Singer-songwriter Mikal Shapiro introduces a new act on The Musical

It’s unlikely that Broadway is in Mikal Shapiro’s future. But the singer-songwriter admits an affinity for the grand musical-theater operations that have swept its stages. This news might surprise some — even Shapiro confesses that she hid her love of musicals when she was a teenager — given her past leanings to folk and roots music. But Shapiro’s latest album, The Musical, fully merges those sonic interests.

Like any Broadway production, The Musical‘s 10 tracks flirt with a variety of styles. For the first time, we hear Shapiro tap into pure pop and beatnik jazz in addition to the downtempo folk that fans have come to expect from her. The songs serve as a cycle, telling a story in tones familiar to fans of Neko Case or Laura Stevenson. It makes for a deep, rewarding listen, one that bestows unexpected insights with each play.

The Pitch spoke with Shapiro ahead of Saturday’s album-release show at Davey’s Uptown.

The Pitch: Having listened to The Musical for a week solid, I’m curious as to whether the title reflects the content. Are you going for the feel of an actual musical?

Shapiro: It’s definitely a concept that I was toying with, as sort of an abstract, but yeah. The way the song styles shift from one to the other, and that there’s two acts [built into the album, five songs each]. It’s kind of like an autobiographical musical. There are characters. There’s not a narrative thread, but structurally, it’s based around the idea of a musical.

I was listening to “Hot Cool” when it all clicked. I’m not sure what made it that particular song.

It’s probably the schmaltziest song on the album. Maybe that’s why. [Laughs.]

How did the idea of structuring it as a musical come to be?

Well, I’ve always messed about in classical songwriting styles. I guess I had a sort of ADD with what I liked to hear. I like all kinds of music and all kinds of approaches. I don’t stick to just one style. It [thinking about musicals] was a way to structure the album and to choose songs out of my catalog. It gave me some form to work around.

I never would have admitted this when I was younger, but I grew up listening to musicals, and I think that they’ve had some influence on me. I know when I was a teenager, it was really uncool to talk about how much you loved musicals, but I’ve come around.

The album also lends itself to deeper listening on an auditory level — hearing “Nope” on headphones brought the brushes on the drums into sharper focus — so that the more you listen, the more things you hear.

Yeah. [Engineer] Joel Nanos is a frickin’ genius, but I think the album takes a few listens, sort of, to breathe. You start to hear things — more things. It opens up, in a way.

What was the production like?

Working in the studio, you find the time to express the space and the breadth in [the music], and yet, allow it to contain a subtle complexity. I haven’t really talked about my music and super-analyzed it, but I think, working with Joel, he really understands the audio space as a physical space. It’s deep, it’s wide, it can be shallow, and hearing him talk about the stereo field, and being able to visualize it in that way allowed us to place things in that space like we were decorating a room.

Working through the album, it seems that there’s a mood and voice that come through every song. What do you do to maintain that voice, despite the disparate styles in which you’re working?

A lot of that is that I have a particular sound and I can’t get away from it, no matter what I do. I have embraced it, and it’s like it’s my own unique identity in my music-making, and it doesn’t matter what I play: It’s going to be there because it’s me. I bring myself completely to the table.

You’d alluded to the fact that The Musical is autobiographical, but there’s no narrative thread. What, if anything, does it tell the story of?

Maybe I’m universalizing, but I feel like, whenever you write a song, in general, you have to draw from your own experience. You put yourself into the position of the character, whoever it may be, even if it’s someone else. And in that sense, it’s autobiographical. It’s a reflection of your own experience. In some ways, in a tongue-in-cheek way, I feel like anyone who makes an album — it’s their musical, and I was just calling myself out on it this time around.

Maybe it’s different if you have a band, but if you have a principal songwriter, and the music is built around that person’s songwriting, I came to that revelation at some point: “This isn’t me just making a musical about myself.” I saw it everywhere, at that point, once I thought of it in that light.