Mikel Watkins found his way into music through adversity. He struggled through a difficult upbringing and addiction, finding his way to stability through music production and artistry. This week, he will be joining headliner Sean Washington and other performers at the First Thursday Open Mic night at the Huss Project in Three Rivers. Then, in October, he plans to release his first extended play (EP) collection of recordings on most popular online streaming platforms.
Some of his work is already viewable online. In fall 2019 he released a recording called Dreams, and at the beginning of this summer he released Love and Other Drugs. His Facebook page contains a broader collection of live recordings and other information about his work and performances, and selections from his EP “Something Different” are available on SoundCloud.
Watkins currently lives in Warsaw, Indiana, which is near Fort Wayne. He is a regular performer at a Fort Wayne live music venue called The Muse on Main. There are also a few other venues in Michiana where he has standing or frequent gigs.
However, Watkins grew up in White Pigeon, and is a regular at First Thursday Open Mic events in Three Rivers. Normally, those events take place on the first Thursday of each month at Lowry’s Books and More on North Main Street, but they paused when the pandemic began earlier this year. They resumed in July, taking advantage of the outdoor space at The Huss Pavilion at Eighth and Broadway Streets to permit socially distanced gathering.
Fellow Open Mic regular and White Pigeon High School graduate Mitchie Moore inspired Watkins to pursue music. With a brother at home who was “always playing music around the house,” Watkins said he always loved music. His brother provided him exposure to a wide range of performers from Pantera and Nirvana to Kendrick Lamar and Paula Abdul. His mother also exposed him to artists like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.
Watkins also drew inspiration from poetry. He is a fan of Edgar Allen Poe, and found the discovery of Poe’s “The Raven” to be a revelation. “It was like tapping into the darker side of myself,” he said, “and really embracing my mental health.”
Despite that exposure to music, Watkins said, “I didn’t start taking it seriously until I was 16,” when he caught on to Moore’s music. “I really looked up to him,” Watkins said. “He was one of my biggest inspirations to just you know, take that step back and ask him questions. From there everything kind of just took off.” Watkins said he has known Moore since the eighth grade, and “just followed in his path.”
Getting into music required Watkins to break free from his comfort zone and “going from this orderly, kind of on the wild side, but clean-cut kid to embracing my inner human being and just being vulnerable,” he said. “I was kind of trying to take control of my inner self and explore, you know, and forgive all the wrong that was done to me and just the messed-up childhood I had, all of that. Once I came to peace with that, I was able to write about it a lot better. It took a long time to become a songwriter.”
After graduating from White Pigeon in 2017, Watkins traveled and explored cross country with friends for two years, visiting landmarks and centers of music like Nashville and Austin, and getting heavily into drugs. In southern Arizona, Watkins visited the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences. He decided to attend there, applied, and got in. Although he dropped out in 2019, his time at the school gave him the opportunity to pick up important music production skills.
In addition to production, Watkins decided he also wanted to write and create his own music. In 2018, he wrote and performed his first song entirely on his own, called Unorthodox, which was produced by Chance Hubbard. Though Watkins spent two years as a producer stemming from his study in Arizona and has collaborated with a variety of people to create music, he has moved his primary creative emphasis to writing and performing his own work.
“It was mostly hip hop at first, but I didn’t want to put myself in a box. I started exploring other genres like R&B, you know, lo-fi,” Watkins said. In addition to bass guitar, he said, “I taught myself how to play the drums. I taught myself how to play the piano, so I wasn’t so one dimensional, I didn’t want to be that. I didn’t want to just be a producer. I wanted to be an actual musician.” Watkins now characterizes himself as a pop musician.
His current influences include Mac Miller, Worry Club, Bill Woozy, and The 1975. He likes J Cole for his “story telling aspects,” and appreciates narrative music. Watkins also credits his parents and his fiancée as influences. “My mom and my dad are my biggest fans, besides my fiancée,” he said. Meeting his fiancée led Watkins to make an instant and deliberate decision to give up drugs and become sober. He said he connected to her instantly. “I felt like I knew her for a thousand years.”
