MYZICA
When Isaaca Byrd was 14 years old in Oxford, Ala., she joined the family band The Bridges. The band featured Byrd’s two sisters, brother and a cousin, and she took up the only instrument left: bass. By 15 she was touring the country with the folk-infused rock outfit, opening for the likes of Matthew Sweet and The Bangles.
The Bridges relocated to Nashville in 2009, a year after cutting a major label record. But the band eventually dissolved, and Byrd began making her living as many Nashvillians do, with a hodgepodge of backup singing, bass playing, songwriting and restaurant work. (She’s currently a manager and server at Burger Up.) She married fellow musician Peter Groenwald and had a baby, all the while moving in the same circles as Micah Tawlks, the other half of what would become synth-pop duo MYZICA.
Before the pair formed MYZICA and released their debut album Love & Desire earlier this year, Tawlks’ life was on a trajectory similar to Byrd’s. At 12, he started playing guitar; at 14, he joined a punk band, playing shows locally all through high school in Sacramento, Calif. And then he followed a girl to Nashville, and though the relationship ended, Tawlks stuck around, forming a Christian soft-rock group, The Micah Tawlks Band. They broke up, and Tawlks began working primarily as a producer and songwriter with his own company, Peptalk Studio, collaborating with artists like Harrison Hudson, Stephen Christian and Matthew Perryman Jones. He had a baby with his wife Erin, who used to work at Warner Music Group.
Then Tawlks began writing for himself, teaming up with Jones for a single called “Ready or Not.” They brought in mutual friend Byrd to sing on the track, and something clicked. And so, with a combined background in folk, punk, singer-songwriter and Christian rock, the two transplants set out to make bubbly, lighthearted, ’80s-homaging pop.
Love & Desire spins like the soundtrack to a high school dance that turned out to be actually fun, or a first kiss, or that perfect teenage night with friends you think you will have forever. It’s unpretentious, casual, authentic pop that perfectly captures the simplicity and seriousness of young love. “Turn this water into wine / Love never tasted so sweet,” Byrd sings. “Make a believer out of me.”
Tawlks says he initially set out to make Top 40 pop, but kept erasing and deleting ideas. “I kept replacing them with ’80s- and ’90s-sounding things,” he tells the Scene. “That was the only thing that was making me excited.” He cites influences ranging from Amy Grant to Cyndi Lauper, but when Byrd began writing and singing with him, she didn’t have much expertise in that genre — even though her own voice sounds like a more chill version of Donna Lewis. It was also Byrd’s first time fronting a band. “It’s been quite a learning curve,” she says. “I’m really introverted.”
Not that you would have been able to tell when MYZICA took the stage at New York City’s Mercury Lounge last month. Byrd was wearing a green silk suit dress, complete with matching tie and knee-high socks, and was all energy — like a more upbeat Suzy Bishop from Moonrise Kingdom. It was a small crowd, but by the end of the duo’s set, everyone was dancing. The covers of Lewis’ “I Love You Always Forever,” The Cars’ “Drive” and (not kidding) KISS’ “I Was Made for Loving You” don’t hurt either. “I know I’m in my business suit,” Byrd bantered, “but I still wanna dance.”
Byrd and Tawlks weren’t even really friends before they started making music together. Even two years into MYZICA, they still have what Tawlks calls “new-friend courtesy.”
“We’re always like, do you feel comfortable with that? Are you OK? Just making sure you feel comfortable,” Byrd says with a laugh. And while they say they’re both all-in with MYZICA, they’re still living their Nashville lives, working with different musicians on various projects and going on three- or four-show regional “runs” instead of full tours.
That’s part of MYZICA’s appeal — how casual it feels. They wanted to make time-machine pop, so they did, without trying to make it safe for Nashville’s Americana, rock and country scenes. There’s not necessarily some grand, glittery artistic vision; just sturdy love songs that are dreamy enough earworms on their own. Even the band name, a mash-up of the names Micah and Isaaca, feels a bit haphazard.
“We had this idea of young love and how brilliant it is and how stupid it is, how emotional and guttural,” Tawlks says. “You say just the thing you want to say. Remember that feeling?” When the lyrics became too complex, they straightened them out again, trying to remove all the “grown-up emotions.”
It’s a nice thought, to be sure — fearless, Instagram-filtered love. Feverish desire with no concern for consequences. It was young love, after all, that brought Tawlks from California to Nashville. “It was so romantic,” he says dryly, the grown-up emotion slipping in. “But I loved the city so much despite all the drama. And now it’s my home.” So maybe we don’t actually have to grow up from our teenage dreams.
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