by j. poet

Mishka Shubaly dominates the stage—he’s more than six-feet-tall with a shock of curly hair and a soft bewildered expression on his face as he watches his fingers moving up and down the neck of his guitar. His tortured, broken baritone gets under your skin as he spins his tales of drunkenness, depression, and self-abuse. His guitar playing is rudimentary, but effective, putting all the weight on his considerable lyrical gifts. The crowd reaction is evenly divided between people who hang on every word with rapt attention and people who shift in their seats grumbling angrily. Shubaly’s the first to admit that his rambling, hallucinogenic rants aren’t everybody’s cup of hemlock. “I never get polite applause. People love me or hate me,” he says. “They leave the club flipping me off, or move closer and buy a few rounds for their friends. I got my tires slashed after a show once, but it only makes me want to do it harder.”

Shubaly’s vision can be hard to take, but there’s a trace of self-effacing humor in his tunes that makes you laugh out loud, even when he’s flirting with the abyss. The title of his most recent album, How to Make a Bad Situation Worse hints at his ability to combine hangdog pessimism and grim wit. “If I wake up suicidal, I write a song about hot girls coming to my funeral and I feel a lot better,” Shubaly continues. He’s sitting in a shack on a New York City construction site. He shuffles papers in the company office for a boss who understands his artistic nature and allows him the freedom to tour and record his music. “I’m the office bitch in an old company,” Shubaly says, digressing slightly. “One of my bosses wanted to be a ballplayer once. He understands what it’s like to be young and have foolish dreams.” There’s a pause, then Shubaly continues. “I do have huge swings in my moods from day to day, but I haven’t had health care for 15 years so I can’t go to a doctor to find out if I’m actually depressed. But I can hold my shit together and keep a job, so it could be worse. People I know that are really depressed, you need to hit ‘em with a Taser to get ‘em moving. I’m just sad and upset and unhappy about a lot of things. I’m my own worst enemy.”

Shubaly’s self-destructive, confessional rants are oddly compelling, and attractive to a certain kind of woman, usually goodhearted souls who want to save him from himself. “I went out with a girl last week, she was about 25, and she said she was surprised I wasn’t falling down drunk by 8:30. Girls think you’re an asshole if your life is falling apart, but if you pull yourself together, they think you’re a fake.”

Shubaly’s anything but a fake; his music isn’t an artistic conceit, it’s the only way he’s found to exorcize his demons. “I grew up in New Hampshire in what I thought was a normal family, but while I was away at a private high school my dad split. I was getting in a lot of fights at school, but my teachers said I showed promise, so my mom used the house payment money to keep me in school.” The family lost their home, sold everything they had at a gigantic yard sale (“It was odd to see our neighbors picking over the remnants of our lives trying to bargain us down on some relic of my childhood”), and moved to Boulder, Colorado, where Shubaly’s older sister was in nursing school.

“I worked full-time and went to school, living in the unheated basement of the house we were renting. I was out of control, getting high on cough syrup and booze, but I finished school by working my ass off and playing music. I learned the three basic chords when I was six and started writing heavy metal power ballads at 13. At 17 I locked myself away and tried to do some serious songwriting. I’m still trying.”

Shubaly finished a degree in fiction at the University of Denver, “but I was always in trouble, drinking myself to death. I decided to try New York City. On a whim, I took a writing class at Columbia. They gave me a full scholarship and I got a master’s degree in fiction.” He also played bass in rock bands, worked as a roadie, and had confidence problems. “I was in this band and one night I actually listened to the lyrics. I knew my shit was better. I may not be able to sing or play guitar that well, but I couldn’t stay in a band where the lyrics made me cringe.”

Shubaly decided on a solo guitar and voice approach. “When you’re solo you can trust everyone in the band,” he quips. “But maybe trust is the wrong word, ‘cause I don’t trust myself. But when you’re solo you have to engage the audience and deal with them as real people.” His first album, Thanks for Letting Me Crash, is a harrowing, barebones affair, leavened by Shubaly’s poisonous wit. “It’s a four-track bedroom demo I made when I was 22. I had pneumonia when I recorded it, but it has a few tunes I still dig. For Bad I borrowed money and went to a real studio and put everything I had into it. It’s the most ambitious thing I ever undertook in my life and maybe ever will. It almost killed me. I broke up with my girlfriend, got kicked out of my house, and lost my job. I was sleeping in the stairwell of the studio when I made it. It took four years to finish. My life was very complicated for a few years there. I’m hoping it’ll settle down in the future.” 

How to Make a Bad Situation Worse is full of bodily functions, boozy bluster, and self-pity, but there’s a wounded heart at its core that makes it painfully, honestly human. Part folk, part Gothic noise, its poetic language, sparse arrangements, and Shubaly’s inimitable vocals draw you in to its claustrophobic little world. He doesn’t have a pretty voice, but it has an unaffected quality that’s impossible to ignore, although it isn’t a voice everybody’s going to love. On his website résumé Shubaly includes a quote from rock critic Robert Christgau who said: “Mishka, you really can’t sing. At all.”

“He said that to me in person,” Shubaly says. “I worked for him as a research assistant for a while and kept leaving him samples of my songs. He never said anything about them. Finally I cornered him and asked what he thought and he gave me the news. It was tough to hear. If I had had a sword available, I would have fallen on it.”