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For Jon Muq, a singer-songwriter born in Uganda and now living in Austin, Texas, music is part of a larger conversation he’s having with the world and everybody in it. Drawing from African as well as western musical trends and traditions, he devises songs as small gifts, designed to settle into everyday life and provoke reflection and resilience. “These days the world is sad,” he explains, “so I wanted to make happy songs. I wanted to write songs that connected with the listener in a very personal way. When someone listens to my music, it’s not just about me and what I’m singing. It’s about how they understand the songs individually. I think these songs can speak many languages, depending on what you want from them.
Muq’s experiences as a child in Uganda and as a man in America give him a unique perspective on the world he’s addressing. “I grew up in a very different life, where so many people pass through hard times just because they don’t have much. Our biggest issue was food scarcity. Then I came to a different world, which gave me a picture of how to write a song that can find balance with everyone wherever they are, whether they have a lot or not much.” As he completes his debut with producer Dan Auerbach and tours with Billy Joel, Norah Jones, Mavis Staples, Amythyst Kiah, Corinne Bailey Rae, and others, Muq is expanding the scope of his music to speak to more and more people.
He has nursed his obsession with music for as long as he can remember. “When I was 7, I realized there was something about sound that I appreciated. We had a brass band at school that would play the school anthem, and I would sit between the horn players and it was so loud. I loved it. People would ask, Who is this strange boy up there with the band?” Later, he joined the group playing bugle, but was dismayed when he graduated and learned that his new school did not have a band. But it did have voices filling the hallways, which excited him. At night he would lay in his dormitory bed listening to those harmonies, eventually summoning the nerve to sneak out and track them down. He searched the three-story building until he found the choir room, and the group soon adopted the curious child as a mascot, giving him homemade shakers to play. “I joined the choir but didn’t sing. I was just following sound.”
During holidays, he would stay with a cousin in Kampala, cleaning house and working odd jobs to earn extra money. During one of those visits, the teenage Muq saw a CD that caught his attention: We Are the World. “I played it and was astounded. Where are these people singing very differently yet all singing the same song? I’m taking this CD. I didn’t even ask him. I just took it. I listened to it for a long time and I mastered all the vocals and tones of the people who were singing. That was my first exposure to modern western music, and it was fascinating to me.” It was a good lesson for him, as mimicking and mastering the vocals of such a disparate array of artists—from Michael Jackson to Cyndi Lauper to Kenny Rogers—expanded the expressive range of his voice.
It also taught Muq to write songs in English. “Since Uganda has 45 tribes, it has more than 45 languages. People sing in their own languages. My language is Luganda, but I have always sung in English.” In fact, he penned his first song as a love letter in English: “A friend of mine was going through a relationship problem. They were breaking up. He spoke English but could not write it, so I told him, I can write a letter for you to change her mind. And it worked! The girl was so happy, and she kept the letter.” Muq decided to make that his first song, so he asked his friend to steal the letter back so he could copy it. It eventually became “Always as One,” and “it’s still the song I start my shows with.” In addition to pursuing his creative endeavors, Muq has continued to devote time to charitable organizations in both Uganda and the U.S., working with non-profits and community programs that provide education, food, clothing, and support to those in need.
Muq would spend hours walking around the village of Mutungo at night and singing western songs. Residents would peek through fences trying to catch a glimpse of the mysterious singer, much as he had done with the school choir, but Muq nervously remained in the shadows. During one of his roaming concerts, he made a discovery that changed his life as much as We Are the World did. “One evening I was walking and singing and I heard someone playing an instrument. It sounded familiar, but also new. Two men were out in their yard performing songs for church, and I just sat there and watched. I was 18 or 19 years old, and this was my first time to see a guitar in my life. I had seen them on TV, of course, but seeing one in person was different. When I saw it, it just made sense to me. When I held it, it just made sense. I knew that this was going to answer so many questions I had about music and the western world.
Muq taught himself to play guitar on his new friend’s instrument, eventually borrowing it for a regular gig at a local hotel. Even after a long shift, he would walk home playing and singing, and a video of him serenading homeless children on the streets of Kampalaled to a stint as an entertainer on Norwegian Cruise Line. That experience not only refined his repertoire but helped him secure a passport and visa. “They saw the vide and asked me if I wanted to sing on a boat. But this like a city on the water. I couldn’t believe it would float. My friends thought the pictures I showed them had been Photoshopped.” He admits there was no grand plan to his career, no strategy or roadmap. “I never expected it to work this way. I never said, I’m going to get a job at a hotel. I’m going to get a job on a cruise line. I’m going to work with Dan Auerbach. Everything happened because I was following sound. I was chasing it. I was just singing.”
On the seas and later in America, he developed a curious approach to writing songs. “I don’t sit down and say, I’m going to write a song now. Most times someone will be talking to me and I’m playing the guitar at the same time. For some reason, my brain can listen to both things at the same time, and I’ll come up with a melody or a phrase, or just an idea. It’s amazing how many songs I’ve written when someone else is talking and I’m just holding my guitar. Even in the studio with Dan, we would be talking about songs or just hanging out, and I would be playing my guitar and coming up with new songs.” That’s how he wrote many of the songs on his upcoming debut, including the plaintive, yet hopeful, “One You Love.” “I wanted to have a relationship with someone but it didn’t work out. This song describes how someone has brought something great into your life, even if they don’t stay in your life. It was not a happy experience, but that didn’t stop me from writing something positive. I wrote it and sang it very slow, but Dans said it could be quick and dancey. It sounds great that way.”
