I’m going to be honest: I had high hopes for Mieka Pauley as she and the rest of her band, the Mieka Canon, have had superlatives attached to their name in every single conversation I’ve been a part of regarding the Boston music scene.  Club owners, avid fans and established musicians in town have all hailed her to be one of the most uniquely fierce talents to set foot on the carpeted floor of the Lizard Lounge, let alone the multitude of bars and clubs she’s played in the city over the course of her time here.  Mieka, Brian, Andrew and Gabe no longer live in Boston and are based in New York, but that doesn’t mean their ties to Boston [well, Cambridge, really] are severed: The city has played a huge part in the creative development of the Mieka Canon and its artistic traditions, especially those of the folk, blues and street performing variety, have left lasting impressions on the young musicians for years.

The Mieka Canon are promoting their new EP, From the Mouth of Paris, which is available for free download here. If you’re in town tomorrow night (August 26), you’ll most likely be handed a copy of the album by one of the band members themselves.  Just be warned: Pauley’s smokey voice, coupled with the skilled, meticulous musical stylings of Brian Cassagnol, Andrew Morgan and Gabriel Hays, will leave your ears starving for more.

-Hilary Hughes

THE OPENING ACT: THE MIEKA CANON AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Brian: Cap’N Crunch! Definitely Cap’N Crunch.

Andrew: Kashi.

B: The closer to cardboard, the better for Andrew.

Mieka: Granola.  Chocolate granola.  That’s fun.

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” or Mouth from “The Goonies?”

B: We’re not allowed to choose Sting?

A: I LOVE Mouth.  They’re not in the same category for me.  I don’t want to punch Mouth, Mouth is cool!  “You know what? This dream? This dream was MY dream.  And I’m taking it back.  I’m taking them ALL BACK.”  So, Sting.  Final answer.

B: Sting.

A: I bet Mieka doesn’t know who either one of those characters is…

M: I didn’t have a childhood. I have no idea.

Gabe: I was gonna say the Karate Kid…

M: Granola or Phil Collins.

…You’d punch granola in the face?

M: … Yes.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

A: A dual coffee/espresso maker, for sure.

B: I’d be a fresher.  That’s from Mitch Hedberg.  I’d keep things fresh.

M: I’d be a toaster.

A: Or granola.

M: Yes, or granola.

G: For some reason I thought of a Cuisinart first.

B: Gabe is really commercial.

A: Yeah.  Sellout.

You go to bed, you wake up, you go to brush your teeth… and you realize that you’ve morphed into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

G: The Count.

M: Same.

A: Um…

M: Oh, the guy in the trashcan!

A: Oscar?  For you?

M: No.  You!

A: [Scowls]… Yeah… Fonzie?

B: You mean Fozzie.

A: I don’t even know his name, I have to take that back.  Kermit.

B: I’d be one of the old dudes in the balcony, either Statler or Waldorf.

After a raucous night out, you wake up at some point the next day and you realize that in your fit of crazy you got inked.  What tattoo did you wake up with?

B: Does it have to be doable in one night, or could I have passed out for days?  Weeks, even?

A: If you steal mine I’m gonna be pissed.

B: Okay, well you first then, please.

A: I would get the full torso tattoo of the bass player from Rage Against The Machine.  Google Image [search] that shit.  It’s a full chest plate!  It’s got dual sleeves and then one side of his back his black and the other side of his back is like, a giant face.  His whole upper body is one piece.  I’d vary it a little bit.

M: I’d have Eminem’s daughter, on my arm.  YES.

B: I was going to get the entire novel of “Cat’s Cradle” tattooed on me, page for page.

G: Man, I have no good answer for this!  How about a clover?

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

M: NEITHER.  So seriously neither.

G: That’s scary.  How about both?  Can you be both?  If I can’t be a hybrid, I’d be a rodeo clown.

B: I think it’d be really interesting to see how much weight I could gain and what I would have to eat to gain that kind of weight if I was training to be a sumo wrestler.  I’m so interested in that.

