On a pleasantly-warm springy day, Danny Michel and I took a seat on the back stairwell of Richards club in Vancouver to yap. Earlier, as I'd waited for him to arrive up front, he proved courteous enough to, when finding himself and his band stuck in rush-hour traffic in Surrey, call the label rep to let us know he was on his way and wasn't just being some petulant rock star. As we walked towards the back doors, he leaned into my ear and thanked me for getting him out of gear-setting-up duty. I think he was only half-joking, as he'd been the driver for most of the way into town. Fresh off a weekend at the Juno Awards in Edmonton, Michel sounded off about a number of topics, getting relatively fired up about some.

Michel's been in the recording industry in this country for years, with a steadily-growing fan base and increasing recognition, but the last year has been a bit of a banner one for him in terms of getting the industry to pay him something more akin to the mind he deserves than it has in the past. This was his first Juno nomination, and it came in the category of "Best New Artist."

"Oh well it's just funny. Fifteen years later pretty much. Better late than never I suppose. Still nice," he states. But being nominated (he was beaten out by jazz singer Michael Bublé), however, didn't compare to his true highlight of the weekend. "I got to meet Alice Cooper. That was really cool. That was excellent. Alice Cooper was really great. Really nice man. Nothing like you'd think." I'm just picturing that Wayne's World scene…

I ask Michel if he feels some artists are too eager to write whatever music the industry seems to want to hear, in an effort to reach 'fame' quickly. He didn't have much to say about other artists, but was taken aback by some peoples' opinions on his own progression. He's been writing music in the same vein for a long time now, but apparently not everyone agrees. "I got accused of selling out on this last record… I guess there's a few songs that are kind of normal-sounding, but it's a pretty artsy, all-over-the-map record if you ask me." But for his own sake, those doubters aside, he finds a combination of things responsible for his note of late. "It's been a lot, like a decade of hard work on my part alone. My career's always been a slow climb, but it always keeps climbing. It's like I've said before - it's like a transport truck going up a big hill… you gotta get in the right hand lane and gear down and just go slow, but you get up, right? It just keeps going. Sure the Maple [Music, which Michel was signed to last year] thing's definitely helping. Is [the musical climate] changing and helping? Sure, I think."

Maple Music has been a help for him in a few key ways, not the least of which, being able to play with musicians instead of solo on tour. "Just having access to touring with a band. I did a lot of touring solo a lot of the time because financially it's tough to do with a bunch of guys and hotels and cars and… they help out with that, so it's nice to be here with my band." He's also managed to retain creative control of his music under them, which is a topic that concerns most bands when pondering signing with a label.

We can confirm that the man is happy in his own skin at the moment. "…ever since I was 18 years old I told myself if I could play music for a living without having to have another day job, then that'd be my dream in life. So it's been about eight years of doing that, so I gotta pinch myself some days to realize that I win, you know, already. I'm really lucky. And I'm not interested in fame and fortune. Those things kind of scare me. Well, fortune doesn't scare me, but I don't care about it."

Indeed, he's not your typical rock musician, choosing to live out in the woods in Ontario rather than in the middle of the city. "I've been living in the woods for four years now. And I'm never coming out." He holes himself away out there with an in-home recording studio (recently given more space by packing away his beloved slot car race track, which was taking up a pool-table sized chunk of room that is now better afforded to a drum kit), that's allowed him to record at his own pace much more than a big-time city studio would. "I don't like being in big fancy studios. Too much pressure, you know? Too sterile… Recording at home's great. Recording in your pajamas… you can get up at four in the morning and have an idea and just start working immediately. And there's no clock running, so you can be more experimental and creative. You can waste entire days. It doesn't cost you. You can't waste days in [a rented] studio. At least I can't, financially."

He's looking at trying something slightly different for the next record though. "I was thinking about going in, about working a little bit in another studio. The Tragically Hip guys own a studio up in Kingston that's a house that's really nice. I've worked in it before and you can rent their studio. And it's a really cool vibe there 'cause you all go live there, it has rooms, so you live there, eat there together, there's a pool, and you record. And it doesn't look like or feel like a studio. It feels like you're in someone's basement, right..." That doesn't mean he doesn't want to keep giving his own space a workout. "I want to get into producing other people's records. So send me your demos."