Muq currently calls Austin home, but he’s on the road more than he’s in Texas, touring frequently and bringing his sunny songs to audiences of all kinds. “When I arrived in America, I was coming from a different part of the world, and I was very lost. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what was coming tomorrow. I just following instinct. I always thought, If I can communicate with people through music, it will make me feel like I am not alone. I can speak to people very intimately using music.”
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Kelley Mickwee and her voice are one of the most recognizable talents making music in her home state of Texas at the moment -- even if you may not immediately know it.
Mickwee has been a mainstay in the Texas-based music scene for years: currently, as part of Kevin Russell’s Shinyribs’ Shiny Soul Sisters, singing harmony and background vocals at his live shows and recordings; as one-fourth of the acclaimed Americana group The Trishas, with Jamie Lin Wilson, Savannah Welch and Liz Foster; and before then as one-half of a Memphis, TN-based duo Jed and Kelley. But sometimes what gets lost in the shuffle of all the well-deserved acclaim for what she adds to other artist’s projects is the music she makes in her own right.
“It's been way too long since I have released music that is all mine,” she says. “I’m so proud of how these songs turned out, and it just felt like the right time to put new music out and see if people are still interested in what I’m doing on my own.”
It’s a comment bathed in humility, and the kind of thing an artist only says if they’re really in it because no other career path would ever really make sense for them. What else is there to do but to keep doing it? Her comments are referring to a new two-song project called Boomtown to Bust, an A-side and B-side single that she’s taking the extra mile and releasing on vinyl. “I love the good old-fashioned singles releases: a taste of what the artist is currently creating, without ingesting an entire album,” she says.
Both songs were written with Ben Jones as part of a yet-to-be-released duets album with Dan Dyer, and recorded with Jonathan Tyler at his home studio, Clyde’s VIP Room. “Jonathan Tyler and I have known each other for years and I have always been a big fan of his music, his work ethic and his vibe in general,” Mickwee says. “I was driving and heard his tune ‘Old Friend’ come on the radio and thought, that’s it, I need to make some music with this guy. So, I sent him a demo of these two tunes and asked if he’d help give them life.”
“We wanted a ‘Red Headed Stranger’ kind of feel but with a ‘mining’ or ‘gold’ metaphor,” she says about Side A, “Boomtown to Bust.”
“Once we got it into the studio with the band, it was just undeniable that it wanted to be a waltz. I love Dan [Dyer]’s harmony vocals on this one. Cody Braun’s fiddle sits perfectly with the mood of the song and Marty Muse glues it all together with his dreamy pedal steel. It's a reflection on what comes when that love loses its glitter and shine.”
Side B, “Let’s Just Pretend (We’re Holding Hands),” is a story of unrequited love, with a little tinge of hope weaved in. “Speaking of love, I love what Jonathan Tyler played on the electric guitar on this one,” Kelley says. “That, and the accordion, really give it that extra little push into that juicy Texas ‘The Mavericks’ kinda sound, which was completely unintentional but welcomed.”
Boomtown to Bust is Kelley’s first original release since 2014’s You Used to Live Here, her debut solo record. She wasn’t kidding when she described the album’s release as feeling like “totally starting from scratch again” … and more than a little scary. Although she was already a seasoned artist at that point with a decade’s worth of experience under her belt, up until then all of her performing and recording experience had been as part of a unit: first as half of the Memphis-based duo Jed and Kelley, and then as one-fourth of Texas’ acclaimed all-woman Americana group, the Trishas.
When the Trishas, all living in different parts of the state or as far away as Tennessee, collectively decided to slow their roll a few years back, Mickwee realized that in order to keep living the dream of playing music for a living, she was going to have to strike out on her own.
Three years later she took a different leap, one that was not so much a matter of “starting over from scratch” so much as just learning how to take her hands off the wheel and have fun as a proud member of one of the hottest acts in Texas: Shinyribs.
Launched in 2007 by Gourds co-founder Kevin Russell as a “solo” vehicle, Shinyribs has since evolved into arguably the most explosively entertaining band to spring from Austin in decades. Mickwee joined the family in September 2017, claiming her spot onstage next to Alice Spencer as one of the band’s two harmony and backup-singing “Shiny Soul Sisters.” She had to hit the ground running and learn the ropes fast (knowing that Shinyribs would be taping its debut appearance on TV’s Austin City Limits the following month), but from the start she felt not just right at home, but exactly where she needed to be.
The Trishas never did exactly breakup, though, meaning that Mickwee and her other song sisters Jamie Lin Wilson, Liz Foster and Savannah Welch still happily reassemble every once in a blue moon when their schedules line up or a favorite gig comes around — like the annual MusicFest in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where they all played their very first show together as part of a 2009 salute to Savannah’s father, renowned songwriter Kevin Welch. Mickwee is also still an active partner (alongside co-founders Susan Gibson, Walt Wilkins, Drew Kennedy, and Josh Grider) in the Red River Songwriters Festival, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2022. “That's our little baby, and it’s doing pretty well — the last few years have sold out!” Mickwee says proudly of the event, which is held every year in Red River, New Mexico and preceded by a short “Traveling Red River Songwriters” tour.
And then there’s Mickwee’s weekly on-air gig she hosted for five-and-a-half years until she had to step away in 2021, the “River Girl Radio” on Austin’s “Sun Radio” (www.sunradio.com). “The format was pretty much whatever I was feeling,” she says. “I was given a lot of freedom to play whatever moved me within that hour each week. It was so rewarding to get to stretch that creative muscle and learn about a ton of music I wasn’t familiar with in the process.” (Mickwee can still be heard all day, every day as “The Voice” of Sun Radio.)
With all of the above currently on her plate, one wouldn’t think Mickwee would have any time at all left over to devote to her own performing songwriter career. Even though scaling back was part of her plan all along, it’s still very much a part of her bigger picture.