Mikayla Manke – I Want to Feel Like I’m Home
The best music, whether written quickly or slowly, is never created urgently; instead, it unfolds naturally, with care, and over a period of time representative of the artist’s present circumstances. This sentiment is especially reflective in Buffalo-based singer-songwriter Mikayla Manke’s debut solo record, I Want to Feel Like I’m Home – a vulnerable, eclectic exploration of the different places and people we leave, visit, and return to in an attempt to ultimately return to ourselves. Permeating with intention, Manke leverages the very songwriting ability that platforms her band Spiria’s success while simultaneously pulling across electronic, acoustic and lofi influences to produce a body of work entirely unique to her.
Outside of the dreamy “Exiting the Maze,” a sonic anchor made years prior in her childhood bedroom, Manke wrote the majority of the record during a temporary stay in Binghamton, NY. It is this very sense of impermanence that translates so well to the record’s sound. On tracks like “Nauseating,” for example, we’re met with a lovely combination of atmospheric pads and bright vocal layers atop a driving guitar riff and a beating kick, underscoring Manke’s understanding of space while reminding us the only direction of travel is forward. “Life Without You” similarly contrasts warm, hollowed out synthesizers with a guitar melody that, after multiple listens, underpins much of the record as a whole. It’s reminiscent of a 2006 Brittle Stars EP in this way, possessing a similar “returning-to” sonic quality that glides through genre. Hearing birds sing throughout only makes it that much sweeter.
Lyrically, Manke writes with an honesty and assurance that is very hard to teach, and in doing so, invites the listener to ask the very questions she seeks to answer. In “The Mold,” for example, Manke aptly and directly exclaims, “I don’t even know who I am or what I want,” as she reflects upon the malaise that can arise through inaction or indecision. Later on, in “Crustacean,” she grapples with the confusing experience of leaving somewhere familiar in an attempt to rediscover oneself, singing “I’m scared to move on / Yet it’s all I want to do.” It’s this very candor that underscores the honesty, warmth and brave curiosity laden across the record.
In I Want to Feel Like I’m Home, Manke has delivered an album that is in no rush to get to where it’s going, but gets there all the same. Sitting with a song or record that demonstrates this type of inherent patience invites the listener to do the same. The result is, when executed as well as Manke does here, an experience that leaves the listener asking their own version of the very question Manke explores throughout: Where does one go and what do they do to find themselves all over again?
Perhaps it’s less about knowing for sure and more about the question itself, allowing it to unfold with the quiet self-assurance most wonderfully reflected in the album’s last few stanzas: “Oh you’ll find your way / I know you’ll find your way.”
I Want to Feel Like I’m Home is available now (March 27) on Bandcamp. All the different ways to support both Mikayla and her band Spiria can be found here.
Categorised in: Album of the Week
This post was written by Ben Frigeri