Micah Visser – OK Night

Photo by Joey Visser

Micah Visser caught the musical bug at the age of 7 picking up everything from the violin, to drums and guitar. Now, the young multi-instrumentalist has grown to become one of Winnipeg’s best alt-folk outfits.

His new record, OK Night boasts a moody, dreamy atmosphere. Pulling influences from Elliott Smith and even Taylor Swift, Visser molds upbeat melodies and melancholy musings to create a beautifully constructed capsule of emotion & youthful ambiance.

Visser sat down with us to talk transitions, personal growth and the making of OK Night.

Get a first taste of OK Night with the new single, “sad mammal documentaries.”

 

Pre-orders of OK Night are available on Bandcamp. The album drops April 23, 2015 at The Park Theatre.

JA: Tell me a bit about your shows?
MV: I started playing a lot of shows probably about a year ago. That’s when I started taking [my music] seriously and booking shows around Winnipeg, with just me and my guitar. I got sick of that pretty fast.

I like playing for people but because my songs were already really personal and intimate, I felt pretty uncomfortable playing them that closely to people when it was just me and I’m the focus. I really don’t like that, so I recorded this album in full-band format, and have played shows in that format. That’s going a lot better.

JA: Can we talk about your influences? You have a lot of indie-pop elements in your music.
MV: When I was growing as a songwriter I listened to a lot of Elliott Smith.  When I was writing this album I was listening to a lot of Sharon Van Etten, who has a really cool alt-folk vibe. That’s one of my big influences and I am pretty heavily influenced by pop music. I try not to get too pop sometimes but I definitely have that tendency to move towards those simple melodic hooks.  But I try to have a little more depth in there.

JA: What guilty pleasure pop stars are you listening to right now?
MV:Taylor Swift (laughs).

JA: Oh of course, everyone is!
MV: Yeah, exactly. The new album has got some Taylor Swift influences in there.

JA: Take me through making the album. I heard it started out as an EP and then expanded.
MV: A year ago I released my EP, The Moon In a Jar.  Pretty soon after it was released I wasn’t happy with it. I felt like I was writing songs that were a lot better and that [EP] just wasn’t an accurate representation of me at all. I wanted to record a couple of songs to get them out and get people listening to them. I started writing a lot of music and I wanted to expand on the thoughts and atmosphere of the record. I felt like that was the direction it was going. I also didn’t want to make the mistake I did with my last album when I rushed it out before I could really give the ideas a good chance to grow. I wanted this one to really say what I wanted to say with it. The atmosphere and the emotions in the album are very self-contained and I feel it’s a good representation of me and my life at that time.

JA: Let’s talk about the OK Night cassettes. I love the nostalgia behind it.
MV:I did physical copies with my last EP so I didn’t want to do CDs again. I found nobody uses them anymore. It’s all novelty now. It’s either vinyl or cassettes, and for vinyl there are huge wait lists and it’s really expensive. Cassettes are something tangible that people can get if they want to support, and hopefully add to their collection.

JA: And they come with hand-typed lyrics?
MV: If people pre-order them. A lot of the stuff I did, I wrote on a typewriter. Part of my creative process is writing drafts of lyrics like that. I like being able to see it right away on a page, so I thought that would be a nice thing to give with the record.

JA: Anything else you’d like to say about OK Night?
MV: I hope people connect with it. It’s very personal but I also didn’t want it to be self-serving. I wrote a lot of the songs for my friends about things they were struggling with, how I saw that and how I wanted to help them. I want that to come across, that it’s not just something I want to do for myself. It’s really something I want to do for other people.

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Pre-orders of OK Night are available on Bandcamp. The album drops April 23, 2015 at The Park Theatre.