Mishka Shubaly is a true troubador. He drives across the country in his minivan, the back window adorned with touristy stickers hinting at the tens of thousands of miles that he and his rig have endured together.
He plays for whiskey money; he sells CDs for gas money. There’s a small area behind the driver’s seat that doubles as a bed (kind of), and it’s not unusual to see him changing clothes in a rock club parking lot or shaving at a rural rest stop.
It’s his calling, really. Shubaly, a former Denver resident and a graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a born writer whose wit is outmatched only by his high alcohol tolerance. He’s lived a life that would have killed somebody of lesser character. And not only has he lived to tell about it, he’s chronicled all of the sadness and dirt in the songs that make up his second record, the new “How To Make a Bad Situation Worse,” which will be showcased when Shubaly plays the Larimer Lounge on Wednesday.
Shubaly’s penchant for hard living has taken a toll, the most obvious manifestation of which is the drama that has plagued his life for as long as he can remember. He has a story for every bar in Denver, and five for every watering hole in Brooklyn, where he now resides.
Q: Whenever you come back to Denver, your first stop is the Lion’s Lair. Why?
A: When I first moved to Denver, I lived across the street from the Lion’s Lair and spent a lot of time sneaking in there and getting kicked out of there. I always appreciated it as a place where you could pay for your drink with a stack of dimes and not get a funny look and the bartender was more than happy to talk to you about her daughter’s ringworm or her boyfriend’s DUI or whatever. In a culture that fetishizes “realness,” well, the Lion’s Lair is about as real as it gets. I had some very great and some very bad nights there.
Q: What do you miss about living in Denver?
A: Other than the Lion’s Lair … well, many of the people I loved in Denver have died or moved away or gotten married (which ranks somewhere between moving away and dying in my book) so most of what I miss is just the character of the city itself, specifically Colfax. I’ve been shown a lot of kindness on Colfax, kindness I probably mostly didn’t deserve.
Q: You’ve said that you’re most often compared to Johnny Cash, Tom Waits or anybody else with a deep voice and a hangover. Who do you get the most?
A: If you’ve ever heard me compare myself to those two, it was just for the benefit of talent buyers or lazy free-weekly writers who insist that you pigeonhole yourself before they’ll even listen to your music. I’d love to shake the comparisons to those guys because one of Tom Waits’ or Johnny Cash’s toenail clippings has more songwriting chops than I do, and also because I rip off more from folks like John Prine, Richard Pryor, Eric Bachmann/Crooked Fingers, Chris Smither, Nick Cave, etc.
Q: On its surface, your music has an obvious, self-deprecating bent. But there’s also some heavy stuff in there. How do you find and manage that balance?
A: I don’t find that comedy and tragedy are necessarily opposites. You know, when the anvil falls on Wile E. Coyote’s head, that’s comedy, so I say why isn’t it comedy when the same thing happens to me? It’s not even that they’re two sides of the same coin, they’re intermingled so at times it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Q: Can you tell us a little about “Washington Ballet,” which includes the unforgettable line, “I’m living in the coldest room in Denver, on the longest street in the U.S.A.”?
A: Well, once I was young, drunk, crazy and in love. I know it’s difficult to imagine, but try to picture it. I was drying out at my mom’s house for the summer and writing fervent love letters to this girl every day. At the end of the summer, she was supposed to move back to Denver with me. Three weeks before we were to move back, she stopped writing or answering my calls. Maybe a year later I got a phone message from her, but I’ve never seen her again. She was my first love, so it was like a death for me, and I took it pretty hard. I came back to Denver by my lonesome, moved into a house on Colfax with some of my ne’er-do-well buddies and drank as much as I could.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
Mishka Shubaly
ROCK TROUBADOR | Larimer Lounge, 2721 Larimer St.; 9 p.m. Wednesday with Beat the Devil, Light Travels Faster, The Good Old Fashioned Sinners and Colder Than Fargo | $8 | bigmarkstickets.com, 303-291-1007
