Growing Concerns Poetry Collective

photographed by ALEXUS MCLANE

If you think about it, a deep breath and an exhausted okay feel like the perfect way to begin anything in 2020.

Zoom calls. Work commutes. TV shows. Why not a lead single?

Shout Across Mountains pensively brings us back into the sound of Growing Concerns Poetry Collective. The trio of artists made up of Mykele Deville, McKenzie Chinn, and Jeffrey Michael Austin, last released an album, WE HERE: Thank You For Noticing, in 2017, and a book the following year. The trio spent all the time in between working on a project, titled BIG DARK BRIGHT FUTURES, slated to release on October 16. While in-person performances and audience engagement helped manifest their first project, their upcoming work shifts the focus to purpose-driven creation for a calculated production that lives as a holistic collection of the Collective’s many talents. If this first single is a deep breath, the rest of BIG DARK BRIGHT FUTURES [BDBF] is the clarity that comes with a moment of personal contemplation.

Ahead of the late October release, we talked about the interdisciplinary nature of their music, the intentionality in their process, and the timeless nature of their work. With Jeff in Texas and McKenzie & Mykele in Chicago, the group’s been used to long-distance collaboration. In fact, BDBF’s whole recording process began when the album’s producer, R. Brok Mende, was in Chicago from out of town in January 2020. More than anything, this step of the Collective’s existence feels like one that considers the whole more than the sum of its parts. In a historical moment where reckoning has become a part of every decision, Growing Concerns is making art that thrusts you

Hooligan Mag (H.M.): What has the creative process looked like for y’all? And even beyond that, what’s the production process look like?

Mykele: With WE HERE, we already had pieces that, when we put them next to each other, were sort of already in conversation with each other … This record is a lot more intentional in its creation.

McKenzie: We were performing a lot before we recorded WE HERE. I thought that was gonna be our thing, just performing, but it was Mykele’s vision that led to recording the album. I think the thing that’s special with how we worked on BDBF is that it really took its time. All of the pieces that are a part of this next album, we wrote between 2017 and 2019. Jeff was working on things during that time, as well. A big dynamic of our group is that we are a collective, but we are all individual artists as well. I have my own work as an actor and as a filmmaker, and as a teacher and as a poet. Mykele has his own work that he does as an independent hip hop artist, and a poet. Jeff has his work as a visual artist and as a musician. During that time, we were all working in our own fields, so with all of that going on, we would come together as we felt necessary to put this work together or to write a new piece. It just took a lot more time to become a cohesive thing.

The most recent work was in 2019, but looking back at it, it could’ve been written a month ago. So much of what we were feeling as far back as 3 years ago continues today. Also, there’s no set way that we’d say, “Now we’re gonna do this thing.” It’s all very intuitive and based on what any of us could offer to each other at any one point in time. One of my favorite pieces on BDBF didn’t come together until we were in the studio!

Jeffrey: From my perspective, musically, I feel such a significant difference between the first album and this. The first album felt almost like a document of the performance work we had been doing, as a way to kind of [archive] the work we had been performing. On this record, because we’re not performing, we had a lot more time to develop this work. I was able to step into new territories in my role in that I was able to put up not only what I’m able to put forward live but to really sit and build these complex landscapes around the work. To be frank, there’s so much of this album that I still don’t know how I will recreate in live performances. 10 years from now, whenever we’re playing shows again, I’m not even necessarily sure how I’m going to perform these songs. [These songs] have been so deeply synthesized, but I think that allowed me to take what I see as my role in the group to a new level as well.

McKenzie: We worked on this album and our previous album with Brok Mende, who almost feels somewhat like the fourth member of the group sometimes. He picks up on some strong sonic perspective in the work we’re doing when we’re in the studio that I really, really appreciate. I have some musical inclination, but I don’t claim the title of [a] musician. I don’t think sonically, I think in terms of text. I think in terms of performance, so it’s really wonderful to work with someone who can hear the sonic sensibilities in something that occurs primarily for me in text.

Jeffrey: In terms of my relationship with Brok, on the musical & engineering side of things, I’ve been making music since I was a kid, and seriously producing music since I was a teenager. But, I never formally educated [about] how to use these production tools. I’m just going blindly into production software and turning knobs until I know that it feels the way that I want it to feel. When I’m having these conversations [with Brok] about where we want these songs to be, I’m often describing feelings to him. I’m talking to him in a language of feelings, saying “I want this to give you this feeling, and then sucker punch you with this feeling.” I’m talking about textures .. and Brok is the person who can then just say, “oh yeah of course.” If I didn’t have him there to bounce those kinds of ideas off of, the kind of fidelity and the life that’s ultimately breathed into the engineering of the work, it just wouldn’t be there.

H.M.: So this was all recorded in 2019?

McKenzie: We recorded it at the very top of 2020. Jeff had already recorded a version of the backtracks that Mykele and I were working with. Jeff moved to Texas by the end of 2019, so in January, Mykele and I went into the studio with all of Jeff’s music and recorded it in January.