A: I think I have a real fear of being morbidly obese.

B: I also think it’d be interesting to figure out how many pounds I would have to gain in order for Mieka to kick me out of her band. (Mieka cracks up.)

M: Let’s not test it.

A: Wait.  I want to be a morbidly obese rodeo clown.

If you were a particular kind of cheese, what kind of cheese would you be?

B: Cheddar.

M: Cheddar.

A: Brie.

G: Gouda.

M: Wait, no.  You guys would be American cheese.

B: What? Why?

M: Because that’s ALL you ever EAT.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what style facial hair would you be?

B: I’d be a soul patch.

A: UGH!

B: Hey.  Music is soul.  That’s what I’d be.  It’s because I’m soulful.

A: I would be a Helmet Strap.

G: I feel like you could do the Fu Manchu…

M: I have no idea.

B: Mieka would be a fully waxed face.

M: No! I’d be eyelashes.

G: I’d definitely be chops.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY UNDERWEAR AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

M: Complete silence.

B: That would be a good band name: “Mieka Dances In Silence.”  Fuck it, let’s change our band name.

A: If I’m feeling sentimental, it’s “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins.  If I’m feeling upbeat and dance-y, it’s “Harder To Breathe.”

B: Really?  I would’ve thought it would’ve been Jamiroqui-

A: No, that’s only when I’m having a full-length dance party to find myself.

M:  Wait, actually, I remembered!  M.I.A’s Kala.  Everything on that record except for “Jimmy”.

G: “Around the World”, Daft Punk.

B: “Aries”, by Bloc Party.

What’s your favorite word?

B: Mieka’s favorite word is “beautiful.”

M: It is.

G: I’ve always wanted to name a band Ham Sandwich just because I thought it would be the worst band name ever.  So I’d go with that.  Ham Sandwich.

A: I like the words “cock” and “fuck”.

G: My second favorite word is wasabi.  Or just Andrew, because of the wasabi…

B: Andrew snorted wasabi once when we were on tour… Anyways, my favorite word is “fallopian”.  I am very confident that my favorite word is “fallopian.”

THE MAIN EVENT: THE MIEKA CANON TEAPARTY BOSTON INTERVIEW

Hey, friends!  Can we get some official introductions from the Mieka Canon?

M: I’m Mieka Pauley.  I’ve played in Boston for a while as a solo act, and now I’ve joined forces with these guys to be the Mieka Canon.

A: I’m Andrew.  I started a band with Brian in college called Harriet Street and we moved here and started playing and met Mieka along the way.  We slowly became her band.  I play the bass guitar and update Mieka’s Twitter. (Laughs)

G: I’m Gabe; I play keyboards-

M: – He really likes Boston, but he’s not from Boston.

G: My connection to Boston other than these guys is that my now wife went to school here for a year so I visited a lot.  I started playing keys with the band over a year ago.

B: I’m Brian.  Andrew and I had a band here in Boston and Mieka and I in particular kind of joined into a creative force that is the Mieka Canon.

A:  …We may or may not have stalked Mieka initially.

B: I had seen Mieka a few times and I was totally obsessed, so I started stalking her after shows and trying to get a hold of her and emailing her and stuff in order for her to check out Harriet Street.  Then, two years went by, and we had something going on and we decided to go out on a tour together, and what we had to offer was that we could maybe be her backing band.  We started doing that, and that’s how the whole thing started.

M: The transitional thing was that they were simply a backing band for awhile, but then Brian ended up producing my last CD and we started off with just a song to see how it goes and it went amazing.  All of a sudden it was like, “I like my music again!”  I had gone through a period of self-hate, and he brought me back to liking what I do.  That’s the thing about collaboration: He was bringing stuff to what I did that I could not do for myself or find elsewhere.

B: I was kind of a producer/therapist to deal with the self-hate.

M: He’s not constantly screwing me over.  It’s amazing.

Let’s talk influences on the Mieka Canon.  Who do would you credit as artists who have helped shape your sound or cultivate your talent, musically?

