Q&A: Donna Missal Finds Intimacy in Isolation on Stunning New EP ‘in the mirror, in the night’
WHO ARE YOU WHEN YOU’RE ALONE? — That’s a question most of us have had to confront within the past couple of years. And if you’re someone who defines yourself through community, this can be difficult to answer.
As a singer-songwriter with three acclaimed albums under her belt, Donna Missal is well-versed in the art of performance. She is a powerful artist with stadium-worthy vocal force and a sense of conviction that permeates everything she does. Both of these qualities welcome soaring studio production and lively concerts. But when COVID-19 sent the world into lockdown, Missal found herself confined to recording music at home, her vocals limited to a volume that wouldn’t disrupt her sister’s work meetings in the next room. The result is a stunning, experimental EP on which she turns her strength inward, examining who she is when no one else is watching.
The EP’s title, in the mirror, in the night, comes from a lyric from Missal’s song “sex is good (but have you tried).” The full lyric goes, “Sex is good, but have you tried / Taking off your clothes in the mirror in the night / When you're all alone?” It sounds like Missal is singing in a hushed voice directly to you, somewhere in the sinewy hours connecting night to morning. The rest of the world outside your bedroom window barely exists. The song’s atmosphere sounds like a memory of a dancefloor, the misty strobe lights transmuted to the ambient blue glow of a phone screen.
But with solitude can come the intense pain of feeling cut off from the world around you. Despite this EP’s focus on insularity, community is vital for Missal. She wants her music to act as a meeting ground. With the specificity of her intense introspection comes a wide emotional reach. Whether it's the hushed lyrics of “insecure” or the danceable devotion of “(to me) your face is love,” Missal refuses to hide how she feels. She spoke to Luna about the circumstances that led her to create her most personal work yet, and how she hopes we can make community more central to the music industry than ever.
LUNA: Congrats on the release of your new EP, in the mirror, in the night. I love the fluid, stripped-down sound, and it feels different from your earlier work. What led you to this sonic shift?
MISSAL: It was definitely a project of necessity. I didn’t have a project in mind when I started, but I was trying to learn to record from home because the world was still very much in quarantine. All of this music was created and conceptualized as a result of me learning to record myself. Studios were closed, people weren’t getting together, and I don’t even think that there had been much figured out about how we were going to continue to work with one another while not in the same space — like Zoom sessions and file sharing, the ways we've figured out how to stay connected and and continue making things together. People were just ready for the whole thing to blow over. But that wasn't happening.
I was living in a house with my sisters and they were working from home. My room was next to my sister's room and she was doing video conferences for her job all day. It was necessary that if I was going to be learning how to record, I'd be doing it in a way that was respectful of my surroundings. I was making really tiny vocal music and trying to learn what kind of vocal chain I liked. The music was very vocal-centric — it was all about lyric and melody, but mostly just to have something to work on to test out how to use Logic and how I liked to record my own voice. Prior to that, if I hadn't started it alone and brought it in, my music was always studio music. There was also always a big encouragement to be a big vocalist and that's always how I've approached it, especially in a studio environment where you can sing to the top of your voice. It's a controlled environment, so it's a different performance space.
I had also been touring so much at the time that I was making the record just before this EP, and that was informing so much of the way that I was writing and singing on my records. This wasn’t really a choice — it was an experiment, and I didn't really intend for the music to ever come out. It's been interesting to take into account for myself how different it is from anything that I've made before.
LUNA: I feel like a lot of artistic invention comes out of adaptation to circumstances and the limitations that are put on you when you’re making something.
MISSAL: Yeah, totally. It can help you expand into a new space that you wouldn’t have entered otherwise.
LUNA: What does the title in the mirror, in the night mean to you?
MISSAL: It is a lyric from my song “sex is good (but have you tried).” It was the song that started the project, so I thought that it was a nice way to reference how the music came together. I also thought that line in particular spoke to the themes that I was writing about all through this experience of spending so much time with my own thoughts and without the influence of things on the outside. The world became so small around me and it allowed for lots of reflection. Referencing the night evokes intimacy, and the title is meant to express that this is the most intimate and introspective music that I've put out so far.
