Mike Montgomery’s journey through the Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati/Dayton music scene began in his early teens, guitar in hand. Even then, his talent drew the attention of seasoned musicians – a fact he recalls with a chuckle, noting his first band, Thistle, featured “older” members “in their early 20s.” This early exposure laid the groundwork for future projects like Ampline. Beyond the stage, Montgomery’s creative pursuits extended to writing, including stints at a skateboard magazine where he interviewed luminaries like J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and contributing to Cincinnati’s alt-weeklies, City Beat and Everybody’s News.
His immersion in the music world deepened through diverse roles, from sound system installation to live sound engineering. These experiences fueled his passion for production, culminating in the 2010s with the construction of Candyland Recording Studio. Early clients included Buffalo Killers, a band with whom he’d toured as a tech. This connection proved pivotal, leading to his collaboration with Kelley Deal of The Breeders, who sang with Buffalo Killers on a Guided By Voices tribute track. Their shared musical vision sparked the formation of R. Ring in the early 2010s.
Despite a long history of songwriting for various bands, Montgomery only recently decided to unveil his solo work. Pony Coughing, his debut album, is a collection of songs crafted since 2018, held back until the moment felt right. Released just weeks ago, the album, as discussed, paints deeply personal and melancholic soundscapes. Montgomery’s quiet, hushed vocals, recorded in the still of night at his home studio, create an intimate and introspective atmosphere, offering a direct glimpse into his innermost thoughts.
You’ve been involved in music for a long time. You’ve played in a bunch of bands, you helped run a label, you own a recording studio. Seems like this has been your life since you were a teenager.
MIKE: Yeah, for a really long time. And I did a music ‘zine for a while. I wrote for the college paper. I wrote for our local papers like City Beat and Everybody’s News, when that was around. I wanted to be talking about music or writing about bands I liked. I can’t get enough of it.
Do you have a defining moment in your childhood where you went from just liking music to loving it and knowing you wanted to do something in the music field?
MIKE: Music and skateboarding were parallel. Music was my first love, because I didn’t know of skateboarding. I remember listening to my dad’s records as far back as I can remember – five or six years old. And then buying an album when I was really young and sitting there with headphones and really being fascinated by the world that would be created inside those headphones.
The first record I bought was Def Leppard’s Pyromania which I still think has a really cool vibe, a really dark kind of atmosphere over all of it. I was also listening to Elton John’s Yellow Brick Road, Beatles records, CCR, Janis Joplin, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, stuff like that. I just listened to “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” I’ve thought of those lyrics since I was a little kid. They’re never at home, they’re always alone even with someone they love. Who are these cowboys? Don’t let them die, you know? Let them be doctors and lawyers. What does it mean to grow up and be a guitar player or a cowboy playing guitar versus a doctor or a lawyer or something? They framed the wide disparity between these two choices. That always fascinated me.
I didn’t really touch the guitar until I was 12 or 13 and I was just banging around on it. I was skating and then playing music when it was too hot out or if I was hurt. At some point, I was playing more music than skateboarding and got more and more serious about it. I really just fell in love with it.
Did you have ambitions right away to be like Jimi Hendrix or were you a true student who understood you needed to practice a lot if you were ever going to be any good?
MIKE: I started writing songs pretty much immediately. I would sit down and think, “I’m gonna try to learn to play this song.” As my fingers fumbled their way towards trying to learn something that was in my head, they wouldn’t find that, but they would go off on a path and I would think, “That’s neat.” It was kind of like spinning the Rubik’s Cube in that way. It was always like a puzzle.
I remember writing songs the entire time that I’ve been playing guitar. I got a book of chords that were all the chords in the Beatles songs or something. I would try to learn the positions, but they never sounded like a Beatles songs. As soon as I would learn a chord, I would start writing a song. So, I would call myself more of a songwriter than a musician. I can’t read music. I don’t know theory. I can’t just sit in and jam with a band. I don’t know my way around the knack of the instrument. I just kind of know how to play the things that I write and play. If I want to play someone else’s song, I got to sit down and kind of figure it out.
As a solo record, why isn’t it a Mike Montgomery album?
MIKE: My name never seemed that cool as a band name. I wanted it to be a project. It’s more about collaboration than it is about solo, but it’s solo in the sense that I don’t have a band. It’s not a stable cast of characters. It’s not really a total democracy like my bands that I’ve been in normally have been. We’re not in a room together. That’s a big part of it. These were all songs that I brought and shared with people. I farmed out ideas and people sent me contributing tracks. It was all done remotely aside from one song called “Chasing the Strings.” That’s an orphan from our R. Ring sessions for the last album. That’s the only song that was done with me, Laura King and Kelley where we actually hashed out the rhythm track together in this studio and built it up. It just didn’t fit on the R. Ring record. We couldn’t figure out how to finish it or make it sound cool. Something was missing, so it got left behind.
I imagine when you first started working in a studio, you weren’t sending files back and forth, everyone had to be in the studio to record. It sounds like, at least for the Nervous Verbs album, you made this work and it went well.