M: I was into a lot of jazz vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and I started writing songs in order to sing and I never had a genre in mind because I was always playing with just an acoustic guitar, so it was Brian who brought genre into it.  So, you guys talk about your influences, which I now claim as my influences. (Laughs)  Their opinions are my opinions!

B: I think a major source in our songwriting is that Jeff Buckley is kind of this icon to all of us.  I can say this because I’m not Mieka, so it doesn’t sound totally pretentious, but before I started playing with Mieka, she always captured me in a similar way to the way Jeff Buckley did.  The music is very different in a lot of ways, but there’s just this thing about Mieka’s vocals and the darkness and emotion to her songs that was almost the same, and I know that was a lot of what I wanted to bring to it when I came into the Mieka Canon.  We’re heavily influenced by a lot of “creative rock”, Radiohead, Death Cab For Cutie… I think you hear a lot of that in what we add behind what Mieka does, and then Mieka has this more eclectic background that she brings to the songwriting.

Who are you listening to right now?  If we were to look on your “Recently Added” playlist on your iPod, what would we find?

M: David Sedaris.

B: I’m totally obsessed with the new Kings of Leon record and just today I’ve been listening to the new St. Vincent record a lot.  I’m just getting into it.

A: Rufus Wainwright.

M: Phil Collins!

B: Andrew is HEAVILY into Phil Collins.  (Laughs)  That’s off the record!

A: No, put it ON the record.  “ANDREW: PHIL COLLINS.”  There’s no shame in that.

G: Well yeah, unless it’s old Genesis…

A: What we’re listening to, it ends up being stuff that we feel like will ultimately contribute to our soundscape.  When you listen to Deathcab for Cutie there’s a lot of soundscape stuff going on, and so it’s constantly like, helping to nurture….

M: It gets to a point where you listen very intently and very specifically, so unfortunately, I mean, there was a point where I listened as a fan, but now when I listen to music it’s like, “Is it useful or is it not useful?”

A: It’s hard to turn that off.

M: It’s kind of sad, because you lose the ability to listen to music just for the sake of listening to music.  No one should listen to me listening to Phil Collins. (Laughs)

A: … I’m not allowed to play it in the car.

G: I just listen to Beethoven.

M:  Yeah, Bach.  My influence is Bach.  (Laughs)

Well, let’s get to back to talking about your creative process.  Can you take us through the creative process behind the Mieka Canon?

M: Before I started playing with the guys, the creative process was pretty random with me.  It sort of happened when I’d be doing something else.  There’s no science to it, and I wish there was because I’d be more prolific.  So, writing in isolation started my creativity, and so now it’s changed a bit because I can play something for them.  The song “Colossal”, for example: We’ll be playing it tonight, and that’s a song that I had written an idea for a verse but it’s impossible to finish something because it becomes the act of finishing instead of the act of just writing and liking what you’re doing, so Brian listened, heard a chorus, and then he wrote the chorus.  We were affected by the pressure of the studio as well because we knew we had to finish, so as soon as we’d come up with something –

B: Yeah, we are a band that cannot create unless there’s some sort of pressure and a deadline.  It’s astounding how we’ll come up with a thousand ideas along the way and earmark the ones we’re excited about, but unless someone tells us that we have to be finished by next week we’ll just leave it until somebody does.  We’ll go back to the stuff we’re excited about and nurture it and get it finished, but I think there’s a lot of cataloguing a bunch of ideas when they come up.  A producer we’ve been working with, Mike Pancini, he was talking about getting vocal takes in the studio, and he was saying that taking the best vocal take is always the first one, and then he actually had to censor himself, and he said “Actually, by ‘first one’ I mean when the person just wrote the song and hit ‘RECORD’ on that tape recorder and that’s what I mean by first one.  You’ll never get that again because that’s the one time you’re feeling what you created.”

M: Like “Colossal.”

Like, “Colossal”, there was just this moment of feeling it, and then you quickly get distanced from that and it’s hard to keep writing because you want to get back to that first thing you did, so I think that’s why we set it aside so that we could come back to it when we needed to finish it.  When you have that distance, you can feel the little things and go back.