LUNA: This EP seems to approach the concept of intimacy from several different directions. What does intimacy look and feel like to you?
MISSAL: It doesn't just pertain to others. There's this level of intimacy that you can have with yourself that the busyness of the world and the busyness of our lives often don't make space for. To me, being intimate with yourself means having an understanding of who you are when no one else is around and being really comfortable with that person. The more I was experiencing that, the more intimate I felt. I was so obsessed with it conceptually that I really wasn't writing about much else at the time that these songs were coming together.
LUNA: It’s a resonant theme that I think we’ve all been thinking about in different ways. What drives you to create, and what inspires your sound?
MISSAL: It’s just innate. I can't even call it an interest — it feels like a necessary practice for me to be writing about my thoughts, feelings, and experiences through this medium. I've been doing it since I was really young — putting pen to paper and journaling. That turned into writing my own songs. I've been doing that as a practice for a long time. It’s hard to say where that comes from. I don't necessarily experience something and say, “Now I am inspired.” It’s a part of my language with myself and how I identify with the world. It’s how I see myself and what I feel most connected to when I'm doing it. Inspiration is a part of my daily life in that way, and I don't often go seeking it.
I tend to not write anything when the feeling is not there. I'm not someone who sits down every day and writes as a practice. I get struck in various periods of time for all kinds of reasons and that's when this stuff is coming out of me. But my mind is always there, so I don't really ever feel like there's a reason for inspiration hitting me — it more so feels like this is the way that I have always and will always be expressing how I feel about my experience. It’s the outlet that I use.
LUNA: This EP has a compelling blend of vulnerable, insular feelings and more danceable beats. How do you imagine your music existing in the world, in the lives of your listeners? Is this something that somebody is putting on their headphones late at night, or is it played in a club?
MISSAL: I was absorbing a lot of dance music; music with rhythm and movement. I've been influenced by so many genres, but I hadn't gotten into dance, club, and house, so I've been listening to that stuff a lot. If you're surrounding yourself with something, it's going to work its way into what you do.
But I also imagined how good it would feel to have my music be a meeting ground, a place for people to commune, and what that community might look like. Because we were experiencing so much isolation and we've been so separated from each other, I was longing for that feeling of being surrounded by others who all have a common interest: being in the same space, feeling similar feelings, and expressing that with one another. You don't have to know the people around you to still feel a commonality. We're here for the same reason: to commune with our people. And how important that is — that we have places and opportunities to be in the same place with one another. I think music really does that. My imagination as I was putting the music together was thinking [about how] it would just be so beautiful to be in the same place with other people again, dancing and feeling close to one another physically and emotionally. How could I make something that would contribute to that being possible again? I hadn't really thought about music in that way before.
LUNA: What role does community play in your artistic process?
MISSAL: When I’m making stuff, I’m genuinely not concerned with who it belongs to, except for me. After the fact, once it’s created and I’m figuring out how I want it to look and how it's going to come into the world, that’s when I start thinking about who other than myself would identify with it and feel a closeness with it. How would they utilize this in their lives? Even though I’m not thinking about it while the songs are coming together, when it comes to sharing, the community aspect is everything. It drives me to continue to do this. Being so separated from people for these past couple of years has made that importance so much stronger for me. Especially having just gone on tour — you get reminded that it's very important to people that they have an opportunity to be with one another and share space. It’s very much like a church in that aspect, and I would love to continue to be a part of creating spaces for people. It's always going to be important, and I think the more that we become Internet-centric and focused on digital connectivity, I’m always going to be longing for that real-life, in-person connection. I would still make music if no one heard it, but community is a big part of why I share my music.
LUNA: Did you have any consistent collaborators when you were working on this EP, and if so, what qualities did they bring to the project?
MISSAL: It’s the most autonomous I’ve ever been in my songwriting, which is really cool. I wrote every lyric and melody. I was sending them to Sega Bodega, who is the executive producer on the EP, so he was my closest collaborator through the whole thing. I learned through this process what true collaboration can be, which is when you're taking what you do best and someone is meeting you at the table with what they do best and you're putting it together. There's not much of an interference with one another in what the other person is bringing. I felt very trusted and left alone in terms of how these songs were crafted from a melodic and a lyrical standpoint, and because of that, they feel like the closest representation of who I am in this moment than anything that I've ever made.
