Last week, Melbourne’s Mickey Cooper released his excellent debut solo album Hit The Ceiling – recorded last year in a tiny New York apartment with a single mic.
As Mickey explains, the record “dissects anxiety and documents the events and aftermath of a family breaking apart,” and we’ve asked him to take us through the process behind each deeply personal track.
“The songs… are snapshots of people and places I love,” he says, “which were irrevocably changed by this sudden rip. Anxiety is also a central theme throughout the record, as a number of the songs document my experiences of living with it.”
You’ll be able to catch Mickey’s tale being spun when he launches the album with September 11 at Melbourne’s Wesley Anne with Alexander Biggs and Hollie Joyce, while the album is available to stream below.
BURROWS
Keeping a relationship alive amid rampaging levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and cortisol in my body. I started writing this song after coming home from watching the Kurt Cobain Montage of Heck documentary. It doesn’t sound anything like Nirvana, but I remember feeling really energized by observing Kurt’s relentless and fearless creative drive.
The lyrics came a few days later when I was in the bath (the effect having obviously worn off), watching a tree flinching against the freezing wind outside. I used that image to draw a parallel with the physical effects of an ongoing anxiety condition I was experiencing.
JOHN CURTIN HOTEL FREAKOUT
A couple of the songs on my album, including this one, are explicitly about the pain of being estranged from my mother. With no idea how to repair what was a deeply honest and treasured relationship, I became stuck in a self-fuelling cycle of insomnia, anxiety and life-numbing medication.
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My immediate family, too, were at rock bottom. One night, my friends convinced me to go out to the Curtin hotel in Carlton for a jazz party. Pretty quickly I found myself completely overwhelmed by the noise of the crowded room, and felt the beginnings of a full-on panic attack. A friend noticed, and took me back to my house in a taxi. There, she listened with genuine care as I poured out my racing mind and sat with me as I eventually calmed down. The next day I finished this song, writing the last section about her beautiful kindness.
COUGHING UP THEIR HEARTS
Watching the slow-motion disintegration of my family. Questioning marriage. Questioning god. Talking in circles and going in circles. I played pump organ on a few songs while getting the album mixed at Bryce Goggin’s studio in Brooklyn, NY. This was the first of them. If you listen closely, you can hear my feet clumsily working the pedals.
RANDY’S APARTMENT
A song about the day after a sleepless night. It was written on a borrowed guitar in a borrowed apartment during a New York City heatwave. At four or five o’clock in the morning I gave up on sleeping and wrote the first three stanzas.
The next day I walked around with my girlfriend in a state of total disrepair, overwhelmed and overcome by the constant sensory excess of the city. The rest of the song was born out of several beautiful moments of clarity throughout the day that managed to pierce through the insomnia and anxiety-fuelled haze.
These were reminders that no great answers or revelations needed to be found, but instead a huge weight could be momentarily lifted just from trying to be right there, right in that moment, in that room, in that city.
AMTRAK ‘13
The oldest song on the album. Written on a two-day-long train journey between Salt Lake City and Chicago in 2013. I wrote the words “I want” at the top of a page without really knowing what I wanted and after half an hour of writing stream of consciousness I still didn’t really know what I wanted.
I was listening a lot to Dylan’s Bringing it all Back Home. In the recording, there’s a few bars of Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore at the end, which is the “secondhand spiritual” referenced in the song. My Grandpa used to play this on the piano for me when I was a kid. He couldn’t read music, but he could play anything by ear. But only in the key of e-flat. He was great.
HIT THE CEILING
When I was little, my Grandma and I were walking home from the supermarket. She noticed a man on a ride-on mower cutting the grass of the local bowls club, and took me over to get a better look. She thought I’d be intrigued by the shiny, big machine, but instead I completely lost my mind and started screaming to go home. She tells me this story pretty much every time I see her, along with the one about when I refused to leave her house because there were ants on the footpath.
Someone once said to me that having anxiety is like walking around with the constant feeling that a grand piano is about to fall on your head. I’ve heard other people talk about it feeling like a bear is following them. Either way, this song is about that feeling – having that fight-or-flight mechanism permanently switched on – and that I’ve probably had it switched on for most of my life.
CAROUSEL
I was waiting for my sister at the National Gallery of Victoria, as we had tickets to an exhibition. At the time, they had a full-scale, shiny gold carousel set up as an installation in the foyer. You could line up and go for a ride on it.
While I was waiting, I watched for about twenty minutes as people queued up, spun around on the carousel a few times, and wandered off. It was so silent and surreal. No-one was smiling or laughing – they’d just wait their turn, revolve around on this strange beautiful entity for a while looking all serious and then slip quietly off. Via the gift shop. It was the perfect metaphor for life.
102 (OUT AND IN)
Aside from a couple of organ and percussion overdubs, I recorded the entirety of the album in a tiny Manhattan apartment using a single SM57 microphone. For half the songs, I used an old ‘Norma’ parlour guitar that I bought at a flea market during my first week in New York. It sounded so cheap and dirty and percussive and I fucking loved it.
During the recording, I wrote this song, along with Randy’s Apartment on the Norma guitar and they’re two of the simplest, most direct songs I’ve ever written. I’ve tried playing this song on other guitars but it just doesn’t work. The song itself is for my Dad. It’s about our favourite place in the world and how we miss it. In the bridge you can probably tell that I listened to Elliott Smith a lot growing up.
HANGIN’ ON THE WORRY TREE
Overactive imaginations. Crooked teeth, crooked heads. Rattling houses, rattling people. My sister in the midst of it all.
COCO POPS BOX
I wrote the words to this song out in one go on the back of a Coco Pops box. It’s raw and it’s honest and it’s got harmonica in it and it exists like I exist because of my mum.