Being out of the city, he at least has the ability to stay in touch with fans via his website, an essential and important tool these days for any musician. Before being with Maple, he was much more in charge of all aspects of his site than he is these days. "The website's gotten a little schmancy fancy crazy. I still try to… I'm trying to make a way that I'm more like active and involved in that… [my fans] are all really happy for me, when I talk to them and they email me and stuff, they're like 'I cant believe we saw you on the Junos, this is so cool, congratulations! We know how long you've worked' and stuff." But with all those positives online come the negatives, so naturally, the issue of downloading music came up.

"I used to think that this whole downloading thing wasn't a big deal but I've totally come around and I've realized how horrifying it has become. It's just brutal. It's like we're dead, we're all dead, all of us. No one's selling records. Not only does it hurt me but, you know, Janet Jackson doesn't sell records like she used to. Nobody does. And we live in the age of the single, right, where nobody wants an album. They want the song. They're like 'oh I like that song', download it, done. And they're not interested in the rest of the album. Nobody wants to hear an album." Michel has come up with an interesting solution though. "I think I'm gonna make my next album… when you put it in a CD player and you press track one, track two track three… I'm gonna make it so you can't do that. So you press track one, and track one is 45 minutes. Maybe... And if you burn it to an mp3, it's a 45 minute mp3. I mean somebody will chop it up, but at least I'd make it hard for them."

The rant continues here. Michel is just getting started. He begins to get nostalgic for pre-internet days. "I miss the days when people loved the band… when I was a kid, if you loved a band, you did everything. If they put out an album that sucked, you still bought it, you defended it. Because you loved that band and you knew everything about them. You knew the drummer's favourite colour. It was like, that was cool. Now it's like music's a TV commercial and it can't be more than three minutes and twenty seconds…"

He agrees vehemently when I suggest that there's too much music these days. "…anybody and his brother can record records at home now and because it's so simple that way, people that aren't really that passionate about it can just do it and whatever… I think American Idol and all that shit, which I really think is shit, has really brought the level of quality of music down. It's providing all this crappy music and telling society that this is good. Now this is what 'good' is now. So you don't have to be better than that. If you're here (indicates low level with hand) then that's good. And the dumbest buy the mostest so it's… I sound probably really bitter and bummed out right now… But just that kind of stuff is really bumming me out, all that Idol crap… everybody wants to be a star overnight and nobody wants to do it for music. Nobody wants to do it for the right reasons. They all want to do it for all the other stupid wrong reasons. And in the end they'll all lose… And I'll be making records."

I bring up a quote of his from a previous interview where he stated that he hoped to have a stack of his own CDs a foot high by the time he hit age 45. "It's gonna be a while, yeah…" Speaking of lots of CDs, Michel talks for a moment about his giant collection of David Bowie records and how he can get anything he wants off of Ebay now - another perk of the internet. But we still aren't done with the topic, as I touch on his bizarre Mexican Danny Michel fansite. He bursts out in uproarious laughter here and shuts off my recorder for a moment while he explains the secrets behind it. That proved useless though, as he kept talking after turning the recorder back on, and basically dispelled all the secrets anyhow. But I still don't know if he meant for me to ruin the fun for everyone, so I'll just leave it alone and let you go have a look at it and make up your own minds about the thing. No matter what, you can find some interesting tidbits there that aren't available on Michel's official website, so it's worth your while, and will bring about a good laugh, much as it reduced Michel himself beside me to fits of giggles while he tried to explain it all.

Michel leaves us all hanging a bit as he finishes up with his plans for the summer. "Well I'm just starting to write again. I got a secret little record - I have another record that's finished right now, that's all done and no one knows about. But it's not my music. It's not my music. It's me doing some other type of music written by an other artist that is gonna be released in the summer. Just a weird little artsy project I've done. So that'll be out, but I can't talk about it yet. 'Cause it's a surprise! A sooo-prise!"

According to his website, the still-not-talked-about-much project is coming out in September 2004. But I don't think we've seen the last of surprises from Danny Michel.

Elsewhere

By Andy Scheffler
Photos : Andy Scheffler
Published : June 7, 2004.