We chatted to Mickey Guyton about her phenomenal new EP – Bridges – performing at the ACMs and her epic year. The interview will be available on the podcast soon.
Hi, how are you?
I’m doing so good!
We need to start off talking about that stunning ACM performance – it was just such a stunning, beautiful performance, so can you talk about what that performance meant to you?
I wrote that song – ‘What Are You Gonna Tell Her?’ – this year and I wrote it truly almost out of desperation, because I felt like the inequalities that are happening to women all over the world, not just in country music, I just don’t have answers, I don’t know how to make it better and I wrote that song more for therapy. To have got to sing that at the ACMs, an original song, as the first black woman to sing an original song at the ACMs in 2020 by the way.
There were so many levels of importance on that performance.
There were so many emotions, and I’m so emotional about it and also it’s such a whirlwind, you get thrown in there. I’m still seeing the aftermath of it, every single day I see a post and I start crying all over again because I’m pregnant and hormonal. It’s crazy you don’t always get to take it in and you’re getting dressed for hours and people are touching and poking… I finally get to take it in and it’s just been so cool.
The release of the EP, again it was such an incredible project. What I love about it is you’ve mixed the fun side of things with these hugely important social messages. Has it always been important to you to have that mix?
Actually, it wasn’t, I was just trying to be like every other woman in country music who gets to come in there and write punchy songs and put them out on the radio and that wasn’t happening for me. It was really difficult, there were a lot of double standards, there was a lot of scrutinising my music and it was frustrating. A lot of these songs that really get you in your heart were real-time frustrations that I was having. Even my song ‘Rosé,’ as fun of a song as it is, it was actually kind of a protest song too. I wrote that song two and a half years ago and I was just like ‘why don’t women have their own drinking country song,’ men always have ones about the whiskey and tequila. Of all the walls that you see with the ‘Rosé All Day’ in the neon lettering, we absolutely need that song, it’s our song, so even that had a message within it.
That’s so true once you take a step back and think of it like that. Your career absolutely blew up this year with the release of ‘Black Like Me’ and the response to that track. It was amazing to see that for the most part the response was overwhelmingly positive to that song.
They were responding positively, you can’t please them all, but the response overall has been so beautiful and to see so many more people that are not black saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ more than ever and saying and understanding the importance of that has been overwhelmingly beautiful. A lot of times people tie ‘Black Lives Matter’ just to the movement but they’re not realising that when a black person says that they’re saying ‘I matter’ and I haven’t always felt like that so it’s been a beautiful, beautiful thing it really has.
Am I right in thinking it was actually a song you’d written before this immediate movement.
Yeah, I wrote ‘Black Like Me’ in March of last year at a writers’ retreat. Initially a lot of people were scared of it, they thought ‘this is a beautiful song but I don’t know what to do with it’ and I understood that too, so I never thought that this song was going to see the light of day and truly get a chance. All of this horribleness started happening and I just put it out on my Instagram and Twitter, just to hopefully give people hope, I didn’t get permission from the label, I thought people need to hear this song, not because it’s important to me but because it’s important at this time.
It’s important for young girls to be able to hear that and see themselves in you, which is an amazing thing but I can imagine you feel a sense of pressure?
I do, absolutely I do feel pressure because I wrote these songs, I don’t necessarily consider myself an activist – there are people at Ground Zero every single day fighting for equality that aren’t getting anything near the kind of attention they deserve and I don’t want to take away from that. That’s the kind of pressure I feel because I want to be respectful to these activists that are doing the hard work, I just wrote a song about how I felt.
You wrote a very important song. It’s something I love about music that ability to get a message across in ways that people can’t always do in other forms, sometimes people listen to lyrics more than the news.
They can hear and receive it.
Obviously you’ve just released the EP but is that building into a longer project.
Oh I’m already getting put back to work, I was promoting the EP and these songs and shooting the music video, the ACMs, but now that that’s done I’m actually back at my parents house in Texas, I’m in the baby room. I’m taking a couple of days off and then I’m jumping back into the studio to finish this project, I’m so excited.
I’m so excited for more music from you.
Complete the sentence…
Music is … heart.
Country music is… honesty.
Mickey Guyton is … love.
