Life During Lockdown: Mikael Jorgensen
Mikael plays keyboards in the band Wilco. In 2002 I produced a film, I am Trying to Break Your Heart, about them, but Mike joined the group just as we finished the movie. While we may have met briefly backstage after a show, it was not until we both spoke at TEDxUCLA in 2016 that we got to know each other. With Wilco as a common thread, we now keep in touch often. What I like about Mikael, in addition to his musical skills, is his prolific and creative approach to all kinds of projects when he’s not touring. For instance, he makes music in a duo called Expandards, he’s composing film scores, and his electronic duo (with Jesse Merle Thomas) Quindar makes fascinating soundscapes. Mikael lives with his family and records in Ojai, California, and he gave me an update about how he’s doing during the pandemic.
Give me some highlights and lowlights from your five months in lockdown mode.
Since I’m on the road so often, I’ve looked at this time as a blessing and have learned so much more about my kids and specifically about where they were academically & emotionally. I’m grateful to be there for them during all this. And then there’s my strengthened relationship with my wife. I feel like even though we get lost in the rigors of parenting and finding personal time, we’ve made sure to check in more often than before all of this.
The lowlights are mostly all due to the frustration, anxiety, anger, disbelief, and grief we are seemingly meant to endure from our current political harangue. My wife’s grandmother passed away in Greece last week & she and her folks are there right now engaging in Terry Gilliam-esque layers of Greek bureaucracy while in the midst of a pandemic. The easy things here are hard to do there.
Watching and supporting the Black Lives Matter protests has been heartbreaking and simultaneously hopeful. I have a lot of learning and listening to do.
How have you grown personally and professionally during this disruption?
Over the past six months I’ve really gone further and deeper into music than ever before. I was learning some technical musical stuff like jazz harmony & some arranging and am consistently inspired by just how infinite music, and music making can really be. I’ve been gaining a handle on these ideas and have been using them to great effect in my project called Expandards. My collaborator Isaac Koren & I have been building this sonic world and figuring out what characters live there and what their expressions might be. Making this music has been my refuge and meditation during this stupidest of all times.
Has your relationship with music and your work changed as a result of not being able to play shows and collaborate in real life?
This time has allowed me to further develop my musical voice in a way that is invigorating. I did this thing the other week to see what would happen if I asked musicians / friends / anyone if they’d overdub onto a bassline that I wrote and a smoking hot drum take from my friend and drummer Mario Calire. I got about 30 submissions from all over the world and it was something like 150 tracks as some people just sent one idea while others sent multiple tracks.
It was a lot of work editing and pouring through but I think it’s a successful piece of music when you understand that NONE of these people heard what each other were doing and yet their parts would be layered together in this rewarding game of serendipity.
Here’s a link to the original beat & bassline and then the version with all the contributions:
https://mikaeljorgensen.com/news/2020/8/19/mikael-jorgensen-overdub-challenge-1
It was great to get submissions from other musicians as well as dear old friends & fans. It felt nice to have these intimate moments listening to all the tracks and being blown away by the richness and care that everyone put into this weird experiment with no financial stakes and limited outreach. It was a meaningful process and I think that the results are super cool and that everyone involved liked the final version.
Can musicians like yourself create positive change in the world during the pandemic?
As the official spokesperson for all musicians, let me be clear: What we do is important.
It’s vital to capture this moment and create a personal, subjective gesture of how it feels right now, in hopes that we don’t forget how our current shit show happened and to help ensure that it doesn’t happen ever again.
I haven’t researched any studies on this but I’d wager that hearing human musical expression develops empathy. When you sing along to your favorite song, you’re someone else for a brief moment & you’re taking on their perspective for about 3 minutes. More of that would be good, right? Let’s do this.