In terms of bouncing ideas off of people and having it be that kind of practice, it really wasn't that for most of the creative process for this EP. It was sending ideas to someone thousands of miles away who would then send me back their ideas and we would put it together that way. It was very cool for me to be working with someone who I respected so much, whose music and expression I loved so much. I felt a real kinship there.
LUNA: Given the precarious stance of live music over the past two years, have you still been able to find connection and togetherness through music, or has that been a challenge for you?
MISSAL: It’s deeply challenging. I think that we’re starting to catch up with the fact that touring is this volatile thing that we really can’t count on, and we don’t always have that as an access point to people. Because of that, we’re watching the rise of social media as the epicenter of sharing while we’re all at the mercy of algorithms that really don't have anything to do with us connecting with one another. The algorithms of today are certainly more intent on selling us things and keeping us as commodified as possible and as connected to commodities as possible, and not so much about allowing for people to create intimate spaces.
It feels like the online space, the social media space, has all become this big mall. It's become less appealing to the average user. I'm interested in seeing how technology continues to shift to become more accessible to people who are looking to connect with musicians in particular. My instinct is to create smaller, more intimate spaces online, which is this vast, never-ending web. I like the idea of creating spaces that are a bit smaller, more niche, and are accessible to anyone, but where you're only going to visit if you really want to be there, rather than these mass media areas of the internet where everyone is there because we're just there. I’m interested in learning how to create more spaces for fans that are there because they want to be in that particular space, interacting with that particular artist. I’m interested in figuring out how to make that happen. I think it’s going to be a crucial thing for being an artist in this day and age.
LUNA: Absolutely. I studied digital media in school, and I can say that, from what my peers and I did projects on, those sorts of spaces are definitely something that the incoming generation of people are interested in creating. So I’m hoping.
MISSAL: Someone can figure it out. We're seeing more development of that, and I think it's really cool and inspiring. It can be really sad and uninspiring to be one of billions. That can take away from your well of inspiration and your will to keep going and to keep up with an ever-changing space. It can be a hopeless and sinking feeling to try to keep up in that space all the time. I'm really interested in seeing what the solutions could be and I hope to be taking part in those solutions.
LUNA: I’m looking forward to seeing that. How have you transformed as an artist since your first release, and where do you see yourself going in the future?
MISSAL: I have no idea. I used to think about where I saw myself and where I wanted to be, but I stopped thinking that way because, as we know now — if you didn't know already — you just cannot count on anything. I’ve heard it described to me as “the future [that] doesn't exist, and the only thing that exists is the moment that you're in right now.” I've really tried to take that to heart, especially when it comes to the stuff that I make. That applies to looking back on where I've been and the stuff that I used to make and what that evolution has been like. I can honestly say that I've never looked back — that's just not part of my creative process. I don't look at the last thing I've done and let that inform who I am now, what I'll become, and what I'm making now. I just never cared. Once something's been done once, I move on and I don't really think about it much, which might have to do with why my music changes over time.
My music has always been a clear snapshot of who I am in the moment that it's created, and I don't have any regrets about that, but at the same time, it is irrelevant to me who I was then. I’m much more interested in who I am right now and making music that speaks to that person. I hope to be doing that forever. It's like a constant game of catchup for anyone on the outside of you, but I hope that, at the very least, the impression is that it's always genuine and coming from a place of wanting to express where I am in the moment that I’m in. I don't listen to my music either, so I can't even tell you how much it's changed, because I don't even know.
LUNA: I like that kind awareness and presence that must allow. It's admirable.
MISSAL: It’s not the best thing for marketing yourself and finding your corner, so for people who work on that side of the industry, I'm certain that there's a distaste for this lack of giving a shit. I genuinely care what people think about my music — I want them to connect with it. But it's never going to be the reason that I hold myself back from evolving or changing, and I'm always going to change. That's life, and I don't want to be afraid of that just because it makes it more difficult to commodify my artistic expression. I hope that I can keep up with that. I don't really know if the industry is set up to support that kind of artist, but I hope so. I've never understood why someone would want to hear the same kind of thing from you forever.
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