Interview: The Sha Sha Collective
How singers and songwriters in the heart of southeast Tennessee keep finding (and creating) music everywhere they go
I don’t know if this is a particularly unique experience, but at my charismatic, Church of God-based Christian college located in Cleveland, Tennessee, I knew a lot of talented people. Music, writing, and academic efforts were a huge part of my own family, and at Lee University, I saw similar patterns emerge and then some. Almost everyone I knew could sing, play myriad instruments, write music, and wax poetic about the key philosophical and theological issues of the moment. And after college, those same people — even while maintaining relationships, families, and other jobs — managed to keep on creating music and other types of art at a rate that I, also a young mom and perpetually employed, personally couldn’t comprehend.
I didn’t realize until after I’d been living in Richmond for several years that the talent in my southeastern Tennessee hometown might have been sort of an epicenter of artistic virtuosity, full of semi-lost millennials capable of creating real, authentic art in the place I fled forever in 2015 that left me feeling dead.
To that end, I interviewed the primary members of the Sha Sha Collective: four singers, songwriters, and close friends who create songs, and maybe magic. It’s real, real good, and I’m not just saying that. They collaborate on almost everything, and yet at the same time, they’re very individualistic in their musical endeavors. They’ve been releasing music at an astounding rate for four people:
Michael De Backer - With an extensive musical history spanning a wide range of genres, his music featured as part of the Sha Sha Collective is folksy, homey, and intense, which is exactly the vibe he himself gives off: reminiscent of ‘60s folk music but far more personal than political, with an enviable lyrical perspective paralleling one of our mutually favorite musical artists, mewithoutYou. His available albums are Tennessee and It Was Always Morning, as well as the single Apocalypse.
Rachelle Barr of Cartinglee - Perhaps it is overly cliché to compare female songwriters to Tori Amos. However, that’s exactly the vibe that comes through in Cartinglee, with ‘90s-esque markedly feminine vulnerability mixed with wanderlust themes throughout, evoking not only Amos, but also Natalie Merchant. Her available album is I Need You, I Don’t Need You as well as the singles Wishful Incantations, Make Something Good, In Retrograde, and Reverie.
Erik Simpson of Dream Jurnal - You might call Erik Simpson the brainchild behind Sha Sha Collective, with a degree in Music Business, but that seems unfair to the “collective” of the other three hardworking musicians. Nonetheless, his music makes him seem like an ephemeral presence, as if Lou Reed was giving a Tiny Desk concert, with a voice like an accordion that moves in and out. His available albums are The Great Unnecessary With, Sad Songs, and Spiritual for a Dying Man.
Zak Spence of Empty Dress - Of all the artists, I would say Empty Dress has the most unpredictable style, which, as someone with eclectic and erratic musical tastes, I thoroughly appreciate. With elements of Sufjan Stevens mixed with shoegaze, each song feels like a small adventure or a story, and you don’t know where it will end up by time the song is through. His recent single is quite remarkable, reminding me of an obscure cover of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” by the Butthole Surfers — one of my all-time favorite songs. His available album is Oklahoma as well as the single Tuesdays in Yemen.
All of them have full-time jobs and families outside of their musical endeavors. Available on Spotify (linked individually above) and Bandcamp, where they are currently donating half of their profits for the month to four different charities: Doctors Without Borders, Family Promise of Bradley County Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and Becoming Brooklyn. You can purchase the songs (and help donate to those charities, and see why they are so important to the artists) here.
I’d long been fascinated with all four of these people, in the sort of shy, distant way one might view celebrities from your hometown, even though they aren’t celebrities to most of the world… yet.
(This interview was condensed for length and clarity.)
JCM: How did Sha Sha Collective get its name?
ES: We were at open mic night at Gabriel’s Pizza, one time I said, “Okay everybody, instead of clapping, I want you to say ‘Sha sha sha sha sha sha.’” And so then, like a year later, later on that year, we were talking about, hey, why don't we just start a label? And so we had a meeting, I think all of us except for Rachelle were there. And it never really materialized. But yeah, it was planted. Earlier this year when we were writing a bunch of songs in February, I just suggested it, and everybody was on board.
JCM: Is Sha Sha Collective a label?
RB: I guess it’s kind of a label.
MDB: It’s like a flea market. Sha Sha is the market itself. And we all rent individual booths where we can come and go as we please.
ES: That’s not a bad analogy.
RB: When I released my album in March, that was the first one we put the Sha Sha label on.
ES: And I put one out two weeks later, that I'm working on by myself. And I was gonna put it under Sha Sha anyway, because that's what I've been calling my independent label for years. And we just decided to make a kind of an unofficial-official thing. And then when the next month, we're like, Mike, let's record, we did. And that's when we put Mike's album out. That was the first project that literally all of us worked on together.
“[Sha Sha Collective] is like a flea market.”
JCM: The one last year or the one last month?
