Before he began work on what would become his second album Fame, out Nov. 2 on Interscope, Mikky Ekko sat down for a meeting with Jay Joyce. The influential producer, best-known for work with artists like Eric Church, Little Big Town and Cage the Elephant, looked at the soul-pop singer-songwriter and told him point-blank: “I feel like I’m just going to fuck this up.” To which Ekko responded, “Exactly.”
Ekko and Joyce’s partnership, founded on a mutual desire for controlled chaos, is at the center of what makes Fame work. It’s been nearly four years since Ekko released his full-length debut, a collection of R&B slow jams laden with modern pop production called Time. Recorded with more than two dozen different producers (including heavyweights like Blood Diamonds, Benny Blanco and Ryan Tedder) in studios across the globe, Time did backflips to capitalize on the exposure Ekko gleaned from “Stay,” his breakthrough collaboration with Rihanna. Fame is a completely different animal, recorded entirely in Nashville with a single producer at the helm.
“I wanted to get back to my roots,” Ekko tells the Scene. The longtime Middle Tennessean returned to Music City to live and work after several years working elsewhere. “Initially, I was doing everything on my own and with a couple other guys, and it was really based around a more familial, DIY kind of scene. I wanted to apply that same logic [to Fame].”
If Time was the result of many different perspectives fighting for attention behind Ekko’s soul-ballad vocals, Fame represents Ekko’s singular point of view coming into sharp focus. These songs are the purest embodiment of Ekko’s authorial voice since Reds and Blues, the 2010 duo of EPs that helped him break out of gigs at small clubs like 12th & Porter and into the mainstream.
Songs like the hip-hop-leaning “Let You Down” and “Light the Way,” a driving pop-rocker that would comfortably fit into Lightning 100’s heavy rotation, diverge in execution but maintain a cohesive spirit. While the tracks on Time sometimes chafed against each other’s ambitious bleeding-edge sounds, Fame feels like a unified work powered with vital, unpredictable energy. For Ekko, working with a rock-schooled producer like Joyce (who also played in the ’90s Nashville rock act Iodine) helped harness that energy.
“The exact reason I wanted to link up with Jay was because of Cage the Elephant’s first three albums,” says Ekko of the Bowling Green-native rock outfit’s first LPs, which Joyce produced. “Sonically, there’s an element of, like, garage rock and punk-rock, and this sort of fearlessness to it. It’s a pretty big middle finger that most people don’t know him for, because of the bigger records he’s done.”
Fame is clearly a pop record, but it isn’t a work of perfectionism. It’s filled with breaks and slowdowns, experiments in defying the listener’s expectations. Early single “Blood on the Surface” explodes with catchy MGMT-style choruses before crumbling into glitchy tape loops and resolving with minimalist guitar strums. It’s a restless record by design, an attempt to channel some good old-fashioned Nashville DIY spirit into the pop crucible.
Despite that local spirit, Ekko admits that this record couldn’t have been made in Nashville just five years ago.
“I think we’re going through an enlightenment phase and sort of working our way into a really cool renaissance of music, because it’s it is really changing a lot in a good way,” says Ekko, specifically pointing to R.LUM.R, Shmuck the Loyal and Mike Floss as artists pushing the boundaries of music made in Nashville. “I think that what makes me the most excited is hearing what other people are doing, and just finally I feel like I’m at a place where … I don’t have to leave town to get inspired.”
Nashville is certainly a different place than it was in 2009, when Ekko was cutting his teeth in a city that wasn’t quite ready to support a pop and electronic music scene. For his part, Ekko is eager to hear the music that this new Nashville is making and help however he can.
“I feel like I’ve been given a lot, and I’ve been in with some of the biggest producers on the planet, just because I’ve been lucky and I’ve been blessed,” Ekko says. “I would just encourage anybody who feels like they’re on to something to hit me up.”
If Fame is any indication of what Ekko can do for himself, the future for bangers by local pop artists is bright indeed.
