Michael Reynolds is Making a Scene

September 21, 2024

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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Michael Reynolds

Twenty years ago, Michael Reynolds was lead vocalist/songwriter for the acclaimed alt-country band Pinmonkey. Ten years ago, he quit the business.

But while he may have stepped away from his music career, Michael Reynolds never quit writing songs. Now nearly a decade later, his Blue Élan Records debut album Tarnished Nickel Sky marks the wholly unexpected and altogether triumphant return of a genuine country original.

“After Pinmonkey broke up in 2006, I kind of floundered around,” Reynolds explains. “I still played shows here and there, just trying to formulate the right plan to keep my career going. Finally, I gave myself permission to not have to strategically think about what my next step was going to be. After spending so much time playing the music business game, I decided to simply stop and enjoy the moment. And that moment ended up lasting over ten years.”

Michael moved to a small town outside of Nashville, took a 9-to-5 office job, and settled into a new life far from the pressures of a country performer. But a funny thing happened on the way to his new normal. “I never made a conscious effort to keep writing, but I guess my brain stayed wired that way,” Reynolds says. “An idea would come to me, and I’d let the song become what it wanted to be no matter how long it took. Because I was writing for nobody but myself, I discovered that I was enjoying the songwriting process more than I ever had before.” These songs were also different than any he’d previously written, emerging as haunting tone poems of restless winds, faded memories, broken dreams and all-too-human yearning. Reynolds’s rough home demos found their way to his former Pinmonkey manager, who began to surreptitiously share them around town. The demos eventually reached the ears of Blue Élan Records co-founder Kirk Pasich, who soon proposed a record contract. More than a decade after he’d walked away from Music City, Michael Reynolds was once again the buzz of Nashville. “And when Ray Kennedy offers to produce your album,” says Michael, “you just say yes.”

“We sat at my kitchen table, I handed him my Martin Guitar, and the first thing he played was ‘Where The Crossroads Meet’,” remembers Ray Kennedy, the five-time Grammy-winning producer of classic albums by Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Chris Knight and Rodney Crowell. “I heard an effortless poetry that felt literary. His voice is the most evocative tenor since Vince Gill and it really pulls you in. With each song he sang, I knew exactly what the album needed to be.” Kennedy brought Reynolds into the studio backed by a first-call band that included guitarist Joshua Grange (Beck, James Taylor, Lucinda Williams), drummer Fred Eltringham (Sheryl Crow, Kacey Musgraves), bassist Steve Mackey (The Wallflowers, Luke Combs), and pedal steel guitarist Dan Dugmore (John Prine, Linda Ronstadt, Sturgill Simpson), plus background vocalists Anthony Crawford (Steve Winwood, Neil Young) and Shelly Fairchild (Eric Church, Tanya Tucker). “The band brought the edgy groove these songs needed in order for Michael’s vocals to do their thing,” Ray explains. “He’s an artist very much in the tradition of the ‘70s Laurel Canyon scene, singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, Neil Young, J.D. Souther and Gram Parsons. The characters in his songs elicit powerful emotional responses simply by expressing things that could have been.”

The eleven self-penned tracks on Tarnished Nickel Sky capture Reynolds’ gifts for evoking wandering spirits, dirt road epiphanies and finite lives poised on the threshold of forever. In the album’s opener ‘Three Days’, the narrator wears ‘a halo forged of dust’ as he goes in search of rootless redemption. ‘Where The Crossroads Meet’ summons small town choices of solitude and regret, while the protagonist of ‘Take Me Down’ recounts a soulful spiral of dark secrets. Reynolds infuses the chilling ‘Can’t You Hear Jerusalem Moan’ with an apocalyptic bluegrass fervor. The romancer of ‘26 Horses’ searches for an exit but simultaneously proffers grandiose hope for what’s to come. ‘Fades’ speaks to leaving Nashville behind and the years of memories that fall away and ‘Southern Boy’ is a clear-eyed declaration of country pride, free of pretense or irony. The trucker of ‘2 Hours From Jackson’ long-hauls for the power of love, the rail worker in ‘So Many Trains’ puts his faith in tracks that lead nowhere, and ‘The Whiskey Goes Down Easy’ depicts a life coming apart one drink at a time. The album’s closer ‘Sweet Blossom’ fuses love and loss for an elegy that is simultaneously heartbreaking and life-affirming. “I’ve always been more inclined to evoke a mood rather than tell a story,” Reynolds says. “Some of these songs just flowed out of me, others took years of revisiting. With all of them, I just followed where they led me. I hope they’re heard that same way.”

For Michael Reynolds, Tarnished Nickel Sky is the unexpected next chapter in a story that continues to surprise the music industry, country audiences and, perhaps most of all, the performer himself. “Twenty years is a lifetime ago,” Reynolds says. “I think about all the time I’d spent haunting Music Row trying to accomplish something. I’d listen to what was popular, and every trend that came along felt like chains that held me down. Letting go of any expectations, whether it was from Nashville or myself, was the most freeing thing I’ve ever done. Maybe that’s why the experience of writing and recording this album feels new again. I can point to Tarnished Nickel Sky with pride and say, ‘This is who I am.’”

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