MYQ Farrow Interview

After reviewing MYQ Farrow’s newest album Keep Your Cake Eat the Rich, I was inspired and curious to learn more about MYQ (better known as Mike) and his solo work. Mike has been in many different bands over the years, and he is currently working with Farrow on top of his solo project.

His new solo album deals with many difficult subjects, such as race, poverty, discrimination, and trauma, but the music is filled with joy. To better understand Mike’s intentions with this album, I asked him for an interview. 

Mike and I talked about everything from COVID-19 to American racism to Marie Antoinette, and his words told me so much about both him and his music. Keep Your Cake Eat the Rich was released in 2020 while the pandemic was still raging, and getting Mike’s perspective on this album helped me understand not only his intentions in writing it, but also the little details of the album that I didn’t notice at first.

What inspired you to do solo work? 

I’m a songwriter and a music teacher. I started writing songs pretty young, by myself. I moved into doing bands secondary because it’s hard to get a bunch of people together to make music.

I initially started writing this album as a catharsis to deal with a lot of the trauma experienced in the world and dealing with that trauma myself. 

How did COVID-19 impact your album?

I recorded at Mark Studios in Clarence because I won a songwriting contest. I got to record as a part of winning that contest, and there were restrictions on the recording process because of COVID.

One of the things about soundproof rooms is that the air doesn’t move very much in them, so when you’re talking about an aerosol [virus], it’s even more dangerous. They took extra precautions to make sure that it was a safe and sterile place to be able to record.

What is your favorite song off of the album?

“The Ballad of Botham Jean.” It’s probably the one that is most to the heart of what the album is really about and most to the heart of me as a person.

The idea that you never know when a white person with a gun will come into your house and kill you, and they can do so, and sometimes with impunity. The entire process of writing a lot of these songs comes from this place of evaluating anti-Blackness and speaking to it. 

What is a song or lyric that you want to clarify the meaning of? 

I’m pretty clear and straightforward in my songwriting. The album is called Keep 

Your Cake Eat the Rich, and it’s a combination of two ideas: “Have your cake and eat it too” and also the Marie Antoinette quote, “Let them eat cake.”

It’s taking this idea of what cake means in our culture and our society. It’s something extra, a non-essential, so when I’m saying “Keep your cake and eat the rich,” it’s about the things that you enjoy, the things that you bring to the party, the happiness, the things that you love. And the way that we keep those things that we love is by taxing and getting rid of the hyper-rich.

We know that it’s about 100 companies that cause most of the pollution, and we figured that out during COVID when we all stopped doing stuff and the pollution didn’t go away. Knowing that it’s these ultra-rich that are perpetuating most of the societal issues, that we are standing for them and loving them when really we just need to eat them because they look delicious.

Who did you write this album for?

I was a music teacher, and I have been performing music for pretty much all of my life. When I came back to Buffalo and when my dad died, I went to open mics throughout Western New York for a year. Almost every single day of the week, I was at an open mic.

A lot of the experiences I was having were racially insensitive, with microaggressions everywhere — and sometimes macroaggressions — about race. I was inspired to write about the interaction between race and class, and how these two things feed each other and work toward each other.

I wanted to write an album for going to an open mic and having to sing these songs for, usually, a majority white and middle-class people about the plight and issues of being poor or an ethnic minority. 

Did you cut any songs from the album?

I did. I cut the song “Money is the Devil,” and I cut it because I didn’t like how it came out. When I perform it live, it’s a much more powerful song than I could get in the studio.

What’s interesting is that Sara Elizabeth, a local artist, covered it for a Music is Art project, so that’s the only place to find that song on the internet. I love her cover, though. 

What do you want people to know about you as an artist or as a person?

I want people to know that as an artist, I write about life as it is, and that I shoot for having joy in things that are hard to talk about or the redeeming or healing power of getting through trauma. I tackle a lot of hard song topics. I have songs about friends that have overdosed, I have songs about childhood sexual trauma, I have songs about rape and assault.

I don’t try to dwell on the pain in a way that’s trying to bring you down, but as a way to say that there is a hope or that there is a way to heal from the wounds that the world inflicts… I usually try to juxtapose the hurt with the joy because I think true joy comes from a place of acknowledging the pain that’s in the moment, but at the exact same time, it’s still light and liberating and freedom. 

So, it’s acknowledging that there is pain in our joy, and that there’s also joy in pain. Finding the places where those ideas and concepts meet is important to anything that I write.

Where is the best place for people to find you?

The best place to find me in person is performing on the streets at the farmers market on Elmwood and Bidwell during the summer. Online, you can catch me on my Facebook page, MYQ F.

I’m also starting to add my solo content to Patreon. My band has a Patreon, so I’m going to be encouraging people to join my Patreon to catch my songwriting. I have zygotes of a song and I have a video of me writing more, and the music video is coming soon… It’s sort of the process of growth of a song, if that’s something that people want to see. Instead of just hitting them with a song, you can see how it’s made. The link for the Patreon is: https://www.patreon.com/farrowband.

You can also find his work with his band, Farrow.