An acoustic guitar with a baritone voice—what else do you need? You know what you’re getting yourself into when you listen to MCKC. With his other project, Wicked Bears, MCKC gets to write punk rock music. While it’s fun to be able to get your anger out and rile others up, MCKC is about peace. It’s introspective and a way to see inside himself and identify the things that make him unhappy. For MCKC, music is a way to process the thoughts and feelings he couldn’t bring himself to say plainly.
To whom do you turn when your mentors fail you? MCKC saw his faith within the LDS church desert him once his problems reached a breaking point. “I’m not happy in the system I’m supposed to be happy in,” he said to himself. He found the answers that were given to him in religion weren’t working for him anymore. All of these answers he couldn’t find turned into depressing and dark songs. It’s fun to listen to them, but if you read his songs as poetry, you’ll have a different perspective on his words.
MCKC does not care how his music makes you feel. “It is me and it is mine,” he says. Solace is what he finds through creating his music and he hopes that others can find what he found. “It’s a way for me to turn that into art.” If you expect him to care about whether or not you like his music—don’t expect too much.
As of currently, MCKC is not a multitasker. Once he is done working on his latest Wicked Bear project, he will release more music under MCKC. You can listen to EP IS OK on Spotify and Bandcamp, a release filled with six tracks that portray how MCKC coped with the struggle of losing his faith, lifestyle and support group and how music got him through it all.
Thanks for listening to SLUG Mag Soundwaves.
MCKC is on Bandcamp.
- This podcast was created by SLUG Magazine and produced by Angela H. Brown, Parker Scott Mortensen
- Associate Producers: Alexander Ortega, Joshua Joye, John Ford, Bianca Velasquez, Audrey Lockie
- Executive Producer: Angela H. Brown
- Music by MCKC
- Soundwaves logo and art design by Nicholas Dowd
- Photo courtesy of David Buist.