Michael Bosworth, known professionally as Mozworth, is an independent singer-songwriter based in Austin. His self-titled debut, which was released on Nov. 15, stands out through both its catchy indie-rock melodies and passionate storytelling. I discussed the debut with Mozworth, along with his musical origins and aspirations. Read the interview below.
Mattea: To start things off, when did you get into music-making? What are your origins with that?
Mozworth: I played around with a bunch of different instruments as a kid. I think my first one was piano. My parents got this old piano at an auction or something, and I quickly started picking out tunes on it, so my mom was like, you should get lessons. Eventually, I found my dad had a guitar. He didn't play all that much, but I picked that up, and once I did that, I was like, this is my instrument, and this is what I'm going to do. It was pretty natural to just start writing songs … you eventually play something as you're messing around and you like it, and then you keep playing it, and that becomes a song … I started playing guitar when I was about 12 and I was immediately just trying to record things that I'd made that because I found that it really gave me a lot of energy to create music.
Has music always been in your life?
Yeah, I feel like I leaned into it a little bit earlier than most of my peers. I was very eager to start by collecting music as a kid. The medium at the time was cassettes, buying, getting cassette singles. Then I got my first cassette bowling, and then CDs came out, and I started buying those. Music consumption and music creation have always been there. I would definitely say some gas was thrown on the fire when I attended my first concert.
What concert was that?
It was in 1996 – it was a festival called Edgefest. It was thrown on by a radio station near where I grew up. Rock-and-roll was in, grunge, and then introducing a lot of pop-punk bands. Goldfinger was on the bill, alongside the Verb Pipe. [With] the punk bands in particular, one of the things that blew my mind [was] the way that that music moves people. It was my first experience of seeing mosh pits and slam dancing and crowd surfing, and I was just like, wow, I can't believe that music can move people like this. I have to be a part of this. I have to do this.
For sure. There’s so much energy in that environment. Kind of going back to your music – if someone had never heard your music before, where would be the ideal setting to do so? … It could be anywhere, like a city, a certain location, a certain mindset.
Something that's interesting about these particular songs that I released is that I have a bunch of songs that stretch back to me first picking at my guitar, but these songs are really from the last three years, and they all share a shift in my songwriting … I'd heard about someone taking a week vacation by themselves just to read, and I was like, that sounds amazing because I'm a very introverted person. But I wanted to tweak that into just devoted time to write songs, to kind of get perspective, so that's what I did. I scheduled my first session in Minnesota, just north of Lake Superior, and I went up in this cabin all by myself and just wrote songs. I got four songs out of that first session, and one of them, the first song that you hear on the album, is called “Letting Go.” It’s funny, I booked that first writing session, and I was so excited to go and do it that I wrote a song before I even left, and that was “Letting Go.” You kind of hear that intention in the lyrics … I'm eager to get into a place where I can go right. Then while I was there, I wrote “The Observer,” “Can’t Back Down,” and “Come to the Ocean,” so that was a really prolific, productive one. Then I did a session in Kansas where I got “Postcard,” and then I did a session after that in Colorado Springs, where I got “Goodbye Colorado.”
That’s so cool to hear because I was reading about that, how you went to those three different locations. It's cool to know which songs were created at which … and you’re from Iowa, right?
Yeah, I'm from Iowa. That's where I grew up. I spent most of my life there, and then I was just looking to do something different. I would never say anything bad about Iowa. I love that I'm from there … but I needed to get out and experience something different. I traveled around here and there, but I never really moved to a new state before. That was kind of brought on with COVID, and I landed my first remote working job, and then kind of felt like, oh, I have a sense of freedom. Let's do something different … me and my family moved from Iowa to Colorado Springs for a year, and that's where “Goodbye Colorado” came out of … [then] Austin came up through my work because my boss was like … if we ever do a like a headquarters, we would do it in an Austin … so I came to Austin, totally blind as to what the city was outside of its reputation … it’s the Live Music Capital of the World, and that obviously appealed to me.
How did you get into the music scene here?
One of the first friends that I made was through the skateboarding community … he was giving me some insight into the activity around the Austin music scene. As that was happening, I was meeting more people who were also into music, other musicians. And I started to form this idea [that] Austin has so many resources around … and I should take advantage of that while I'm here. Once I started thinking about that, it quickly switched to no, I'm gonna do this. Nothing is gonna stop me … I've been motivated to do a lot of things, but I've felt like a different kind of motivation about this project. I don't know what it is about it, but [it’s] pure determinism. I need to get this done. I have to do this. I want to do this. So I'm really satisfied.
That's beautiful. I feel like there's just such a community here, especially when it comes to music. There's such a tight-knit [community], everyone's supporting each other.
