Interview

Going Deeper:

An Interview with Michelle Shocked

You might know her for her warmly perceptive late-'80s hit "Anchorage," but that tidbit of folky pop barely scratches the surface of the broad range of Michelle Shocked's music. Her latest album, the double-disc package Deep Natural, is being marketed as a blues record, a fact that's at least partially justified by gritty, guitar-dominated songs like "Good News," "Little Billie," and "Draughts of Dublin." Deep Natural is also something more: It's the inaugural release of her new self-created record label, which she's named Mighty Sound. After spending years wrangling with Mercury Records in a well-publicized battle over her independence, Shocked has emerged victorious - and she's done it all on her own terms. Here, she tells Blues Revue about her formative years, examines her aspirations, and looks back over a career that's arguably at its highest point.

Tell us about growing up in Texas, in the same town Freddie King was from.

Usually, when lightning strikes more than once you say, "There must be something in the water." But in East Texas, the water is in the air. When I finally made it up to the blues mecca of the Mississippi Delta, it suddenly made sense to me why blues people talk about "heat lightning" and "smokestack lightning," because the climate is really conducive to electrical storms. In East Texas, we don't have that, but we do have the very humid place where the edge of the swamp meets what we call the "piney woods." So what's in the water is actually the water in the air.

My dad played Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy and Lightnin' Hopkins. Of the three, I'd say Big Bill Broonzy probably made the biggest impression on me. He had that song, "I told her no/I say, I don't wanna go/and I ain't goin' down to no Red Cross store." And I didn't have a context for that at the time. What is a Red Cross store, and why aren't you going? It was very mysterious.

My dad is a flaming liberal, which in East Texas is tantamount to being a Communist. He had gone to East Texas State University and got an English and history degree and had become an English teacher. In the course of teaching, he eventually decided that it wasn't for him and started buying old houses and fixing them up.

Were your dad's musical tastes a major influence on you, then?

I'm sure the music he played was influential on me, but really, I feel like I somehow experienced the blues. I experienced it at a young age, and in a way that makes me feel like the blues are a gift - an empathy or an insight. I didn't even realize that I possessed the gift as early as other people around me recognized it. So when I needed a way to express myself, it was there, full-blown. Some people think of it as a quest, like I have got to find my crossroads. I had already walked that road somehow. And I'm not going to tell you that the road I walked had the most stones in the path, but apparently, for certain people, it only takes enough to open that door.

(continue to part 2)

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