We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mike Bankhead a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Mike, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is my upcoming concept EP. It’s called I AM EXPERIENCED.

Songwriting is one of the ways I deal with anxiety & depression, how I cope, and how I reflect and react to current events and the world around me. Over the last few years, I kept seeing the video and images of people who look like me being executed by everyday racist citizens or by the police. This led me to collate a few songs that I had written about Black experiences together into one project. Every song on this EP is in a different genre, but all had their roots in Black music. The thread that ties the songs together is that these are all open, vulnerable, honest, authentic accounts of Black experiences, told from my first-person point of view. The artistic aesthetic has been that all personnel on this project are Black.

This is a meaningful project to me for a few reasons. Being determined to collaborate with Black people on this project – people for whom these songs would take on a deeper, more personal meaning – well, that determination meant that I had to go outside my comfort zone and seek out people who I had never worked with before. Sharing these songs and feelings with the other folks on this project has been cathartic. I can’t honestly say that any one song on I AM EXPERIENCED is the best thing I’ve ever written… but I can say with 100% certainty that as a cohesive artistic statement, this is the best work I’ve ever done.

This project also fits perfectly into one of the other topics from your list, in that it’s taking a risk. I’ve had conversations with some professional PR folks, and I’ve been told that releasing an EP where each song is in a different genre makes it very difficult to market and promote this project. Of course, there’s the distinct possibility of alienating the very few listeners I currently have by branching out and making music in styles that they haven’t heard from me before. I really hope that doesn’t happen, and I think that the people who listen to my music are savvy enough to understand the art I’m trying to make, but it’s something that my anxiety has me nervous about. And then of course, there are people who will go out of their way to ignore the actual content of the songs and perhaps cast aspersions upon these songs or my motivations behind writing them. I’m being very frank and open in these songs, and that’s kind of scary. Why am I taking a risk like this? Well, as songwriters, we should really say what we need to say and make the art that we need to make for OURSELVES first, right? I’ve done that here. I hope people come along on this journey with me.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a bass player and songwriter from Dayton, Ohio. I’m someone who loves music, who has written songs for a long time, and eventually came to believe that my songs were good enough to professionally record. That took me some convincing, but I’m glad that someone believed in me enough to tell me to start making records. I started work on my first album in 2015, and it was released in 2017. Clearly, as I’ve continued to work on my craft, I’ve gotten better at writing songs and recording them, and I think you can hear that if you compare my more recent recordings to my first ones..

As for what sets me apart from others, first, I’m a songwriter whose main instrument is bass, and that’s not super common. I’m also a Black man who mostly writes and arranges songs in rock-adjacent styles of music, and even though rock-and-roll is a Black invention, that’s not super common these days either.

The thing I’m most proud of currently is this new concept EP. I’d like people to know that I’m an open and authentic artist. I’m not really all that talented, but I try to make up for my lack of talent or technical limitations by working hard. I’d really like my songs to have an emotional impact on listeners, I want to make people feel something when they listen to my music.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to be able to make a living from music someday. The music business isn’t set up to make this an easy thing to do. I am well aware that it takes a lot of hard work and competency in more than one business-related skill. That said, I’m going to write songs ANYWAY. I have to. I write them for me first as a way to deal with life, among other things. If I’m going to write songs anyway, I figure I might as well figure out how to make a living from doing that. It’s just as valid a field of work as any other.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I don’t know that I have one big story so much as lots of little stories. If I think hard about it, I’ve experienced all sorts of failure on my musical journey. Like many other musicians, I have a whole LOT of compact discs around that I haven’t sold. There’s also a bunch of other merch I have that I haven’t managed to sell yet. I ran a Kickstarter campaign to try to defray the costs of my second album, and that failed resoundingly. The record got released in September 2020, which was during the kind of global pandemic that happens once every 100 years. One of the paths in music that I’d like to take is sync licensing, and I haven’t managed to land any syncs yet. For some reason, I am unable to find musicians who are willing to play live shows with me on a regular basis. I’m not talented enough. I’m not pretty enough. I’m not young enough. I’m not good enough. Somehow, I haven’t quit yet.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mikebankheadmusic.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikebankheadmusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MikeBankheadMusic/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-bankhead/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbankheadmusic
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUAH2sv7hXMqP79LY3u-YCw?
• Other: https://www.polywork.com/mikebankhead

Image Credits
Jennifer Taylor Patrick O’Reilly Allison Stallo