I describe it in a couple of ways. I think there's just a general energy in the city. Now that I've lived in different places and felt what that's like, I can compare and contrast, and Austin does have a good energy to it that lends itself to inspiration and creativity. It’s demonstrated in all the activity that you see in the arts, and it's not just music … I went to a friend's visual art show a couple of weeks ago … [and there’s] stuff in the filmmaking community.
I’m a film major, actually!
Oh, that's awesome … all of that to me, that’s where I want to be. I want to be around other artists and be inspired by them, and maybe even include them in my projects, so that we can work together, and Austin has quickly just felt more and more like this is my home. This is where I should be. This is where I can do the kind of music that I've always wanted to do, to do art at this level. The quality of the music that I put out, I'm really proud of because we did it on a very small budget comparatively to what someone would be paying if they were a major label.
It's so vibrant here. I love it. I love that everyone's creating stuff. I was kind of wondering, also, what does your songwriting process look like? How do the lyrics come to you?
When I'm going into this cabin, I'm truly there by myself with my gear and a pen and paper, and the headspace that I'm getting into – because I have a family – is just kind of like, where am I at? What am I doing with my life? Is it worth doing that, should I change something, you know? I think about that around my family members as well, so it's a very introspective mindset that I'm in when I'm going into these, and as I'm thinking through where I'm at in life, stuff comes up … “Can’t Back Down,” for example, ties into the mentality that I was talking about. My wife and I were going through a bunch of difficult things, and I was taking a step back and looking at life, and I'm like, man, these things are just laying so heavy on us. If we can solve these problems … we would just be in a much better place … [I wanted] to just encourage us as a couple, we gotta keep going. We can’t give up … That song is sort of like a pep talk.
Yeah, there's so much weight to it, but it's also like, wait, I can get through this.
One of my favorite things about the human spirit is that there's resilience. There’s always stuff in the world that really challenges us, and when we can stand up in the face of it, it's a really beautiful thing. I'm glad that that song was able to capture that in some way. I think people will definitely pick up on that.
I know we already talked about the process of writing the songs for the EP, but I was also wondering, what was the timeline for that? How long did that take? When did you go and record the songs?
I decided that for sure I was doing this about a year ago … I pulled my friend and Jeff, he's a guy that I'd worked with in the past, and I know he'd done a bunch of home recordings himself. I was like, will you join me on this as essentially a producer, and tell me, what can we do to [make] these songs feel complete? … So he gave me a bunch of track notes and one of the key things that came out of that was that these songs do feel cohesive. They feel like they're a part of a whole, but there's something missing in terms of the energy, and if you listen to the demos, they're comparatively much slower. There are no drums … I met a drummer who was going to be a drummer in [a punk rock cover band I was in]. His name was Ken, and we started to practice together … Ken was like, you've got originals, right? Let me hear them. I was very reluctant to share this music with him … these are pretty laid-back songs, comparatively, but he was really open-minded, and when he heard them, was like, I think there's something here. I want to help you finish these. We went through all of the songs and then added drums where necessary. We played around with percussion for “The Observer,” for example, but we decided we just wanted to keep it very, very simple, and we left drums out of that.
Yeah, it sounds good that way.
And I think one of the songs, ”Postcard,” we sped up by 20 beats per minute.
Wow, that’s pretty drastic.
It was one of those things where we got together, we started playing, and were like, this feels right. We should be playing this fast. It was just cool stuff like that along the way … Ken was like, I hear a female vocalist on these tracks. And I was like, dude, I know exactly the person, and her name's Ashley Wright. She's back in Iowa, but we had sung on projects before … We've written songs together in the past, and our voices sounded really good together. So I was like, hey, do you want to be a part of this project? I'll fly you down. I'll record you … and she was excited about it, and signed on to do that … everything that I recorded is in this little guest bedroom behind my house, and we went and got really nice microphones from rock and roll rentals in town. That’s how we were able to make it really cost-effective for good sound. The drums I recorded with Ken about a week in advance of Jeff coming into town, and when Jeff came into town, we recorded all of my parts in two and a half days. So that's all the guitars, the bass, all of my vocals.
That's really fast. It seems like there were a lot of moving pieces, but that part of the process was really fast.
Yeah. Then the following weekend, Ashley came in and I recorded all her vocals. It was kind of fun because this music had started as just demos. Every time you go through a different phase of this project, the song changes what it's going to be, and that was a really exciting and scary discovery process. As an artist, sometimes you kind of worry, like, is this thing gonna get out of hand and become something that I didn't want and that, [but] I was open-handed enough to let other people's input and stuff flow in, and as these songs came out, this is exactly what I wanted them to be. Even though my original vision of the song definitely had to expand to what it became, every song I feel like is the best, best version of itself, and I'm really proud of that.
