Mike Baker Music

The music started because writing stopped being enough for everything I wanted to say. I had spent years putting things into paragraphs and books, and then I started experimenting with music and realized a story felt completely different once you gave it a melody. Beyond the Shadows was me trying that out in public before I knew whether I had any business doing it. I did not expect that decision to turn into sixty-something releases. I followed the next song, and then the one after that.

SHMILY Vibes

SHMILY Vibes starts with Kellie. SHMILY means “See How Much I Love You,” and it has been part of the private language of our marriage for years. By the time I made that record, we had spent nearly twenty-five years building a life together. Three kids, moves, careers, illness, arguments, laughter and a thousand ordinary decisions to keep choosing each other. That is what I wanted the record to hold. Marriage from the inside is a lot more interesting to me than some perfect love story, and this was the first time I realized music could hold a personal story differently than writing did.

The ADHD run

The ADHD music came from finally having language for what it feels like inside my head instead of only experiencing the consequences of it. I was diagnosed when I was young, but understanding yourself at fifty is a different thing than having somebody give you a diagnosis in high school. Beautifully Unfocused came from trying to tell that honestly, alongside the book. There is overload and shame in that story, but there is also humor, intensity, creativity and the part of my brain that has produced most of the things on this website. I got tired of treating all of that as a defect I was supposed to apologize for.

Then I kept finding more songs in it. Shut Out the Noise came from the days when everything gets loud enough that I cannot hear my own thoughts. Side Quest came from realizing how much of my life has happened because I wandered off whatever path I thought I was supposed to be following. Live From My Head is basically what happens if you spend enough time around me that I stop filtering my brain. Hockey, meetings that should have been texts, marriage, things I say too loudly, things I forgot, things I screwed up. The ADHD work got better when I stopped trying to explain ADHD and started showing people what living inside my version of it actually feels like.

Ordinary Tuesday

Ordinary Tuesday came from realizing that I have spent too much of my life assuming the big days were the ones I was supposed to remember. When I started thinking about the things I already miss, most of them were much smaller. Kellie laughing somewhere else in the house. One of the kids calling when nothing was wrong and they only wanted to talk. My mom saying my name.

The album grew into fourteen songs because one song could not hold all of it. Cameron leaving for New Zealand is in there. So is the experience of standing in an airport and saying something ordinary like “call me when you land” while knowing something much bigger is happening. That record also helped me understand what Just an Ordinary Tuesday was becoming on the writing side. The music and the essays started meeting in the same place. I am trying to pay better attention to the life that is happening while I am busy waiting for something important to happen.