Mieka Pauley

February 2, 2006
Artist: Mieka Pauley
Program: Coffeehouse

Mieka Pauley warms her hands and voice in the morning sun streaming through the windows, singing softly. The techies behind the glass inside ask her if she can sing louder, but she demurs, saying she’d prefer to save some for later, for her live on-air performance. Yet in between sound checks, Pauley twists in her chair to chat with me in this fishbowl, eager to talk and ready with a laugh. It can’t hurt that Pauley also brought along backup for her third visit to WERS. Her partner of six years, the cuddly black comedian Baratunde Thurston, sits beside her, cracking jokes to get us both laughing.

It is 7:30 a.m. and the studio techies are moving in slow motion. As they mess with the mikes, Thurston begins to improvise an off-key blues song about the government as Pauley picks out the unfamiliar riffs with a smile. The next night, they will appear together at Club Passim, where he will perform stand-up before her act.

After her on-air set, Pauley and Thurston get serious about jokes. Both Harvard graduates, they have a high concept of their respective mediums, and agree that neither a joke nor a song is meant to address a concept explicitly.

“It’s about packaging statements in a more palatable way, and leaving them open to interpretation,” Pauley said. “It’s like when a joke is explained—it’s not funny. It’s the same with a song. It’s the difference between telling about the emotion versus making them feel it. I could tell someone about feeling sad, or I could write a song that makes them feel sad. That’s art.”

But Pauley dislikes waxing pretentious about the genre of her music, or anyone else’s. “In the end, it’s just gonna be rock,” she says. This may stem from her pet peeve: being called a folk artist. Sure, she plays an acoustic guitar—that’s what she’s got. But although the long-haired artist has stood onstage at the Newport Folk Festival, drawn comparisons with Joan Baez in the press, and frequented Club Passim, the subterranean haunt of Bob Dylan, she claims no shared musical heritage with these greats.

“When Nirvana played unplugged, no one called them folk, because they heard what they had done before, and it was not folk,” Pauley said. Yet she doubts she’ll ever go electric herself, she says, because she doesn’t like the overpowering, easily misused effect of electric guitar. “It’s like Bush and the military,” Thurston says. Ba-dum-bum.

During our interview, Pauley often lets Thurston take the stage, chuckling quietly as he flatters her with his self-deprecating humor. When they met, he says, he gave her a phrase “taking fate day by day,” which she later used in a song about him, and they talked for hours.

“I talked,” he corrects himself, “but the fact that she didn’t run away was awesome.” It seems they still share this dynamic, even after six years.

But Pauley is not the shy folk flower about whom several journalists have rhapsodized. “When I’m onstage, I am not shy,” Pauley asserts. I’m willing to believe it for a few reasons. While her songs have a quiet, melodic and thoughtful theme running through them, she sings them in a sultry, tough city voice. And there’s something about the emotion underneath that gets Pauley stomping her foot hard to keep time—stomping them in old-school, shiny red Nikes, not cowboy boots.

Lastly, this is a girl who once played a set during which a man got up and stuck a dollar in the jukebox machine, and she’s still onstage. After all, she could be could be using her Harvard degree in… biological anthropology?

“It’s about equal in terms of security as being a musician,” Pauley laughs. “Equally lucrative in terms of [contracting] malaria germs, I guess.”

Thurston suggests that she get a Mohawk to make the message loud and clear: she’s serious. But he’s joking.

For now, the long-maned Pauley and her unplugged, soulful sound is the only point of reference for many who hear her music; even her new self-titled EP was recorded live and acoustic. Pauley’s ideal setup, however, includes a “man on keys” and a bass guitar, which she used for her set at Club Passim last night to great effect. Pauley idolizes vocalists like Mariah Carey and Ella Fitzgerald, using her hand to illustrate the way a talented voice like Ella’s can dip in and out of many levels of sound in a full band, and plans to do the same someday with her music. She might even use her knowledge of biological anthropology to comment on the monkey business in current politics, the way Thurston does with his jokes.

But if for those who have read this interview seeking to genre Pauley, categorize her, or otherwise figure her out, all you need to know about her is this: she is a girl who knows the right time to use her voice.

-Ryan Rose Weaver