Nick Mitchell Maiato :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview

If this deranged and uncanny year has anything to teach us, maybe it’s this: there no sense in hiding, the world’s going to find you anyway. That’s the spirit animating Nick Mitchell Maiato’s “Show Yourself,” one of the steady rippers from his latest, Pino Carrasco. Some of the songs on the record began as ideas for a future album from One Eleven Heavy, Mitchell Miato’s Transatlantic rock outfit with Dan Brown, Hans Chew, James Toth, and Jake Morris. But when the pandemic wrecked tour plans, he pivoted, shaping the album on his own while in quarantine in Spain. Doing so required him to get comfortable with himself.

As a result, Pino Carrasco feels idiosyncratic but whole. It’s certainly shares One Eleven Heavy’s jammy tendencies, with Dead, the Allmans, and Santana nods, but also washes of the same woozy glory you might hear on a Meat Puppets record, especially on “Ode To What” (as heard on his bandmate’s podcast, The Toth Zone). Though crafted in isolation, it shares with One Eleven Heavy’s recordings the quality of enthusiasm fueling every element coming out of the speakers. In advance of the October 18th episode of his must-listen radio show the Cosmic Principle, he took some time to talk about cutting loose, trickster gods, and the abiding inspiration of Neil Hagerty. | j woodbury

Aquarium Drunkard: The songs of Pino Carrasco were originally intended for the third One Eleven Heavy album. Once you concluded that you’d release them on a solo album instead, how did they change? 

Nick Mitchell Maiato: They weren’t all written as One Eleven Heavy songs. I think I had around three or four: “If I Were a Sawmill” and “Show Yourself” came first and I was already working on “Public Address” when we found out that our California tour in May ’20 would be cancelled due to lockdown. 

After that, we all became slowly more skeptical about the viability of the album recording in Nashville, which we’d scheduled for August, but I continued working. The more this whole COVID thing dragged out, the more I sort of instinctively shaped them into finished pieces, half suspecting we just wouldn’t be able to get together. 

I re-sang some parts and fixed some flubbed solos, which I might normally have just left on demos, and then I wrote some vocal harmonies, bass lines, percussion, and counter-rhythmic guitar. Then, I just carried on writing new stuff until I had a full album’s worth of material, at which point I felt so much work had gone into it that it would be weird to just leave them as demos.

I’m definitely bummed not to have spent a few weeks at Hans’ [Chew, One Eleven Heavy pianist] new home studio with my pals working this stuff up into whatever shape it might have come out in—I miss those fools and the band is just really getting started—but I’m happy with the way it turned out. To me, they sound like One Eleven Heavy songs minus piano and with a simpler, more clap-happy rhythm section.

AD: You open “Public Address” by saying you don’t believe in giving speeches. But is there something like a unified theme on this record? 

Nick Mitchell Maiato: I guess that lyric is me steeling myself against writing a complaining song, of which there’s probably a surplus right now, and also laughing at myself for risking pressing vacuity into vinyl by avoiding saying anything. Tongue is firmly in the cheek, there, as the rest of the lyric is something like an oblique observation of the shitshow that is 2020.

Unified theme? Yeah, sure. I’d say the whole record is loosely about the relationship between escape and imprisonment, in one way or another, from song to song. “Show Yourself” is about facing up to self-doubt with a kind-of comic God vision as the catalyst… “Ode to What?” is a fairly expansive bit about our relationship to news and fake news and the difficulties people have discerning which is which and how one person’s oppression can seem like another’s liberty, dependent on the context, of course. It’s an internal tug-of-war record, I guess.

AD: “Public Address” feels like snippets of conversations. How do you write lyrics?

Nick Mitchell Maiato: Snippets, exactly. That song’s really an anomaly on the record, in that sense, because it was a kind of exercise in collage, both lyrically and musically. The hook lyric (about giving speeches) became kind of a meta element that ties together my own random thoughts and dialogs in a way that scoffs at their randomness whilst acknowledging that there’s obviously a semantic thread, i.e. complaint. The rest of the record was written in a much more traditional way, lyrically. Sitting down and fleshing out an idea with extended imagery and themes. 

AD: A comic God vision? Do you mind expanding on that a bit? 

Nick Mitchell Maiato: This may sound faintly ridiculous, but okay… I was standing on my balcony during what must have been the third week of lockdown—I don’t think I’d ever been indoors for so long up until that point and the 3’ x 7’ balcony was my only contact with the outside world—and I was sort of woozy with cabin fever: that kind of low-level headache that’s like being stoned without being stupefied. So I was standing there, in my robe with a cup of tea, and I all-of-a-sudden sensed my smallness in relation to everything and felt sort of disgruntled at my awareness of that. 

Not that I had an actual vision of any kind of God, but a dialog did occur in my mind with not necessarily a mean, sardonic God, but more of a jovial “whaddya gonna do?” kind of God, who was looking in at me as bored and irrelevant in celestial isolation as I was alone on the balcony of my flat in La Torre. I had a moment of feeling snooped-upon—I guess it was really, mundanely, the beginning of a kind of agoraphobia as a result of being shut-in for so long —but I was kind of thinking, “fuck off out of my face, Lord!” And the God of my internal dialog was telling me, “fine, but it’s not like we need to be face-to-face for me to know every single thing about you.”

AD: Sounds like a bit a of a theophany, an imaginary one at least.

