you can do, you know what you can't do," he says." [But] I always want to not be repeating myself. It's not like music, where it's like, 'All right everybody, if you know the words sing along!' I wish I could be like, 'Join in on the punchline if you know this one!'
"The title, Beardmilk, has nothing to do with any joke on the album," he continues. "I haven't written anything pertaining to beardmilk. I just really like the imagery: people are like, 'It's kind of disgusting but also kind of sexy, I'm not sure if I like it, but I can't stop thinking about it ... ' It's just a gross combination of words. And it's just a funny concept. Imagine if you could milk your beard right now. It'd be like, 'mmm-mmm.'"
Wed, Jul 25 (8:30 pm)
With guests
Wunderbar, $5 vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
Privacy Policy:
Vue respects your privacy. We will not forward your personal information to any other organization except as required by law, and will use your e-mail address only to respond to your comments. We reserve the right to edit and remove comments for length, clarity and/or if they are illegal or inappropriate. Your email address is never shown to visitors to vueweekly.com. Read the whole policy at: http://vueweekly.com/privacy
Comments policy
Comments go online directly without first being seen or reviewed by editors at Vue. Don't personally attack people, don't be defamatory, don't be spam-atory, don't hawk your band, don't pretend to be someone else, be clear, be on topic, be nice. Read our extended comments policy here. »
We use Disqus for our comments system. What's that all about?
We found that managing the comment community at Vue was easier to do with a system like Disqus. If this isn't straightforward to you, get help here.