M: I think it’s subconscious: You put it aside and then you re-hear it, and when you rehash it, it’s like smelling perfume at the mall where you can’t smell anything after awhile.

It sounds like sensory overload.

M: Conversely, though, a lot of songs for me, going on tour and playing them every single night in front of audiences, it doesn’t matter, I can just fuck around onstage and see what happens, either intentionally or because I’m bored out of my mind, and at the end the song is actually I like it a lot better than when I first wrote it because there’s this comfort in it.  So, I mean, if there’s a way to combine both of those – I know part of making a song finished, for me, means performing it a lot.

B: We’re writing a new song write now, where the lyrics of the chorus are “I’d like to learn the science of making choices”, so I think we’re being very self-aware in our current writing. (Laughs)

Are there any songs in your catalog that you feel particularly connected to or that stand out when you play them live?

M: All of a sudden I really like playing this acoustic, quiet song called “That Golden Road”.  In general I don’t like to play those because I’m always overwhelmed by the idea that I’m boring the audience, so at least that’s what’s behind making it more interesting, so I’m excited about playing it tonight.  That, and “We’re All Gonna Die.”

A: I think it speaks to our creative process as well, that there’s a lot of stuff that’s very “right now” where before it was just reinterpreting songs and now there’s a few songs that are kind of ours.  We’re shaping those songs, and there are five more in the works, I mean, we have actual snippets of songs that are all kind of yet to be realized songs.

M: I think those are the ones that we’re super psyched about.

A: That, to me, is where a lot of the current excitement that we have about playing now comes in.  I mean, this is for all of us, though, something that we’ve all realized together.  Those are the songs that we’re really excited to play.

B: I think “Colossal” is my favorite song just in terms of the song, but playing live, “We’re All Gonna Die” is just fun to play.  I think we get bogged down in our depression rock (laughs) so it’s fun to have one that….

What’s it been like, touring and going back and forth this month for your New York and Boston residencies?  Why did you guys decide to go about hosting residencies this way?

M: Well, we’re releasing an EP, and Boston is our hometown but we’re living in New York, so those are the two most important cities to us, and I just really like the idea of honing our songs in front of our audiences that have told us they like us as opposed to trying to impress something more unfamiliar.

What are the similarities and differences between playing in Boston and New York?

M: There’s a lot of crossover in terms of artists; I keep running into the same people in Boston and New York.  There’s a lot more crossover than you’d believe.  In terms of the scene, New York is just inundated with music; you’d think people are jaded but they’re not.   It’s real easy to get people to just come out and play.  I think if we hadn’t lived here it would’ve been real hard to get people out every week in Boston, so that’s sort of been a good surprise compared with New York.  I’m not saying there’s anything bad about the Boston music scene, at all: I’m saying, what’s next after the Lizard Lounge?  You have to get to Toad.  You’re not just walking by and stopping in.  Here you sort of have to be the source of it, you know what I mean?

B: There’s ups and downs.  To me, Boston is so much so a quieter town.  I mean, anything is quieter than New York City, but it’s a quieter town and so there’s maybe less people and less people walking by the door to get in, but I’ve definitely found having been in both places for a little while now that if you get somebody excited about you in Boston they’re coming back every time.

M: That’s true.

B: In New York, it’s a little more fleeting.  People are coming in and out, and there’s something exciting about that, but at the same time there’s not the loyalty.  We played our first show here last week and to hear fifteen times as you walk out the door “I’ll see you next week!” it’s so exciting.  We didn’t hear that in New York, walking out the door.

M: There’s a lot more of a personal connection in Boston.  In New York, we’re playing for a lot of other musicians, so that’s a huge difference, whereas here you’re not just playing for musicians.  People are coming out simply because they’re fans, not because they’re scoping you out.

Do you guys have any fun stories from the road?

M: Oh, like that show we played in Austin? With nothing surrounding it, so we had to drive down for three days and then drive back for three days?  That was awesome!

