On March 28th O.A.R keyboard player MikelParis is releasing his fourth solo album, GuitarDrumming 01. Though he has released previous solo work, this marks his first album release focused on his unique style of guitar playing, which he calls GuitarDrumming, to write and record songs. The original songs also include contributions from friends Vernon Reid, G. Love and Of Good Nature. While MikelParis had the opportunity to play a number of these songs live over the years before fans could get ahold of a recording, he still had an abundance of songs to choose from for this first official collection focused on his performance style, and that shows in the wide range of tracks he selected.
While the phrase “GuitarDrumming” might make you think of a heavy, percussive style of music, that’s far from the truth on this album that’s nuanced and at times, even intimate, in its carefully constructed and reflective songs. However, rhythm does play an important part in every song, whether it’s a driving force as in the song “MoveIT”, one of MikelParis’ first songs using this technique, or a quieter, even more acoustic piece like “Make The Most”.
Today Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of GuitarDrumming 01, which you can hear below. I also spoke with MikelParis about what motivated him to put this album together, and what it means to him to finally release these songs into the world in recorded form.
What do you think helped urge you to put this solo album together? I know that you tour a lot, so was it a matter of timing and being off the road enough?
For me, it was the time, and the energy, and the mental focus that I needed to do my songs justice. It was difficult to find that. My mind was focused on other things. I’m just so excited for people to start hearing this stuff.
In many ways, finishing these songs and getting them ready, takes even more time and bandwidth. That’s serious work.
It’s a lot of work, and no one is going to work as hard on your own stuff as you will. It was also that idea of letting go of that idea of it being perfect. But I want to be able to listen to my own music. Hearing a recording of one of my songs inspires me. I’m not an artist who doesn’t ever want to listen to their own music. It’s exciting to me. You have to let go of picking stuff apart, and trying to embrace the objective perspective, to hear the whole song, and not all the little parts.
Do you construct your songs through little bits and pieces, so you don’t hear it fully until the end? Or are you a more traditional songwriter who makes a full demo?
Pretty much all the songs on GuitarDrumming 01 are songs that I’ve played out, live, for years. For me, that was also a great way to really figure out what my favorite structure and instrumentation is. Then, it was just about being in the moment, and capturing performances, and doing it at the right studios with the right gear. You just want to catch as much as possible of the initial inspiration of the song, and keep that magic. That’s what I kept trying to do, to not get too far away from that, and keep the songs as true to their origins as possible, while giving a fresh perspective from 2024, which is when I recorded most of them.
That’s impressive to have that goal when you’re working over a long period of time.
I’ve been very patient! But the songs are just sitting on my shoulders, hundreds of them, a whole back catalog. That’s why I knew I needed to focus this project on the GuitarDrumming style, and not on my other work. I also wanted to protect my work and get it out there. I’d like to think that my approach is unique and draws on my unique experiences.
Especially if you’re playing a lot of the songs live over years, it makes a lot of sense to officially release them and put your name on them. What was the first step on this path to putting these songs together?
As far putting these together, and focusing on the GuitarDrumming, my creative brain is always going, but it was definitely last year. The period of 2020 to 2022 was part of it for me because I was being very prolific, livestreaming every day, putting myself out there and being vulnerable. I know that after Snidbits, which was an album that I did during the pandemic, I wondered, “What am I doing next?” I discovered also from the band, O.A.R., that it was going to be a different touring schedule than usual in 2025, focusing more on festivals and private shows, ramping up to the 30th anniversary, so I knew that I was going to have time to really push something forward.
I started looking at all these songs that I hadn’t released, and so many of them were grounded in the GuitarDrumming style. The inspiration for the rhythms and the melodies came from that, so I said, “Okay, that’s it! I’m going to be MikelParis, GuitarDrummer!” I realized that I had at least three albums of songs that fit into that. Also, I’ve been playing these songs out live, but nobody really had a way for listening to them or streaming them. I remember years ago, I played the song “Hit Me” live, and someone came up and asked me if it was on a CD, and I had to say, “No, it’s not.” It was about doing the songs justice, and doing this style justice. I decided to invest in myself, to invest in MikelParis finally.
When I was at this incredible recording studio in Wisconsin, where Cory Wong got his start as a session player, the owner told me that Cory finally started saying, “I’ve got to invest in myself.” So I said, “GuitarDrumming, here we go!”
This collection also has a lot of variety to it, and a wide spread of ideas in terms of what you picked. With “MoveIT”, you also included an instrumental version. Was that special in some way?
That was the first song that I ever wrote with this GuitarDrumming style. Just figuring it out, thinking back to just getting out of college and using devil sticks to drum on an acoustic guitar while my friend Todd was just playing chords in our first apartment in Hartford, Connecticut. It was hearing the sound of the percussive attack of these electrical takes. Then years later, getting into Stomp, and Luke and Steve, the creators of the show, really encouraging me to look back at that moment, because they inspire all of us to look at the world differently. I remember Luke always saying, “Rhythm is with us from the womb, we hear a heartbeat.”
That first year in Stomp for me made me think back to that guitar thing, and ask, “How can I do this by myself, so I don’t need a partner, to play it?” That song, “MoveIT,” was one of the first songs that I played in front of anyone anywhere, where I was doing this rhythmic thing with my thumb and really starting to have ideas about my technique. It started out as an instrumental. I didn’t have any lyrics to it. It also feels like a bookend to the album, since you hear the album version at the beginning, and at the end, you hear this full instrumental. I also wanted to inspire people to experiment with that track, like other artists and DJs.
Given its history, I’m not surprised that you put it on the first album, as the first track. But I’m glad you didn’t think it was too much of an early experiment to include. That really goes behind the scenes.
I tried other things, but it was always, “Nope!” I hear what you’re saying.
I hope that people who listen to these songs will listen to the whole collection, not just the singles. I hope they’ll listen to songs like “Make The Most,” which is pretty different from the others and shows how widely this approach can be applied.
Exactly. I didn’t want the album to all be whacking on a guitar. I never want it to be a gimmick. I’m a songwriter, and I wanted to showcase on this collection my different approaches to how I play the acoustic guitar. It can be gentle. “Make The Most” was funny because the sax player singled that one out and said that I needed to give attention to it.
I think, years ago, Folger’s Coffee was having a contest to write their new jingle, and that was the start of that song. Lyrically, it started at that, about waking up in the morning. I loved the song, and it’s happy and positive. Some of the messages and the themes in that song feel uplifting and I wanted to keep that one on the album.
Hearing “Make The Most” made me wonder if these other songs might also have stripped down versions, or could be presented that way.
Oh yes. When I’m doing them live, just solo stuff, when I have a stomp platform, and a keyboard off to the right, and a clean mic, I present a lot of these songs with more of an acoustic vibe. But, recording-wise, I do like doing stripped-down versions, like Prince’s Piano and a Microphone.
It really shows how songs can stand on their own. Production is wonderful but if the song doesn’t have to rely on all the Production, you can present it in its purest form, acoustically.
