Mikky Ekko Talks on Expanding His Boundaries With Debut Album ‘Time’

Once Singer-songwriter Mikky Ekko put his name and voice on the music industry’s charts with the Grammy nominated Rihanna collaboration “Stay,” opportunities were pounding at his door to get his solo career started. However, before he could present his own full length album, Nashville-based Ekko knew he had get out of the security of his hometown familiarities to find the songs that truly captured his identity. After two years of traveling abroad to foreign places, meeting new people, and taking every painstaking effort to craft the 12 tracks that fully expressed his vision, he has finally emerged with his first LP “Time.”

Bursting over with a cache of powerful sound and Ekko’s striking falsetto vocals, ‘’Time” delivers a dream pop score that paradoxically feels both otherworldly and easy to relate to musically and emotionally. It is not an accident that the record has such a grand and universal appeal, as Ekko credits his philosophy of being honest with himself on his songs as a prime reason both fans and other artists have connected with his authentic melodies.

Los Angeles listeners who want to connect with Ekko at a live performance can find him supporting New Zealand electropop duo BROODS at The Fonda Theatre on March 5. The album officially dropped on Jan. 20, 2015 and will be taking him back to his traveling habits again to proudly share his songs live on a North American tour. Ekko is outspoken about how writing and recording the album in cities all over the world helped to push him past his limits as a songwriter, and allowed him to reach out to a broader audience with his one of a kind voice.

Entertainment Voice: You are in the UK right now (London), and you wrote the title track “Time” in London. Do you spend much time there, and if so, what is the draw/attraction to that place for you?

Mikky Ekko: Yeah, I do spend a lot of time here. I love London as a city–I love New York, but London is more manageable for me. Maybe that’s because it’s one of the first bigger cities that I learned to get around on public transportation coming from Nashville. Initially, I wanted to go find myself at a place that was way out of my comfort zone. And everybody still speaks English obviously for the most part, but it was far enough outside of my comfort zone growing up in the South. I love the South, for me it feels like family there, and I wanted to go beyond that first set of boundaries. I’m a risk-taker, but I’m a calculated risk-taker. I like to find myself in places outside of my comfort zone pretty frequently.

You wrote and recorded this album in many different cities (Stockholm, London, New York, Los Angeles); was that intentional to give a cosmopolitan element to the album?

I am always down to travel, but my main focus was finding an album that felt like me. I hang out with lots of different groups of people, and I treat them all like family. That is what is I find to be really important about this album, that it can be really diverse for the people who are really going to love this album. When you get it, you just feel like part of the family, you know? I want the crowd to be diverse; I want my fan base to be diverse because I think we live in a time where it’s important to push your boundaries. I worked really hard to do that on this album and make it accessible.

Do you feel like writing in all of those different towns helped you capture that diversity?

Absolutely, I actually had a nightmare when I was in Stockholm because everybody was being so kind to me. I would show up and they would speak in English to me, and the whole conversation would be in English when I was standing there. But when walked away I could hear them go back to Swedish. Which made sense, but then I had a dream about being around a bunch of aliens in a really strange place. It felt like they were all coming for me when in fact I realized that my body for the first time was experiencing the shock of being in a new place. Everybody there was catering to me, and that was really scary because I am used to being in control of my surroundings.

So far, your biggest successes have been writing and collaborating with other artists, such as Rihanna. How does it feel to be working on your own project and being front and center?

Well even the song that Rihanna sang was a song that I wrote for me. This entire album has been about the pursuit of a song. In every single song, I hunted, I worked really hard to stalk these songs down to the very last minute, whether it was the lyric, or the production, or the mix, or the master. Everybody will tell you about it too, they’ll stand by that. When I wrote that song, I wrote it for me, and I knew that was what was important. She was connecting with something pure in me. That was a very real emotion that I was going through and I’ve never written a song for anyone in my life. What she gravitated toward was a song that I wound up writing that was really important for her. When I heard she wanted it, I immediately knew that this was right for her. I think there need to be times when I’m able to know that it’s a cool thing to let the song go.

Who are the vocalists that have influenced you and your singing style?

That’s always a crazy question. Growing up, I listened to a lot of grunge and hip hop. It wasn’t until later on I really discovered that I really need to listen to these singers and figure out what they are doing that’s really important. I always loved the voice, but I never knew why. It wasn’t until I really dug in on Jeff Buckley, Bjork, and then all of the Pixies stuff whether it was Kim Deal or Black Francis or The Breeders, that kind of stuff was really influential for me. There are a lot of women that I have studied because I think what’s really cool is when you hear a female vocalist who is able to simultaneously find this balance between being nurturing and really wild and powerful. I think that’s a really cool space. I heard artists from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Lykke Li and others like them, and I started to take things that they were doing and incorporate them into my voice as a male to create a lane which wasn’t competitive with other guys. I just wanted to find my own space on the planet and cruise out in another direction. [Jeff Buckley’s] “Grace” was one album that I listened to on repeat when I got it. And I thought, if I could sing “Grace” top to bottom, that would teach me a lot about myself as a singer — what I wanted to accomplish, what I needed to work on, and then how I wanted to apply it. So “Grace” was a big one for me.

You grew up as a minister’s kid, and your website says that church was a “reverent space” for you. Does that sense of reverence penetrate your music or general outlook on life?

Yeah, I have a reverence for time. I once read this article on a plane that said for the wealthiest people in the world, one of their greatest assets is knowing how to buy time. I think I understand what that is saying because for me that is more about investment than it is purchase. I realized I could invest in things I love, so for me it was about finding those areas where there was a return on the investment. Or there was a reverence for something important that was bigger than me that was being created. That is what I try to create every time I go into the studio, every time I write.

Mikky Ekko new Album Time will be released Jan. 20, 2015. Ekko will be playing at The Fonda Theatre on March 5. Tickets are available here.