That sobriety, he said, has also influenced the music he creates. As an independent artist, Watkins must still involve himself heavily in production. Bringing his music together, recording and editing it, developing artwork, and distributing it all takes organizational and communication skills that come more easily to him today. “I had to instill some type of different work ethic into myself and make everything work,” Watkins said. “It’s finding time to create no matter what sacrifice has to be made.”
A typical day in the studio involves “trying to find something I can sample,” then layering tracks and adding “drums over it, and bass over it,” along with his own lyrics, “just trying to make it fit my sound,” Watkins said. The process involves breaks in which he can “listen to some inspiration, and then I come in and I approach it the same way every time, if (the song) is the one.”
Coming up with new songs can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a month, and new music comes to him at all times of day during all kinds of activities. “I could be online, at work,” he said. “Boom, a song comes my head, a whole song or, or a melody, or even just me humming something and then it just comes out.”
Watkins likes narrative music because it makes his work both relatable and flexible. “You know, it’s just the way that I approach every track,” he said. “It’s like a melody, even if I’m rapping on it, you know, I could sing it. I could rap it. I could speak it, you know, and people would understand, and people would get the same message, the same amount of love and input, you know, just that feeling in your chest that, you know, it’s helping you. You don’t realize that it’s helping you until you’re sitting at home. You’re like, dang, you know, I’ve been in a similar situation.”
Although his standards have grown with his skills, Watkins said he is willing to share some music tracks that are not available online through his Instagram, @mikeljameswatkins, or by emailing [email protected]. Those tracks are ones that he has withdrawn because they do not fit his current “hooks,” or “the thing that keeps people interested in the song. They kind of wait for it, like a catchy part of the song.”
Nowadays, Watkins is enjoying his daytime job cooking at a restaurant called Danny’s Sports Bar and Grill. “I’m a pizza boy. Another passion of mine is cooking, so I get to live that, too.” His social life is more stable, and despite being two hours from White Pigeon, he enjoys quality time with his parents. He and his fiancée are expecting a baby girl in December. Eventually, Watkins sees pursuing a pizza shop with his own, using his own original recipes in the Three Rivers area.
Watkins said his affinity for Three Rivers is strong. In high school in White Pigeon, he said, “I was letting the small-town life consume me,” which led him to “a sort of falling out” with the town. Eventually, a friend introduced him to his fiancée, who is from the Fort Wayne area, and for whom Watkins moved to Indiana. Fort Wayne has provided him time in a larger population, which, along with his other travels, has led to him finding greater appreciation for St. Joseph County.
The organizers of the Open Mic events have helped with that, Watkins said. The pandemic has slowed his participation in that and other live performances for him, but he said, “the Lowry’s Open Mic in Three Rivers, that’s my home. That’s my family. Aundrea (Sayrie), Torrey (Brown), Mitchell (Moore), Charlie Wolgamood, that’s my family.” Watkins said Wolgamood gave him his first opportunity to perform in a festival, making him part of the lineup at HarmonyFest 2019.
The Open Mic series is “the first place I ever performed that I was actually comfortable at,” Watkins said. “There, everything makes sense. Time slows down when you’re on stage there because people actually appreciate the art you’re putting out.”
Moore introduced Watkins to the Open Mic events in May 2019, just after his return from Arizona. “I performed there, three months in a row. And when my first EP something different came out, they offered me a feature position there,” Watkins said.
Watkins has not been back to Three Rivers since before the pandemic began but will be back for Open Mic this week. He will be debuting music from his new EP then, which will be released on streaming platforms on October 6 after a year of work.
Entitled “Loops,” the EP includes “five tracks, five different genres. I got a little bit of lo-fi in there. A little bit of pop, bedroom pop, R&B, and hip hop. It’s kind of like the kitchen sink of sorts. While I was doing it, I said, ‘I want this to be completely different than anything else anyone’s heard in the past year.’” Songs on the EP speak to themes of love, substance abuse, mental health, friendship, abandonment, and family issues.
For those wishing to attend, the First Thursday Open Mic event for September will be this Thursday, October 1 at the Huss Project Pavilion. Ample parking is available at the Huss parking lot at Eighth and Broadway Streets in Three Rivers. The event is free and open to all and starts at 6:30 p.m. Performances will take place outdoors. Event organizers say there will be campfires, but attendees should plan to dress appropriately for the weather forecast.
Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.