B: Yeah, this past March we went down for South By South West.  The showcase wound up coming up last minute so there was no way to book a tour around it-

M: -But it was way awesome.

B: Oh, yeah! It was really fun and I mean South By South West makes it worth it, but you can’t wrap your head around until you’ve done it how much driving that is for a 45 minute set.  It was a solid six days of driving and 45 minutes of show.

M: But then again, South By South West, it’s not like we drove down to play for 45 minutes and then packed up and left; we came down, we saw the shows, we walked around, we saw the scene down Sixth Street, we had lunch and saw a band play across the street on the roof, that kind of stuff.

B: It’s like… Mecca. (Laughs)

What exactly brought you guys to Boston in the first place?  How did you wind up in the same city?

M: I was born here but not raised here and then I came back for school.  Andrew and Brian went to school in Ithaca and then they came here to play.

A: MIEKA WENT TO HARVARD.  HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?

M: … I was trying to skip over that one…

A: AND she skipped second grade.

B: Yeah, she skipped second grade.

A: Brian and I kind of chose Boston arbitrarily…

B: We were kind of trying to decide where to take our band our get started with our band.  My wife had family here and we just weren’t ready for New York at the time and I’m so glad we didn’t go there first.  I think we would’ve fled running and screaming, even though I love New York now.  Boston was a good place to get started.

M: When I was looking at schools I came and visited and I had lunch in Harvard Square, and I saw all the street performers there and I was overwhelmed romantically with that.  I get obsessed very easily, and I was so obsessed with the idea of coming here so I could do that.  Once I got here I started street performing in Harvard Square.

B: We did, too, kind of in a parallel fashion.

M: There’s just something so romantic about playing in Harvard Square.

Hey, Joan Baez did it back when she lived in Cambridge…

M: Joan Baez!  Tracy Chapman!  Martha Sexton!  Man, I will give you ALL those names.

How do you feel about Boston as a hotbed of creativity?

M: I mean, I met these guys here, so I’m immediately- I mean, everyone runs into Berklee kids and plays with Berklee kids and that’s an amazing thing.  I came back here and just did a show in the round and I was the only person who wasn’t a Berklee kid, and I sat there and said hey, these kids are kicking my ass.  I’m just gonna sing.  Another cool thing about Boston is that there’s a lot of art to do here – the visual arts, and video stuff, that’s nice to be around.  A lot of college kids are here, too.

B: There’s something about youth in a city and New York definitely feels older, but there’s something about the youth population when kids will take what you have done and just take it to the next level, so it’s always just getting pushed ahead.  To have so many young people in Boston, it felt right to us when we were coming in when we were pretty young and there’s just something about the youth in this city where it never feels like things are getting stale.

M: In New York, you gotta have your shit together if you’re gonna play in front of people.  Here, I feel like you’re allowed to mess around more; you’re allowed to mess around on the street and at the open mics or whatever, and that’s how you get your start.  Cutting your teeth means something different here than it means in some local town, you know what I mean?  There’s quality coming from Boston.

A: Yeah.  Cambridge doesn’t fuck around.  People aren’t gonna sit and listen to shit.

M: Like [Club] Passim.

A: Yeah!  In that way it’s a productive thing in that you get some good audiences here.  In New York, they still don’t want to listen to you suck, but here you gotta cut ‘em quit.

Can we talk about some of your favorite Boston venues?

M: I fucking LOVE Lizard Lounge, and it’s not because we’re sitting here.  Club Passim has been very cool and very supportive for the solo stuff especially.  Man, I started here when the House of Blues was open in Harvard Square.  I haven’t been to the new one on Lansdowne yet.

B: I love the Paradise Rock Club for rock shows.  Our home venue was definitely the Paradise Lounge.

M: Johnny D’s has been good to us, too.

Yeah, their jazz brunch is pretty bomb, too.  So, Mieka Canon, what’s next?  What’re you working on now?

M: We just finished the EP.  We’re working on getting people to like the EP.  The MP3s are available to download at From the Mouth of Paris.