H.M.: Y’all were doing the long-distance creativity before it was cool with the COVID times. How has it been working as a group on different sides of the country?

Mykele: I think the initial part of it was kinda stark. We had been so accustomed to being in the same room and having breadth to see better. We got this variable that Jeff was going to move, and we immediately had to think about how this project was still going to exist at a distance. Is it possible? We kinda came up with the idea that Jeff would lead up with the demo, we go and record with the demos. We send those back to Jeff, Jeff goes through and refines the demos until they have all of the ideas. Then, he sends it to Brok who turns up everything Jeff did. It’s a couple [of] steps involved in this record that give it a lot more detail when we were just smashing all of our stuff together. It came out beautifully. It sounds a lot more intentional because we can now take the space. This album has morphed into something that is going to be practically a digital album. Something to throw your headphones on and get into.

McKenzie: It really feels like that separation and the vibe of this album underscores what this moment means and feels like for so many of us. There’s the social distance, and we found ways to connect with one another as best as we can. But, we also found a way to create community and maintain relationships, and take care of ourselves, besides not being connected to one another.

Jeffrey: In retrospect, now that the album is essentially finished, I’m really glad that things were slowed down in this way. It allowed for us to digest things as they went, and we reached a new level with the work because of that patience, that slowness. I think, had we all been packed in the studio tryna pump this album out in one week, it never would have reached those levels.

H.M.: Would y’all wanna talk about those new levels you reached?

Mykele: Some of the stuff that we’ve been talking about for years now, in terms of our liberation as Black folk, in this album we gave each other the space to own and take over space an entire track if you want to. But, we found ways to still support each other, so the whole album still feels like it’s in conversation with each other. It’s like passing the mic to each other instead of waiting for the other person’s verse to end.

Jeffrey: From the very beginning of our working together, I feel like my role in this group has been so deeply rooted in listening. Listening to y’alls performance, y’alls delivery of your work, of your message, and listening for the ways in which I can build scaffolding to help that work continue, to elevate it higher. From this position, when I’ve had the opportunity with this album to really sit and listen to the delivery of those pieces in solitude, but also to an insane degree. I’ve listened to these pieces hundreds of times. I’ve tried to pick up on all the little nuances and subtle emotional shifts and subtle visual shifts that take place throughout the works. It’s just made me that much more capable of building an equally nuanced landscape for that work to live in. All of these things we’re expressing will make more sense when you’re able to listen to the full album. I feel like the complexity and nuance of the sonic experience is so much more intense and impactful. It feels like you really are being taken somewhere sonically. That’s my goal in all of this.

McKenzie: We talk about “Shout Across Mountains” as a really strong thesis for the album. It’s a nice little nugget of what we wanna talk about, but once you crack that nugget, there’s gonna be a lot more dimension.

It’s like passing the mic to each other instead of waiting for the other person’s verse to end.

H.M.: What did becoming a group look like?

Mykele: I had become more of a rapper and I wanted a space where I could pay reverence to just the poetry. I could just read out of my journal if I wanted to, but I had this reverence for live music. I loved Jeff’s percussive nature, so I wanted to make this a thing.

We met up and performed a couple of times. We were Growing Concerns, just Jeff and I, for a couple of weeks. If it had just remained me and Jeff, it would have become a duplicate of my rap career because I’m a storyteller. To make this unique and to give my stories [a] conversation, I knew I wanted to expand this group, but I just didn’t know how, [then] in comes McKenzie into my life.

McKenzie: We had met at the end of 2011. Mykele was an actor at the time, and we were doing a show together at the Chicago Children’s Theater. After that show, we’d run into each other here and there. In 2015, we ran into each other at Salon-a-Thon. We ended up chatting outside for a while, we were talking about poetry. We both had really evolved since we had met back in 2011, and we both had just started making space in our lives for poetry. Mykele invited me to come to practice with him and Jeff, and I didn’t really understand at the time that Mykele wanted this to be a whole thing, I thought he just wanted a poet for a one-off thing. I drove there, it was in Pilsen above this flower shop on Cermak. It felt like a real-life version of RENT like young people just trying to make something that matters.

I pulled out some pieces that [sort of]vibed with what they were leaning towards, and it was all so seamless. I remember just thinking, “That’s cool, and that’s cool too! Oh wow!” We picked the pieces that we wanted to do for the show, and then [Mykele] was like, “We’re a collective!”

Mykele: The only way so many of my things exist is through collaboration. My heart was so broken after my previous group had gone down. I kept trying different projects to find the right combination of people where it doesn’t have to feel so regimented. That was a part of the name, not just to be Growing Concerns, but to be Growing Concerns Poetry Collective, it takes a little pressure off the idea that we are this band. We can also individually be our own selves and come with our own flavor, we’re just in conversation.

It seems like this exists somewhere, but I haven’t really encountered how our stuff moves. I haven’t seen another clone of that, so let’s foster it.