MIKE: I think it’s incredible. When I first started, you couldn’t really fly a track in. It would be from one tape machine to another and you’d have to line it up, press play. There wasn’t really a way that the technology that I had where we could sync it as easily as we can now. With the advent of computer recording, that opened a lot of that up and now with everyone’s accessibility to affordable recording equipment, you can send an entire session file. You can share sessions so easily now. If someone doesn’t even have that, they can do a voice memo on their phone and I can fly in their vocals. They can text me an MP3 and I can make it fit into the track. It’s so easy to collaborate with people, that’s really liberating.
I imagine this record would have sounded a lot different had you made it 10 years ago or 15 years ago.
MIKE: I couldn’t have made it in the way that I made it now. I wasn’t working on computers even 10 years ago. I was still doing tape machine and digital recorders, but not computers.
When I flipped over the album and looked at the back cover, I noticed the copyright data is 2023. So, you’ve been sitting on this for a little while?
MIKE: Even longer. It was totally finished, but there was stuff going on in my personal life. The records have been pressed for a couple of years but it never felt like a good time to celebrate something I was doing or release a record. I always thought of the process as putting out a record, you go play shows. That’s not really something I can do right now, so I just thought I would wait. Talking with Joe Steinhardt at Don Giovanni Records, he kept asking, “When can we put it out?” It was meant to have come out ages ago. We just kind of decided there was never going to be a perfect time, so let’s just put it out and move on. That’s what I’m doing.
Given that the album’s been done for years, do you have a follow-up already done?
MIKE: I do. Yeah. I have a second album that I could finish tonight if I wanted to. But there’s no timeline. There’s no crunch. There’s no pressure. There are song ideas and I work on by myself at my house, in my home set up. A lot of them are on my phone. Even the songs on this record – my voice, my guitar – that’s just me singing and playing into my iPhone. I would fly that into my recording set up and dress the tracks up or get contributions from other people.
I read that part of the reason the vocals – and the music – are so quiet is because you’re recording at home and have to be aware of your wife and son, so you can’t go crazy. Your vocals remind me of Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse who, at times, could sing very quietly. There are times when I think I’m listening to a lost, long Sparklehorse album.
MIKE: A lot of people are saying my stuff sounds like Sparklehorse. I admit that the only thing I know about Sparklehorse is that Mark killed himself. A friend of mine, Chris Reddy, tried to turn me on to them years ago and I kind of remember the vibe of it, but I don’t remember the album. I want to dig into that band because enough people have said that it sounds like Sparklehorse, maybe there’s something there that I’ll like.
I interviewed Mark back in the day. He lived on a farm in Virginia and said he’s wander the property and he’d find stuff, like an old wheel well, and he’s think, “If I hit this, I can make music with it.” I’m guessing that as someone who owns and runs a studio, you probably tinker around a lot with different things that might not be traditional instruments as a way to make noise.
MIKE: I do, especially doing stuff at my home. My setup here at home is basically just for mixing. I don’t even have microphones here at the house. If I needed one, I would bring one home from the studio. I put out a song called “I Have Seen Ruins” and there’s percussion on it. I took an old iPhone and a new iPhone and I was playing the one on earbuds. I took my new one I was just like tapping on some cabinets down the hall from where my son was, then I took that back and played it out of my phone into a session and kind of made it into sound using the iPhone as a mobile recorder; just figuring out a way to keep working on an idea without having access to the whole studio or the room.
The album has been done a while. Were the songs written for the album or are these songs you’ve been collecting for years?
MIKE: The oldest one is probably “Secret Bad Thoughts.” I wrote that before my son was even born, so that would be like 2018 or 2019. It was just sitting around, just a song, and I wanted to finish it but didn’t know when I would have access to any of my bandmates to get into a studio. I ended up having a friend play the drums remotely.
The last tune, “I Am of Tremolo,” was written after my son was born. He was upstairs and I was quietly singing. I had written it to almost be like a lullaby. The vocals and guitars were recorded into the iPhone and I thought that I kind of liked that. I didn’t even think about wanting to redo it in the studio. That was the first track where I thought maybe I could just add stuff after the fact, that it doesn’t have to be a full band playing on it. I sent it to Kelley and she was like, “The song should just be you. I don’t see myself on that.” I have a lot of songs that maybe she doesn’t hear herself on, or my other bandmates in Ampline, because it doesn’t fit the vibe of that band.
This record is a way for me to not have to abandon thoughts because they don’t fit a band dynamic or aesthetic. It’s a way to allow me to give those ideas the courtesy of completing the thought with no pressure, no timeline. I don’t have to take anyone’s time in a room. If an idea fails, that’s fine. It’s just me.
So how did you know the album was done?
MIKE: I had no pressure, no deadline, no goals. They just sounded finished or complete. I hardly used my actual giant recording studio for any of it other than “Chasing the Strings,” which was the R. Ring orphan. The rest were tinkered on here and there as I could. There was no budget, I was just doing it mostly at my house. Maybe a guitar here and there I did at the studio for “I Broke Them All Myself”. I think I recorded the guitar for that because it was an electric one and I needed an amplifier. It was going to be a little bit louder. I think I did that vocal and that guitar in the studio.
