An Interview With McKain Lakey
This spotlight interview is with McKain Lakey, an award-winning multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. McKain spoke with Cedar Commissions program manager, Robert Lehmann, about making space for queer identities in country music; reflecting on what it means to be in a body; and the vulnerability involved in a project like this.
You can listen to McKain Lakey live Friday February 9th during our Cedar Commissions concert.
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Could you just tell us a little bit about yourself as an artist? What are the things that you’re excited about? What’s been your background?
We'll see how this goes… I play country music, [laughing] I mean that’s kind of the long and short of it.
My background is in various kinds of American folk music. I started playing guitar when I was 11, learning country blues fingerstyle guitar from Flip Breskin, who was my first guitar teacher, in northwest Washington State. Flip introduced me to the broader folk music community and I learned a lot by ear from elders in that scene. I was super lucky to be exposed to a lot of different kinds of folk music from a pretty young age: activism-focused songs from the 50s and 60s folk revival, early country music, old-time, trad jazz... A lot of that still comes through in my writing now.
The last few years, I’ve been writing mostly band-based material. The focus of the writing has been on full-band arranging. It’s been especially fun to dig into the nuance in classic country, but introduce other influences too. I’m thinking a lot about country arranging- how to put songs together in a way that is clever, getting at references to different motifs within the country music genre, but also filtering in other genres and ideas throughout. That’s been the fun nerdy thing that I've been focusing on lately.
I think a lot about country music and the way that it has alienated a lot of people. I think of ways of reclaiming it as a more welcoming space.
RL: [Laughs] This is good. You went to school for audio production, right?
Yeah - I went to music school and my focus was in audio.
RL: Cool. Could you talk a little bit about your roots? Whatever that means to you. You talked a bit about your mentor, and musically where that's grounded. Where are you grounded?
I grew up in a rural part of Washington state, so that's definitely something that surfaces in my music. It’s reflecting on rural identity and navigating what that means, especially as a white rural person. With this project in particular, I’ve been exploring ideas around where I grew up and where I choose to be now.
What is it that drew you to Minnesota? How did you find your way here from Washington?
I’ve lived in a lot of places since Washington, but I had been in Arkansas right before the pandemic, and I really liked my life there. I was living in this teeny town half the year and then touring half the year, and teaching old time music in the public schools through a nonprofit program. It was really rewarding.
When the pandemic hit, it was all thrown up in the air. At a similar time, the state of Arkansas was trying to implement a lot of anti-queer, anti-trans legislation. And so between not having income anymore and also just thinking bigger picture about what my needs would be, it didn't make much sense to be based in Arkansas anymore. And I had friends up here, so I moved up.
We're lucky to have you for however long that is. Can you tell us about your Cedar Commissions work?
Well, the title of the piece is “Bodies.” Honestly, The Cedar Commissions was the first grant that I've ever applied for and I assumed I wouldn’t get it. So I wrote it as a way of forcing myself to figure out how to write a grant. At the time that was happening, I was in the midst of gearing up for a consultation for top surgery. And so I thought, “I'll just write songs about chopping my boobs off,” and that apparently was a worthwhile thing to fund!
So that was the original idea, but as the project has progressed, it's shifted. It's still about bodies, but not necessarily always about my specific body, and more about the experience of being in a body generally. [laughs] When I say that out loud, it sounds super vague!
Early on in the process, I put up a post on Facebook with the question, “When you think about your body, what are the first three things you think of?” And I wound up getting all of these deeply personal responses from people from all different areas of my life, including from a lot of people I grew up with and people in my extended family. I felt really honored to receive those messages.
It really got me thinking about how this project had started from a place of investigating queerness through bodily experience. But being in a body is a complicated thing, and it's complicated for all of us, regardless of gender identity. The work still feels super rooted in queerness, but it’s also digging into class dynamics, rural versus not-rural dynamics, and relationships to bodies in a broader sense.
Sometimes it feels complicated to talk about my work and how it’s informed by gender and queerness. It feels like that's become a sort of gimmick where anytime anyone writes about what I do, it's like, “This person writes gay-ass country songs.” Through this project, it's been interesting to explore queerness as a broader concept, and write about things that still connect to the queer community but aren’t specific to just us. These songs are for a much broader community.
So that’s the way the project has grown - are there other ways that you feel like you've grown or things you've noticed during this process?
It's been interesting to be going through this process while also unpacking a lot of personal stuff. This project in particular involved learning a lot about trauma. Whenever you're trying to be attuned to bodily things, it brings up a lot of other complicated stuff, since so much of our experiences as humans get stored in our bodies.
So that inward attention, combined with doing a project that feels so outward-facing (where we're talking about the project in group meetings and interviews, being photographed, etc)-- it has felt deeply vulnerable in a way that I wasn't fully expecting. And as someone who is in a period of body transition, this whole process has had me feeling very exposed in ways that don't always feel great. But it’s also brought up a lot of interesting things that probably wouldn't have come up under other circumstances.
What are you looking forward to in terms of sharing that music for the first time in February?
Honestly, I'm really looking forward to just being able to play and not talk [laughing], because so much of what I love about music is that it just speaks for itself. It is what it is, and anyone can have whatever experience they're going to have about it. I can just let it be what it is.
I'm also really excited to be playing this with the band, because it’s just so fun. It’s exciting to have some spaciousness for working out arrangements and to have new things to bring to the table. So I'm excited about that. I'm also excited to be collaborating with an aerialist as part of the project.
Aerial is something that I started doing myself a little over a year ago, and it’s been a really meaningful way of exploring my own body and my own strength. Being able to collaborate with an aerialist feels really special in part because it echoes my own experience. But it also feels important to have that visual component alongside the music. It’ll add to the experience of the music as being an embodied thing, and not just a situation where there's the performer, there's the audience, and there’s distance between. It will be a collective experience–all of us together– and I'm excited about that.
Who are you collaborating with in terms of ensemble and instruments?
It'll be AJ Srubas on pedal steel and fiddle, Rina Rossi on bass, Andrew Bartleson on drums, Kevin Gamble on keys. And our aerialist is Bailey Shatz.
RL: Is there anything else that you want to share about the project? Anything else you want audience members to know? In general, what do you hope audience members experience when they come to see you?
I don't have expectations for that. Part of my values as an artist is that I want people to be able to come as they are and have whatever experience they're going to have. I know for myself–obstinate child that I am– I really hate it when other people try to dictate my experience. It's more about empowering people to do whatever they want to do, have whatever experience they want to have, and engage in whatever way feels authentic to them in that moment.
I talked earlier about blurring the performer versus audience member line. The beauty of live performance is recognizing that we're all creating an experience together–everyone in the room. There's something really beautiful and freeing about these ephemeral spaces. I don't want the audience to have a specific experience other than just feeling safe and able to experience whatever comes up for them. Music is fraught, and I don't want to presume to understand what people carry with them when they walk into a room. I'm just there to do what I do and open up the space for them to use however they need.
Catch McKain Lakey’s performance of “Bodies” premiering live at The Cedar on Friday, February 9th as part of the Thirteenth Annual Cedar Commissions.
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The Cedar Commissions is made possible in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