That’s such a great way to put it. It's like they were transformed, but they still maintain their integrity, their intention.
Integrity is such an important word for me … I want to do everything that I can in service of the song to make whatever that concept is make the most sense … But also, I think my job as an artist is to be as close to my 100% self as possible. What I mean by that is, as soon as you start making stuff, you hear the internal antagonistic voice saying don't create this … you hear all those voices … I think my job as an artist is to ignore those and to follow the idea to where it leads. With each of these songs, we pushed it. We tried different things. Some things worked, some things didn't, and we arrived at the end of, oh, this song is done, and I’m happy with it …
I just love songwriting. I love the journey of it. There's self-discovery in it too … now that the work is done, and I sit back and I listen to it, I see different things about myself.
And you know yourself more.
You performed at Shiner’s Saloon recently, right? How was that?
It was fun. This is a brand new project, so that was the first live performance of this project in downtown Austin … we've got a lot of good feedback, [with people saying] the live experience was better than even the recordings … so that was really exciting to hear. And, of course, you got to put in the reps, like, we need to play more and get things really ironed out. And I really want to have the Austin version of Ashley … I still want that element of the songs represented live, and I need to find that person still, I do have a show that it's kind of tentative for December 20 at the Meridian.
Yes, I saw that!
We do have a female vocalist who is going to try and rehearse with us, so it’s a tentative thing. Maybe that can happen for the December show, maybe not, but I'm definitely in the process of finding female vocalists to perform with and fully replicate the feel of these songs live.
Do you have a favorite live experience?
My favorite band live is The Flaming Lips, probably. I definitely like bands like that that are in the alternative scene, in the late 80s to early 2000s definitely, all the 90s. That's the music that has imprinted on me, and that's where I really speak from … I don't know if my shows will ever get to the level of creativity that they have; they just have so much stuff that they do. But I love the idea of being that creative with the live show in its current form. We're just musicians. We're playing these songs and we're enjoying them, and we hope that you enjoy them, and we can create this musical moment together, but it's pretty bare bones at the moment, very punk rock.
But as you perform more shows, I’m sure you’ll be able to have more fun with it.
Yeah, I'm excited. Again, it goes back to Austin. I want to meet more artists, and as I meet more artists that maybe want to be collaborators in some sense, that can work itself out in our live shows and there could be cool stuff that we add.
Do you have anything else next in store?
I am a huge fan of Daniel Johnston, and he has such a deep connection to Austin, which was cool to discover. I followed him well in advance of moving here – I really love The Devil and Daniel Johnston, the documentary that covers his life. When I went back and watched it, I was like, oh, man, most of this documentary happens in Austin … I was messing around in my studio, and I started to come up with my own rendition of “Walking the Cow,” which is one of his more well-known songs. As I played on it, I did it in a higher register on the guitar; it kind of sounds like a surf rock song … I put together a demo of it in about 24 hours. I did it because it was really fun … I sent it to [my band], and they're like, we like this. We should play this. So we ended up playing it for the Shiners show, and that was really well received. I'm going to release that song on Hi. How Are You Day … and I'm reaching out to Austin's How Are You Foundation to see if there's any way that we can participate with that song.
What is Hi, How Are You Day?
It's an Austin-centric holiday around the Hi, How Are You Foundation, which is like a foundation that focuses on mental health in particular, specifically with musicians. Daniel, of course, wrestled with a number of mental health issues, so Hi, How Are You is just about promoting a culture of checking in with people and asking people, how are you really doing? Really leaning into each other's lives so that we can be a support for one another. But they usually throw a show every year I go. I've supported them in the past. The past performance was the frontman from Fleet Foxes, [Robin], and he played at the Paramount with another artist. Her name was Valerie June, and they performed for Hi, How Are You there. I would love to be a part of something like that in the future.
It will happen!
Apart from releasing that single in January, this is the beginning. I have a team of people around me [and] I know how to release music now. I'm a completely independent artist. I'm basically running my record label, and I'm my own publishing company. I'm doing everything by myself. I want to set up basically like a two-year cadence, so I take a year to write, and then I take a year to release, and then I take a year to write … I'm super excited about that, because I know, no matter what I'm doing, I'm always writing something … It's my outlet. Everybody kind of has a way that they can release; making music is the way that I do that … [I just] keep going and, just like the songwriting process, you start with an idea, and you see how far you can push it; that's really what I want this project to be. And because I'm independent, I feel like I'm giving myself all the freedom, freedom in the world to be as weird as I want to be. Music can get into some weird directions, and I want to have the freedom to go in those directions and really see what happens.
You’re keeping Austin weird.
Yeah, exactly.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.