Because the album was done long before you put it out, have there been times where you’ve thought, “I wish I would have done this differently”?
MIKE: I’m usually pretty brutal on myself about every single thing I ever do, whether it’s a drawing or a painting or a song of my own or something I worked on for someone else, a mix or something. I always go back and I hate seeing or hearing my fingerprints on it. My voice grates on me when I hear it, and I can’t lose myself in the song and appreciate it as a song because I hear myself in it. I’m pretty brutal about that. There are some moments on the last Ampline album that we did, both of the R. Ring albums, that I really like. And I think it’s because there’s so much Kelley on there that I can hear the songs and not think of myself as being a part of them. I can appreciate them as music and get a chance to listen to them as completed thoughts without cringing that I am participating in it. For this record, I think maybe because I was not trying to record in the studio, I thought of the songs as demos. I was singing into my phone or live vocal and guitar takes a lot of them. I thought, I’m going to allow myself the grace to have a warts and all, whatever happens, happens kind of vibe. I’m going to be okay with it. I don’t know if it’s laziness or artistic maturity, we’ll call it a combination of the two, but I’m okay with it. I like it.
Who are the guests on the record and how did they wind up contributing?
MIKE: Rick McCarty from Ampline, Kelley Deal, of course. Laura King, who does Superchunk and R. Ring, I got to know her through all the R. Ring sessions, so that was a no brainer. Lori Goldston, met her at a show with Kelley with R. Ring and then we did some shows together. She played on our first album and the second one. The ability to get strings on something remotely is awesome. Kate Wakefield from Lung, she’s another person that can record strings remotely or sing remotely, whatever. I can just send an idea and know it’s going to be in safe hands. Sylvia Mitchell, who did some strings on the song “Cyclops Shore,” I met her during tracking sessions where she came into my studio with other bands. Dan Dorff Jr. is a fantastic drummer and piano player. I met him when he was doing sessions with Daniel Martin Moore. And I realized that he and his wife, Alexis Marsh, have got a recording set up at their house, so they can do tracks remotely. They’re super talented and nice people. Adam Nurre, who plays on “Cyclops Shore,” he can sing, play keys, bass, guitar, drums, whatever. He’s a well-rounded musician and can record remotely. I met him when he was drumming for Jeremy Pinnell.
The newest person in my life is probably Devin Ocampo, who is from D.C. and had the bands on Discord like Faraquet and Medications and The Effects. I was a big fan of his work and of his bands and of his music and talent. Kelley and I started a Zoom band with Devon and his wife Renata through the pandemic. We were trading ideas back and forth. They came to town maybe a year and a half ago, and we laid down a bunch of tracks. We have a whole album that is me and Kelley, Devon and Renata. Just because of my life circumstances, we haven’t been able to get back in the room and finish it up. Devon was kind enough to send me a guitar track for “Chasing the Strings” and he plays the outro solo on the “I Have Seen Ruins.” It was the first Nervous Verbs song I released.
You mentioned writing a song that you thought of as a lullaby for your son. Does he react to your music or is he too young to have the patience to listen to it?
MIKE: If I’m listening to a mix, whether it’s my song or someone I’m working with, like Superchunk, he’s in the back of the car saying he wants me to talk into my phone and ask it to play “King Tut” by Steve Martin. We’ll listen to either the banjo version or the full band version and he’ll tell me which one he wants. If I say, “Hey man, I’m gonna listen to my own thing right now,” he’s in the backseat going, “Ahhhh, not your stuff.” Or if I’m listening to one of my own songs, he’ll say, “Dad, this is you. Why do we have to listen to you?” He’s not listening to it like, “Oh, this is cool” or “This is a good song.” But he does understand songwriting and we had a really interesting conversation two nights ago. I’ve sung Neil Young’s song “Thrasher” to him like a thousand times. We both fall asleep with me singing that. He calls it “Hiding Behind Haybales.” He’ll say, “Sing that to me.” The other night, he said, ”Will you sing me a song?” I was putting him to sleep and I just started making one up. He said, “No, not that dad.” And I said, “I know, I’m just messing around. That’s not a real song, is it?” He said, “Anything is a real song if you make it a song. Everything was just an idea at some point and then someone sang it and they made it and they liked it and then someone else liked it and then it became a song.” And he said, “Like ‘Hiding Behind Haybales.’ That was just one guy and now it’s a real song and that’s where songs come from. They come from people.” I was like, “Yes, you’re very wise. It’s totally true.”
And after that he says, “And now can I listen to King Tut.” (laughs)
MIKE: Yeah, he’s obsessed with Egypt and archaeology and ancient artifacts so he loves King Tut or anything about pharaohs or pyramids or tombs or a sarcophagus or death mask or mummies. He is totally obsessed with it.
