Mieka Pauley

By C.D. Di Guardia

Photo by Phil Carias

"You have those days where you're like 'Yeah, I'm making the music I wanna make,' but other days you're like 'Where is this going? Why am I doing this?' and these people gave me that reason.”

-Mieka Pauley

The normal musical fairytale usually involves the artist getting "noticed" and/or “discovered” by some fast-talking and slickly dressed “label guy” who throws heaps of money at them just to make more music. Mieka Pauley knows that is wrong.

But she needs to make more music, and she needs to play this music for people.

At the very moment, she’s huddled at a table in a small Boston University coffeehouse a few hours before a show there. This is a home gig for her — she drove over from New York but that’s an afternoon drive for Pauley. Her car, a 2006 model, already has upwards of 111,000 miles on the odometer. She jokes about having her next tour sponsored by the GPS company Tom-Tom. A solo artist, she doesn’t have someone else with her to take a shift driving the band van. She fills up her backseat with clothes, puts the guitar and a few pairs of shoes into the trunk and takes off.

This doesn’t seem too odd to Pauley, who doesn’t have an entitled bone in her body. “I always drive unless it’s actually physically impossible for me to do that,” she says, noting a few instances where shows were booked too close together yet too far in distance to make the drive. While she is currently a made-up and carefully dressed vision of feminine onstage identity, it’s not hard to imagine her pulled over on the side of a highway, greased up to her elbows and fiddling with a distributor cap or some other form of engine-based esoterica.

“Since I was raised Catholic, I have trouble asking people to do things,” says Pauley, “So until they offer, I’m going to do it myself.”

Pauley drives herself in many ways. Born in Boston, she grew up in various locations across the country that would eventually mirror her current lifestyle. She landed back in Boston to take up the study of biological anthropology at a small local school located near the Red Line stop at Harvard Square. Harvard University does not seem to be the ideal place to coast through college while you’re touring and playing music, but Pauley managed to do it regardless, still finding time and energy to write and play her music.

Fast-forward five years or so, and Pauley found herself wanting to record her first “real” album.

One pleasant thing about recording her first album was a chance to revisit some older friends that she felt had never been fully realized on previous recordings for one reason or another. The oldest song currently in her catalog sits newly realized on Elijah Drop Your Gun, track seven, “Fate Day By Day,” which Pauley, ever the historian, says was written back in the college days of 1999.

While some artists might prefer newer tracks to older ones, Pauley seems content to let tracks go through a life within public view — from acoustic versions to live versions to full-on orchestrated band versions. This approach creates another sort of connection with members of her audience, most of whom feel a strong relationship to Pauley, as though they’ve watched her “grow up” musically.

For Elijah Drop Your Gun, Pauley opened up the doors even further, letting the audience play a crucial part in the recording of the album — a level of support that Pauley discovered went even deeper than imagined.

While wildly successful bands such as Radiohead are toying with different ways to sell music as a marketing experiment, Pauley decided it might be worth trying a different approach - open up the process to the audience, allowing them to contribute to a “fund” that supports the artist and perhaps allows them some financial breathing room in the costly process of recording and producing an album. The idea came from other recording musicians in Pauley’s milieu, people like Gregory Douglass and Sirsy, who created albums funded exclusively by fans. Pauley, who hates to ask for anything, wasn’t even really expecting much. “I thought maybe I’d get a few thousand dollars, but the entire CD was paid for and beyond,” she says, in awe of the idea.

The financial support also gave Pauley the opportunity to experience no-limit album production; it not only gave her financial freedom in the recording studio but also enabled her to pay the session musicians, advertise the record — even include a full CD booklet with lyrics to the songs.

The support was almost instantaneous, with a couple thousand dollars pouring in the very first day. Depending upon the level of the contribution, fans get anything from a signed copy of the disc ($15 — or about how much it would cost to buy the disc at a show) all the way up to the top level, which includes a free house concert, an original copy of Pauley’s first release, 20 personalized and signed copies of Elijah Drop Your Gun, 20 discs of B-side recordings, and two “season tickets” good for admission to every show for the next year.

“(The pre-sale) had to close at some point, just to get all the names into the liner notes,” says Pauley. “I am so lucky,” she reports, her voice quaking ever so slightly. “I’d been wanting to make an album for so long. I had no idea how much it costs to make the album you want to make.”

This added an extra charge into the act of recording the album for Pauley. Not just financial backing, but spiritual backing, as well. There was no “I hope people are into my record;” rather, she had liner notes chockfull of people who she knew were interested — people who would hear the record without a doubt.

When writing the liner notes, Pauley discovered she needed to thank people for two things: “My fans made it possible financially to make the record, but they also gave me someone to make it for.”

Touched by the returned spirit of her audience, Pauley went into the studio with a renewed vigor for her craft. “It’s huge when you work in a vacuum,” she says, referring to the glassed-in and carefully electrified studio environment. “You have those days where you’re like ‘Yeah, I’m making the music I wanna make,’ but other days you’re like ‘Where is this going? Why am I doing this?’ and these people gave me that reason,” she explains.

Where Pauley excels mostly is her connection to the live audience. Even if they weren’t sitting in the control room, Pauley felt their presence in every move associated with the creation of the record. The names and locations of the names are burned into history via the CD booklet. The record itself is a glorious comment on Pauley’s musical and personal development. A true example of public artistry, Elijah Drop Your Gun was produced both by the artist and the audience.

This has left its mark on the artist, the record and the audience alike, and they are all richer for it.

www.mieka.com