Michael Riley journeys back to music creativity

SCROLL DOWN TO LISTEN TO A TRACK FROM THE NEW EP

It’s a hot summer day on the fringes of Heritage Hill and the neighborhood is boisterous underneath a midday sun that feels like a furnace.

Rush hour traffic flows past with little room between bumpers. Construction on the corner keeps a sort of cacophonous tempo of hammers and droning power drills. A group of children lob a football to each other in a grassy median.

At the top of the steps of a nearby duplex apartment, Michael Riley emerges onto the front porch in a patchwork button down, grey jeans and black wingtip boots.

A Mission to Grow Grand Rapids’ Music Scene: Riley (Photo/Tess Kirgan/Studio Obscura)

With the sunlight splashing over his face, an otherwise crimson beard reveals a few shimmering greys. At 42, those greys are well-earned. Riley has navigated the often unpredictable landscape of the music industry as a musician and as a songwriter for most of his life.

He pulls a seat out at a cafe table that wobbles on the concrete and speaks with a gentle, calming demeanor.

“I just feel so grateful that I was able to get out of the hole that I was in and get back to a place where music was a possibility. That I felt this creativity again and this desire to actuate it into the world,” Riley says.

“I took a break for a lot of different reasons that happened to be personal. I was finding out a lot about myself and my mental health. It took a long time to figure that out. I went on a journey of trying to regulate my body in a way that was sustainable and working for me.”

After taking a step back from performing publicly for over eight years, Riley began appearing at local open mics, and has been known to silence a room with little more than his powerfully raw voice and an acoustic guitar.

Now, he’s helming a new musical project under the moniker This is the Movie with a close cast of musicians and an EP titled “The Wheel Turns Itself,” released on Bandcamp in August.

LISTEN: “Here for a Moment” by This is the Movie

A NEW RECORDING AND A NEW RECORDING STUDIO

Suddenly our conversation is interrupted by a choir of car horns. A boy from the neighborhood football game scrambles across the lanes after a loose ball.

It’s a jarring, split-second commotion that seems to freeze the world, or at least the block, for an instant, as cars screech to a halt just in time to avoid catastrophe. The boy, football under his arm, dashes back out of the road unscathed.

Riley calls the group of middle school aged kids over to the stoop and gets up from his chair. He is calm but serious, as he cuts straight to the point. It’s more of a plea to be cautious than anything else.

“Please be careful and please look out for each other, this road is really dangerous. I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” he says, before resuming his perch on the metal stool. His words come back into focus.

“I really do kind of believe that this is the only life that we have to live … and whether or not I’m right or wrong about that doesn’t really matter, because we just have right now. I’ve lost people in my life enough to know that I don’t know how long I’m going to be here or how much time I have to offer to these things. And for whatever reason, it is important to me to leave records of my music. That’s the biggest priority at this point is making records,” Riley says.

The new EP, an instrumentally atmospheric yet lyrically somber batch of songs, was primarily recorded in St. Louis with producer David Beeman at Native Sound Studios. It follows Riley’s 2009 self-titled solo release.

Riley’s This is the Movie: Creating an image-filled, atmospheric yet lyrically somber collection. (Photo/Tess Kirgan/Studio Obscura)

In 2022, Beeman and Riley began collaborating musically. Riley took multiple trips to St. Louis, where the pair hunkered down in the recording room and chipped away at Riley’s growing collection of songs, which at the time were merely raw phone recordings. After a few sessions, they emerged with six songs that would eventually land on the record.

“We worked on them together, recording as we went, doing a little bit of arranging with the songs, and just mainly enjoying the moment together in this process of creativity that was kind unfolding in front of us, because we didn’t really have any preconceived ideas about what the record was gonna be, or what it was gonna sound like, or what instruments we’re gonna play. We just went at it,” Riley says.

While Riley is the sole songwriter helming the project, he’s accompanied on the album by Tim Lenger on bass, Adam Maness on piano, Sam Golden on strings, Tristen Gaspadarek on backing vocals and Beeman on drums, keys, synth and guitar. Beeman also assisted with arranging.

The result is a lush collection of songs with ethereal instrumentation backing Riley’s rugged voice and heartfelt stories.

We decide to venture out from the cement porch by foot to scope out Riley’s new studio, Tiny Tape Recordings. His boots click along the sidewalk as we wade through the thick humidity.

On the walk, I’m shown a few phone recordings. There’s one of him rapping over Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” It’s something he does for fun to dust off the vocal cobwebs. He handles the difficult rhymes with impressive cadence. We reach Midtown by foot, and descend into the basement of a brick building.

Riley leads the way and unlocks the door to the studio. It’s a narrow room with just enough space to move around. Still under renovation, Tiny Tape Recordings, a collaboration between Riley and Dustin Anderson, will be an all-analog studio that works with artists and bands of varying genres.

“Tiny Tape is a one-room, fully analog studio. With vintage gear from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, we help artists make songs that sound and feel like their favorite records from the golden age of recording — no sterile digital sheen or heavy editing — just real vintage tools (analog tape, ribbon mics, tube compressors, tape delays, spring reverbs) and real human expression,” Riley says.

“Our mission is to grow the Grand Rapids music scene by giving artists an affordable, inspiring space to create and release more music.”

Riley will perform on Monday (Oct. 13) at City Built Brewing in Grand Rapids as part of Nathan Walton’s “Monday Night Live show. Details here.

Contact Riley via Instagram @michaelrileymusicgr.

Riley: ‘The biggest priority at this point is making records.’ (Photo/Tess Kirgan/Studio Obscura)

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