Nick Mitchell Maiato: There was a kind of rude awakening element to it and I went back into the flat feeling invigorated and uninhibited and less… not to be overly dramatic about it…but less humiliated, generally, and not just in terms of the way I felt about being shut in. Like, okay, so life is a giant cosmic joke and we self-aware humans embody its punchline, but that doesn’t mean we each have to carry around all the weight of responsibility of life’s ridiculousness. Like, we should all be a little bit more comfortable with our own mortality and just let it all hang out.

It was actually a turning point in the writing of the record and in the styling of it. Neil Campbell from Astral Social Club told me the cover art is, “genuinely disturbing,” and I knew he’d gotten it right away. Like, he knows that, to be happy, one must embrace the cosmic joke. And I know he knows that—Neil is one of the most “Show Yourself” people I ever met and he’s all the more fantastic for it.

AD: What was your daily routine like working on these songs? 

Nick Mitchell Maiato: Well this goes back to my last point. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic the likes of which someone of my generation has never seen and, yet, the conditions it imposed on me couldn’t have been more perfect for working on music. I don’t want to sound flippant or lacking in empathy because I know just how catastrophic this thing has been for so many millions of people, but I couldn’t have felt more at liberty to just get my head down and get into this thing. I loved being forced to stay home. It was just the motivation I needed.

My wife was working from home, also, teaching online. We live in a fifth story apartment building in Valencia, Spain, so it’s not your natural music-making environment—but it’s cheap, which helps with my situation. I couldn’t really play when she was teaching, so my mornings would be spent working on writing parts in the front room with a little practice amp, recording ideas into my phone. We’d eat lunch at two, Spanish style, then I’d scurry off into my little studio room and work until somewhere in the region of seven and nine PM every day. As soon as the downstairs neighbor started whacking the ceiling with a broom handle, basically, I’d stop. 

I’d run out with the laptop, hook it up to the stereo and listen to the day’s takes and mix right there in the living room. I probably pushed the boundaries of acceptability in terms of abusing the shared living space, from time to time there, but my wife Devrinna is the most chill person you could meet and just told me, “do what you have to do.” We lived like that for the best part of four months minus the odd day of lounging around.

AD: It’s a guitar-centric record—but it also full-on boogies; did you have reference points for the rhythm section vibes? 

Nick Mitchell Maiato: Well, we live in a building with what sounds like a woman who teaches palmas (flamenco hand clapping) across the way. I’ll be doing the dishes and all I can hear is this lady bellowing out instructions and then these amazing polyrhythms clapped out at breakneck speed. So that definitely filtered through. Devrinna also turned me onto this record La Leyenda del Tiempo by flamenco legend Camarón de la Isla right before we moved out here, which is full of that stuff—it’s his fusion record and it’s really amazing. Being something of a rudimentary drummer, I figured hand percussion would be a way to flesh out the record and give it bursts of extra energy at points, so I layered up all these counter-rhythms, which was amazingly fun, and I think it worked out, though I doubt the lady across the pavilion would agree.

AD: How do you maintain the feeling of spontaneity and interplay when you’re working alone? 

Nick Mitchell Maiato: I was playing to a click track the whole way, so getting any sense of vibe into the record was really tough. Click track forces rigidity upon the situation, right off the bat. So I tried to play behind the beat on a few tunes and I also swung the rhythm against the click, which was fucking hard, let me tell you. Also, I learned a little trick from Ryan Jewell about layering up hand percussion and purposefully not hitting right on the beat so you can bring some of that natural feeling back into it.

The sense of spontaneity came as much from the writing technique as anything. I’d write parts as I was recording them, rather than starting out with a fully finished song, so it was a case of, “OK, where do I take this now?” I think “Show Yourself” is the best example of that. Every time I hit upon a new idea that might follow the next, I was turning round to the empty room looking for someone to hi-five. That song is the only one that has an actual jam in it, too, as I did not know what the hell I was gonna do on bass during the middle section and I just let it happen and then jammed along with it on the other instruments.

AD: You got your start playing a much noiser style of guitar in bands Chalaque, Beach Fuzz, and Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura. Was there a moment where you started thinking about guitar differently or was it more a gradual progression? 

Nick Mitchell Maiato: They were my 2000s bands. I’d played in bands from being a kid in the ‘90s and they were all songs bands, so I’d already tentatively explored more traditional techniques. I was a Royal Trux fan from the early ’90s and Neil Hagerty was always a huge inspiration. James Toth sweetly talks about me having had some kind of, “crossroads moment,” during our friendship which I think is a gross overstatement of my abilities as a guitar player for one, but also nowhere near as commonplace as the reality.

I was in New York, finishing up a Chalaque tour with Jon Collin and Yek Koo and Howling Hex was playing in town. I already knew Neil as I’d released the Rogue Moon LP on my label so he put me on the guest list and I went down to the show. I’d seen Trux a bunch of times, but never Howling Hex. Anyway, I was watching his hands, thinking to myself, ‘Oh this guy just has a really solid understanding of the modes and then just goes nuts and lets his hands do the playing, not his brain.’ And that was sort of the beginning of me starting to find my way around the instrument more confidently. That’s it, really. Not that my playing is even in the same league as Neil’s. He’s my all-time guitar hero and he knows it. Here’s hoping he doesn’t read this.

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