Quick Q and A with Michael Troy
 by Kathy S-B  ·  7 November 2009

Michael Troy is a hard-working and very inspiring individual. His music has the ability to “touch souls” as he notes below. His lyrics and instrumentation make you sit up and listen. It’s nearly impossible to ignore what he has to say and how he says it in song.

Michael’s music can be heard on his website. Here’s a video of Michael singing “Charlie Pike” from his debut recording.

You’ve had a variety of labor-intensive occupations such as millworker, carpenter, and fisherman. Being a songwriter is a different kind of labor, yet still very intense. How would you compare the songwriting life to that of a laborer?

They are very different, if for no other reason than the physical labors involved in the mill or at sea, as opposed to the mental labors of songwriting. With songwriting, you have an idea, you think about it, do some research and have a whole creative thought process going on. It’s not like you can just sit down and write something, there is a lot of thought involved drafting, editing, finding a melody and conveying a story that touches you, all in a short time.

Many reviewers note that your songs are those of honesty, integrity, and compassion. Those are some heavy duty adjectives but I’d have to agree. When you write your story songs, do you find you view the characters as though you were living their lives — walking a few miles in their shoes, if you will?

Sometimes, yeah. I know many of these people, the characters within the songs are friends from childhood and throughout my life. There are times I narrate their story like ‘Marlene’ and times that I feel the story as in ‘Four Boats Down’. Each song is unique unto itself . . . so is the way any writer relates to them.

Are there any compelling differences between “Mill Town Boy” and your previous two recordings?

Every CD is different. Every song is different, a different story. On Whispers in the Wind it was just the vocal and the guitar, solo, very basic tracks. On Romancing the Moon, the tracks were engineered, we added instruments, arranged the music. On Mill Town Boy I took the reins and produced it making the calls on musicians, arrangements, harmonies. But I am the same writer on all 3 CD’s, in the end I just took different approaches to each of them.

When did you actually start attending open mikes?

1998 was when I started going up to Club Passim in Cambridge

Had you been writing songs for a while prior to that time?

I wrote a little but there was no need to finish them, I didn’t gig. Then I was in a little trio for a while, we did covers. From there I just took the natural step to write my own music.

Do you have any defining moments — upon hearing or seeing other artists — when you thought to yourself, “Hey, I think I can do that too!”?

Well . . . people like Bill Morrissey, for instance, inspire me. That doesn’t mean that I can do what he does, but what grabs me as a songwriter is that across the board you can be yourself, you can find yourself and then you hone your craft. To be yourself as an artist and to be real is great feeling. To produce and to make good art is special. Joni Mitchell says in a song, ‘love is touching souls’. Songwriting is like touching souls, when you as an artist can make that connection with the audience it is like touching souls. It enlightens you to the fact that, we are all more alike, than we are different.