Michelle Shocked:

Activist Roots Producing Soulful Fruit

By John Voket

You may want to pigeonhole American singer and songwriter Michelle Shocked because she hails from East Texas. But throughout her remarkable career, Shocked has amassed a body of creative work that defies any single style, point of origin or categorization.

Maybe that’s why, depending on who you ask, fans will identify her as folk…or punk, or bluegrass, or swing, or Latin … and lately, even gospel.

That chameleon-like quality seems brilliant from a marketing standpoint. She has mounted successive projects and modeled the material to suit herself in the moment and producing diverse results appealing to completely different tastes.

Based on how well her entire catalog continues to sell, this formula is working for Michelle Shocked. It just apparently frustrates the heck out of record companies that like their cornflakes in a cornflakes box, period.

Shocked is at the same time a musician and an advocate, having spent a part of her life as a homeless person. She is as articulate debating the causes and affects of homelessness as she is the environment, her newfound spiritual grounding, or current state of our geo-political arena.

The soft spoken artist is also something of a music industry legend for rescuing her catalog of music from a former label by threatening to sue the company under the 13th Amendment — the reform abolishing slavery.

But that label, Mercury Records, settled the day the trial was to begin, freeing Shocked to pursue other avenues to distribute her new music, and at the same time releasing the master recordings of her earlier catalog, which she argued were contractually hers all along.

For more than 30 minutes one recent afternoon, Shocked chatted with The Newtown Bee from her home in southern California. She was looking forward to hitting the stage at The Ridgefield Playhouse, along with Erin McKeown, on Saturday, February 2, to show off material from her catalog, as well as her latest offering, a spirited live gospel-themed release entitled ToHeavenURide.

That latest release was captured digitally when Shocked opened an early Sunday morning set at the 2003 Telluride Folk Festival.

Newtown Bee: Your new release has a song called “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.” How did that number find its way into the set?

Michelle Shocked: Here we go. I didn’t know the set which became ToHeavenURide was being recorded, but back in 2003 when we did it, war was very much on everyone’s mind. My basic approach to the issues isn’t about supporting or not supporting the troops; fighting or not fighting terrorism – my approach is from a very strict principal of nonviolence. You do not kill somebody to send the message that killing is wrong. And you do not bomb, and terrorize and devastate a country to (send a message) that what they have done is wrong.

So earlier that year we tried to mobilize an antiwar movement to utterly no avail. When I tried to speak out I was told to shut up and sing. So I had to try to make the same point in artistic ways, so I went after that old Vietnam-era protest song. I know in the gospel tradition, the song represents the war between God and man, but as an artist I’m going to use it to try and get my message across. And I think you can hear that day, the audience was with me on that.

NB: The project also has a couple of other covers including “The Weight,” which I most recently heard covered by Panic At The Disco, if you can believe that. What is it about “The Weight” that makes it such a universal and popular choice to cover?

MS: It’s the surrealism of the lyrics - the melody is obviously quite beautiful and eternal. It always struck me as gospel-esque, a secular gospel song. It intimates greater eternal mysteries than it actually communicates overtly.

The theme Robbie Robertson was apparently addressing, according to my research, was what he described as “the impossibility of sainthood.” It served my purpose because it was a bridge between a secular audience, who was by no means coming to see Michelle Shocked perform gospel, and a Sunday morning audience who was specifically coming out to see a gospel set at Telluride.

NB: The thing that struck me most in reading through this life story, was the nearly historical move on your part to use the 13th Amendment as a means of gaining release from a protracted and problematic record contract with Mercury. Can we talk about that chapter in your professional life?

MS: I feel bad for the artists who work so hard to achieve their dreams only to realize they’re built on sand – their contract with a major label is a one-sided affair. The record company holds all the power and all the cards, so no matter what you sign, at the end of the day if it’s not to their advantage, they are going to screw you.

So in making that move, the tradition I stood on as an artist is no different than the hard-won battles the labor unions have fought, or the battles of social justice activists in the civil rights movement, or in Native American treaties. But people reclaim their power by sacrificing. So all along I said I wasn’t doing this to be a celebrity, I was doing this as a social and political activist because I wanted to change the system from the inside. And to do that you have to stand on principal. Using the 13th Amendment in this case was a slow, steady, but well-laid plan. California was very forward thinking in establishing a law against servitude, so they drafted the law providing for service contracts that were only valid for seven years no matter what.

That’s why most record contracts are written to abide by the laws of New York, where this law doesn’t exist. But whenever a California-based entertainment lawyer sees a client facing abuse under contract, they may apply the circumstances of the artist to the case. Once they find the perfect formula to apply the law, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. In my case, I owned the master tapes of my recordings, and they wanted to renegotiate because they wanted the masters back. So they put me on ice and refused to promote me for three years.

So in many cases, people said “what happened to her?” They forget you exist. And a lot of artists can’t survive to fight for their creative property, so they just give in. I’m standing on the shoulders of artists that came out of the old California studio contract system, and I hope future artists will be able to stand on my shoulders to protect themselves.

NB: You spent some time in your life literally as a homeless person. I’d like to know what you took away from that experience that flies in the face of commonly held misperceptions about being homeless?

MS: In the ‘80s when I was homeless, a lot of the sociology was tied to the Reagan administration dumping all the mental hospitals out on the street, as well as the lingering effects of the Vietnam War and the lack of a safety net for returning veterans. You’d like to believe we’ve come a long way since then. But we still live in a society that fundamentally believes in the values of private property. And yet, homelessness has a direct causal relationship to private property.

When I lived as a homeless person in New York, there were entire buildings left empty for us to live in because it was more profitable to leave the buildings empty than to provide affordable housing. The bottom line, from a political activist’s perspective, is we all need shelter – and because it’s a universal need, it’s a universal right. But in a society that values private property over human lives, housing is something you define as a privilege, not a need. I learned that once you stop and hear the voice of a homeless person, you’ll likely hear a single mother trying to raise her children, and she’s falling through the cracks.

And long before someone ends up on the street, they have struggled desperately to avoid, at all costs, landing there. And there is no safety net, no system in place preventing them from falling to that lowest rung of the ladder. So I think once you hear the voices of the homeless themselves, you can never think of it as just an issue again – it will become deeply personal.

NB: What is the makeup of your band and set lists on this tour? What are the folks here in Connecticut in store for when they come out to see you at the Ridgefield Playhouse?

MS: There is this young artist named Erin McKeown joining my band as a guitar player. And I just think the world of her as a performer, a songwriter, and as a musician. She’s not from Texas, and I think she’s like, conservatory trained. And I give her mad props. Another member of the band is the Minister of Music from my church. I go to one of these mega-churches in Los Angeles and sing in the choir, and he’s been making himself available to help me present this gospel set – which needs someone the caliber of Reggie Royal to pull it off. There will be a healthy balance of my material, but there’s not much point in just going out on tour rehashing, right? The band I’m bringing is reconfigured for the gospel style of ToHeavenURide, and I can adapt the old songs to that configuration.

For tickets ($45) to see Michelle Shocked at The Ridgefield Playhouse on Saturday, February 2, visit RidgefieldPlayhouse.org or call 203- 438-5795. To learn more about the artist, visit MichelleShocked.com.