Welcome back, Miko Marks

Miko Marks has been missing from music for too long. Her last record was released over a decade ago, and the lead tracks from her new album Our Country, showed what we’d been missing. I had the chance to chat with Miko about why she stopped in the late 2000s, how come she’s back with new music now, and what challenges she’s faced along the way.

Hello Miko! So, my first question probably the one you get asked all the time. Why such a big gap between between your last record [2007’s It Feels Good] and Our Country?

To be honest with you, I was discouraged from recording another project because the experience that I had with Freeway Bound and It Feels Good, while they were well received, it didn't make its way to jump the fence in Nashville. I still performed all those years. I still had a band and I was still performing, just not in recording. I thought that part of my life was done because of my experience in Nashville and because the walls just seem too high to climb.

And what was it about that that was difficult, was it was it just the industry there is quite insular?

I think it was that a huge part of that, but I also think the fact that I was a black woman played a part in it as well.

There was a lot of conversation about the lack of women in country music two or three years ago, and now it's about a lack of sort of racial diversity. Do you think it's got any better sort of over the last 10 years, or do you think it's a lot of similar conversations with a lot of similar challenges as in the past?

I really think it's still just a conversation. I do have hope because there are strides being made with Mickey Guyton hosting the ACM this year, along with Keith Urban. And with folks like Rissi Palmer and Colour Me Country, there are a lot more artists out there that are making waves as opposed to when I started out. And I think the conversation that's happening is making change happen. I think you can feel it.

It seems to me that particularly in country music, radio and radio airplay has got a massive influence over what does and doesn't get made. Do you think that whole radio system needs to change as well as just have the conversations around it and some of the big awards shows starting to introduce more diversity?

Absolutely, that would be a great place to inject that change in the pattern. That would be a good place to start… of many places to start.

I was reading earlier about where the new record started. What was the sort of spark them for Our Country?

Well, I had two band members when I first started out and many years have passed by, and I thought about Justin Phipps, who was the guitarist in my band at the time. And so I reached out to him based on a dream I had, like a dream about making music, I didn't call with an album in mind or anything, I just said “we need to make some music, we need to get together and play”. And he was like, “I have this song, ‘Good Night America’, that's been waiting for us. Want to give it a shot?”

Well, I heard the song and it was unlike anything I had ever done, the urgency in the song, the cry for America to right its wrongs was something I had never done in my music. So I heard the song and I was just really struck, in a way that I had to do it. I'm being impacted by the issue of racial injustice and violence in our country, the song really spoke to me, so I needed to do this. We had no intentions of doing an album, but the night turned out so well, we were like, let's keep going.

It was kind of like a building block; “Oh, I'm actually going to another project after we've done this.” So that's how it happened. It was so organic.

And so after five or six songs you were like; “yeah, this is a this is a thing now”

Yeah. We have something here now, that's what happened. It was not intended. And that's probably one of the most beautiful prophecies that I've gone through to have this album unfold the way it did. Our Country was not on my radar, and sometimes that's how it happens. You know what they say, God laughed when you make plans. So he’s clearly cracking up at me because this was a project that I didn't see coming.

Do you think if it hadn't happened organically like that, you would have ever got to a point of thinking about making a full album again?

I don't know, because I was clearly not on the path of recording any new music. I did one song - a roller-skating song because that's one of my passions - in all those years. I just felt content and happy performing in front of people who wanted to hear me. But now that I created Our Country, we're already working on another project (laughs), so clearly I was wrong.

When your confidence takes a knock or you've got a passion for something that doesn't quite work out, I guess that's a difficult thing to get back into again.

It’s a huge challenge. I was discouraged. I felt a little beat down, you know, I felt like I had given all that I had to those projects that I had put out, but clearly there was more of me to give. And the fact I can clearly see my growth from then to now is really, really nice.

I was going to ask, what was the biggest difference between what you were doing on It Feels Good and what you've done with Our Country?

I would say the big difference between the two is that on Our Country we speak to the present day and time that we're living in, and how I feel in these times. For example, the song ‘Mercy’ is really a cry for or all the social injustice, the inequality, the marginalised people, the children, you know, our kids are being killed in the streets. And ‘Mercy’ was written out of seeing all that happen. And then for ‘We Are Here’, which is about my hometown of Flint, Michigan, and many other towns, that song was written about the fact they’re still suffering from the water crisis. I feel like it's been forgotten about and I wanted to shine a light on it because they're still struggling, they still have unclean water, and so this was meant to shed a light on that issue, that it’s not gone, it’s still here.

Did that become a theme, as you were kind of writing the songs and creating the album, that topicality?

I don't know if it wasn't an intentional thing, but it became a thing because of all the things that were going on in our democracy. The Black Lives Matter movement… I started looking at the truth of what was going on in my country and really trying to shed light on all of those things.

Were any of the songs in particular hard to write in terms of the emotion that you were putting into them and the subject matter?

‘Mercy’ was a hard song to write and ‘Hold It Together’ was emotional for me to write. I wrote that along with Victor Campos, Justin Phipps, and Steve Wyreman and it feels like hat we all should aspire to do. I wouldn’t say it was hard to write, but it was emotional to write.

What are your expectations for Our Country, because last time it sounds like radio play and the whole Nashville machine was one of the things that that got in the way. Do you think you've got a different set of expectations now? Are you in a different place? And do you think this sort of music industry is in a different place?

I'm in a different place for sure. My expectations for this album really are quite simple. I want the listener who hears and I want the subject matter and the tone to resonate with them internally, that's what I want.

It feels like you kind of you could fit into the main country but also Americana is an option for your sound. Do you think there are more avenues because of that kind of development over the last ten or so years?

Absolutely. I love that music on this album crosses genres and crosses boundaries because that means that it can be held by more people. I am so thankful for that. The fact that Americana is a genre option for me is a beautiful thing.

If you want to find out more about Miko then visit her official website, or you can check out what she’s up to on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Our Country is out now and available to stream from Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music.