The release of All We Will Become, the first new music from his band Misha in eight years, represents a rebirth of sorts for John Chao. The band released its debut studio full-length Teardrop Sweetheart in 2007, though the breakup with his longtime musical and romantic partner cut short the promise of that LP. Luckily for music fans, Chao has continued on with the project, and as “Optical Illusion of the Heart” and previously-released single “Limelight” demonstrate, the band has never been better.
When asked about the theme of the video and how it relates to “Optical Illusion of the Heart” in an interview with mxdwn, Chao explained:
“I’m smiling because [the video for] ‘Limelight’ was kind of moody and dramatic, and didn’t feature much of the band members at all! (laughs) It occurred all at night and it was sort of about two lost souls wandering around Chinatown. A lot of our visual content is largely based around New York [City]. Partly because that’s who we are and partly because it represents that fusion of all of us being together, everybody here in New York that is a transplant that came here for various reasons. But we all represent very different ethnicities and a really wide diversity of origin. And so what we wanted to do with all of our videos was reflect that.”
“‘Limelight’ was about the loneliness of nighttime and the drama of the dark, but ‘Optical Illusion of the Heart’ is a much brighter song. We wanted to stay with the idea of being in New York and celebrating that rare fusion of culture and also commonality, but instead we wanted to flip it on its head and be more fun and be more casual. And so it doesn’t really reflect that much thematically except in the way that we were being playful about the song itself. But it ties in with this idea of celebrating who we are as a fusion of people being in New York and reflects more of the ‘pop’ attitude of the song, and because ‘Limelight’ did not show us at all, this one is focused primarily on the live band members.”
Chao worked with a variety of artists to come up with the eclectic sounds that are heard on “Optical Illusion of the Heart” and the rest of the tunes on All We Will Become. Jonathan Rothman of The Long Winters and vocalists Ronit Granot and Amy Vachal (who is not featured on “Optical Illusion of the Heart”) are just a few of the musicians that contributed to the album. If Vachal’s name rings a bell, it may be because the talented singer was a semi-finalist on the popular singing competition show The Voice. Chao explained what it was about the players on All We Will Become that brought them together:
“We are this weird, kind of motley crew – but we all have this affection for pop music. And we all we all grew up with very specific deeply rooted musical traditions. Amy is half-Filipino, half-Caucasian-American, Jonathan grew up in the South, I grew up in the South and I am Chinese. So we started talking and there was this part of all of us that showed the same love of pop – really big bright melodies and catchy hooks. Yet we were all hankering for a project where we could bring our different influences together, the different parts of our background and find a new way of sharing sounds. ‘Optical Illusion’ starts with kind of a Texas drum corps and ends with this Brazilian drum part, which is the background of my other singer Ronit, and in-between it’s very pop. So that’s what Misha represents: a way to combine fun, joyful expression of pop music but then sneak in these different influences that are a bit more unusual.”
So coming from such disparate origins, how did the members of this musical collective come together in New York City?
“It was the sort of classic New York thing where you work at a restaurant, somebody plays a certain instrument – I met Jonathan at Little Frankie’s, a restaurant he worked at – and then I met Ronit at a bar where she was working, and then Amy was a friend of Jonathan’s,” said Chao. “So we all got together through the freelance-slash-second job scene. So many amazing musicians in New York have a double life.”
While new music from Misha is exciting enough, there is another comeback that coincides with the release of All We Will Become. TOMLAB, the Berlin label known for releasing records from beloved indie groups such as Owen Pallett, The Books and Andrew Wolf, is back in action for this release. This record will mark the first major United States release for the label since 2008. Chao talked about the recording and writing process of All We Will Become:
“So the way the album was written, we recorded the album me and Ronit in my apartment together over the course of nine months or so,” he said. “The other band members like Dave Packles the drummer, he would would play certain drum parts and I would do most of the other ones and Jonathan would come in and lay down a bass track, and so forth. Live it is totally different, we rearrange the songs and everybody contributes together, for the album it was more that I played and arranged most of it, and Ronit sings most of it, and Amy, Jonathan and Dave, they plugged in their unique influences song-by-song.”
All We Will Become:
1. This is How it Must Begin
2. You
3. We’re Gonna Have it Out (Modern Love)
4. Limelight
5. Optical Illusion of the Heart
6. Elater
7. Nightshades
8. In Reverse
9. Blood is Hard Enough
10. Everywhere and Everything
11. Lion Bark (Luminous)
12. Chartres
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