McKenzie: Our first show was a Sofar, so we were in a living room, but the response we got was so strong. I remember going in thinking, “Is anyone besides us going to think it’s cool?” And the fact that so many people were digging it, and we were invited to do another show that same night, I realized quickly: there’s something special happening. We’re not reinventing the wheel by any sense of the imagination, but I think we are doing something within our own unique truth that other people aren’t doing right now.

Mykele: The only reason I felt like I knew this was going to be something good and useful, I had got to experiment with my own rap career before this. With my own rap, it’s similar in a way where it’s uncompromising, and I got to infiltrate a lot of the white spaces, the DIY spaces, and the bar scene. [That’s] the biggest thing with my shows: that Trojan Horse mentality. I come in, I’m on a ticket with some of those rock bands, and I start, and immediately I’m off about any issue of Blackness, uncompromising in these types of ways. I knew there was a market of a lot of these truth seekers that weren’t just looking to turn up, but to actually listen to it. I just didn’t think that by myself it’d be compelling enough. So, when I heard McKenzie do it way better than I could in the way that she does it, I knew that if we hit a living room, even just a small space, people are gonna be affected by her voice, my voice, and Jeff’s sensibility.

Jeffrey: I think that the multiform nature of what we’re doing is part of what, from the beginning, kind of compelled people and grabbed their attention, and continues to do so. You’re continually going through this process of, “What is this? Is this a hip-hop performance? Is it theater? What am I experiencing right now?”

We have this way of never quite letting you feel comfortable with your definition of us. I think that is a real strength of ours.

H.M.: Could you talk about why you started the track off with that sigh?

Jeffrey: There had been a number of different instruments I had been trying to teach myself how to play that melody on to see how it vibed on the original demo track. I was down here [in Austin] visiting one of my partner’s friends who has a 2-year-old kid. When we were hanging out over there, I saw that they had in the corner of the room this little child’s toy piano. I was like, “Hey, could I fuck with that?” I took it, I let them keep hanging out, and I was in their garage alone trying to teach myself that melody from the memory of that track. Once I started getting close to it, I hit record on my phone to try and get a recording of it. So I would be recording it, and I would fuck up, and I would go back to my phone and record it again, and I would go back to my phone and fuck up. That’s an unedited soundbite of me going to my phone again and being like, ‘okay,’ and then getting it. Once I integrated it into the track and listened to it unedited like that, I said, “it feels like part of it.” It also feels like the beginning of the record, like, ‘Here we are, we’re back again.’

McKenzie: I love how that happens. I don’t buy into coincidences a lot. It’s so wild that it happened that way because when I listen to that, there’s so much in the recent past where so many of us are collectively like... “Okay. This is [the] reality now.”

Jeffrey: I feel like sighing has become my main form of communication.

McKenzie: I think opening up with that sentiment is a really beautiful way to acknowledge where we all are. [It’s] a really wonderful invitation to move forward in a way. To take a step into what this is.

Mykele: We’re usually pretty aligned on what is beautiful. At first, I was like, “Was that me?” And once I realized it was Jeff, I was like, “Well of course!” We know each other well enough now that if Jeff goes out on a limb and does something on the track, I know it’ll be inline with elevating something that the track is saying or I’m doing. I think we have blended our styles together so well, that even if they’re different, we can trust each other in this triad of, “Lemme try this, and I’ll send it to you and see what you think.” I love that we’re able to be in conversation with each other in terms of art, even on the micro-level.

McKenzie: We feel like this album really leans into shadow work. This moment that we’re in right now is not a happy time in general. There is a lot that we’re being asked as individuals, and as a society, to reckon with and really evaluate, and really look in the eye, in ways that we’re not really used to doing. I feel like this album is part of leaning into that, actually facing a shadow and darkness. Just recognizing and not trying to “love and light” it away. It’s not just good vibes. Let’s actually deal with what’s in front of us. I feel proud of the way in which we accept that work and explore that work here. I think it’s really hard to do, and as human beings, we don’t really want to do that. But, I think it’s such an important part of the moment. We’re not gonna cross over, we’re not gonna get to the other side of this moment unless we do that. My hope is that this work is a tool to help people do that.

Mykele: We need to be honest about everything that is happening, honest about perspectives. Music can be a really great tool in helping people through and also giving them perspective. I think this record is really uncompromising in this way.

McKenzie: We’ve been really uncompromising on when this album is gonna come out. We had a couple of opportunities that would certainly help as a group, in terms of reach and all that, but all of those opportunities would have involved pushing back our release. We feel really strongly about this album coming out this year, and before the election. We feel like this is needed now. It’s not worth it to us to delay this work for our own purposes, we feel like it’s needed now.

Jeffrey: When we sat together as a group when I was in town, [we] talked through it. It became clear to us at that moment that we’re here, uncompromising to the degree in which we want to talk and confront these issues with this work. So much of the work, very loudly, proclaims a need to dismantle a lot of these traditional, tired institutions and models of working. It felt a little counterintuitive to say, “maybe in the interest of this one model, we should compromise and push our album back.” It all feels very aligned on a central principle level for us.