ES: The one last month.
RB: Yeah, released in October.
ZS: I guess you can say we’re songwriters with benefits.
JCM: How long have you all individually been making music? I wanted to know which instruments you played. I think you all play guitar, right?
MDB: Let me start. Let me start as the least versatile. I play guitar and bass. And that's it. And the skin flute. I wrote a bunch of really terrible songs in high school. And then I think I don't I really wouldn't consider my my earnest songwriting career to have started until 2008 when I was in Cambridge. And then Erik and I started, and that’s when I really started earnestly. I guess honing the songwriting craft was 2008 and then I think I wrote stuff that I'm not ashamed of. That's how I gauge it. Everything that came before that I was pretty ashamed of because I was writing these really crappy Christian songs or instrumental songs or something like that. And then from 2008 onwards, I really expanded the the content of music.
RB: I don't know why Michael said he's the least versatile because I only I play the piano, and I play the guitar. I could probably play other things, but I don't usually, I'm the only female vocalist in the group currently — at least sitting here. So I do get to be on everybody's songs for that reason. Super fun. I love that. I've been making music since high school and writing songs since high school… and I took a long hiatus from writing music and really playing music at all when I had my kids. For obvious reasons.
MDB: Can I interject something? I would like you to strike everything I had said from the record. Because in 2005, Zak and I formed a comedy band. Oh, yeah. We were The Traveling Troubadours and we actually wrote really, really good music together, we—
ES: Won a couple contests.
MDB: We actually won some open mic contests. We took home some cash prizes. And we were a bit of a cult hit at the university in 2005-2006. And those songs were very good, now that I look back on it. But those were all comedy. Anything that I tried to do seriously before 2008 was really hokey and awful. But the comedy stuff was was golden.
ZS: That segues into me because I started writing songs when I was 18, with Mike. And I had started taking piano lessons the summer before I went to college. And I had been a drummer before that. But I started playing guitar when was 25. I guess my main instruments are guitar, drums, and I sing, and I kind of play piano. I used to play a lot more but I don't really anymore.
RB: You play the bass too. I play bass because I have to. So far the music that he's put out, he's recorded all of the instruments on it.
ZS: Yeah, so I released Oklahoma, my first album, this year in May. And I recorded that in 10 days. In probably a manic episode, honestly. I wasn't sleeping.
ES: And I wake up in the middle of the night to hear him singing harmonies to his own music.
ZS: It was a was interesting experience for everybody. It was a blur. And yeah, I recorded it and mixed it and mastered it. It all sounds like it happened in 10 days as well.
ES: But there really is something special about that though.
JCM: I find that really endearing.
ES: The oldest song I remember writing was in first grade. I wrote a song about dinosaurs and it was a rap song. And so based on that, I think my songwriting comes from the fact that I was poor. So anytime there was a project that needed to be done, it was like, well, what can I do that doesn't cost anything… I can write songs. So I wrote songs about science and colonialism. But in middle school, I learned how to play tuba. And then I was in band for a year and a half. And that second year, I learned to play trumpet. I got a guitar when I was 14. And that's when I really just started writing a lot of songs. And then there was this weird period of time because Mike, Zak, and I all lived together — we lived in the same dorm our freshman year, and then our sophomore year, we were in the same apartment. And then during that time, I was a music major. So I was studying music all the time. And I was trying to incorporate these musical ideas, but just got burnt out on songwriting. Because a lot of things were transitioning in my worldview and none of the songs felt authentic. And so I just stopped writing songs. But it wasn't really until Mike and I started writing in 2007-2008 that I think I started taking songwriting as a serious skill. I feel like songwriting is probably the musical skill I do best.
RB: You're a band director, so you can play all sorts of instruments.
ES: What instruments do I not play? I don't play violin. Yet. I was just talking to Mike about borrowing his violin to learn it.
JCM: I wanted to ask what your band names mean like, Cartinglee and Dream Jurnal without the “o” and Empty Dress and “Michael De Backer.”
MDB: Mine is this weird nickname I got about 33 years ago.
ZS: Empty Dress is a band that I left grad school to start, and was deeply disappointed a month later when everyone quit but me.
ES: We quit by going on a tubing trip down the Hiwassee.
ZS: That I didn't go on. It was actually pretty devastating experience. I was like, I'm gonna make music, I'm gonna do with my friends. And then I ended up doing it all alone, which is kind of depressing. I was like, well, Empty Dress was the name of the band. We really liked it. And I still like it. So it was my band. I left college to start it. So it's me now. And it's only me and no one else is allowed. That's what they get.
ES: I can't remember where Dream Jurnal came from. I was recording an album between the years of 2013 and 2017. Yes, it took me that long to finally put it out. And I didn't have a name. I didn't want to go by Erik Simpson. But I was very fascinated by dreams and the idea of visions and stuff like that. However, there was another guy named Dream Journal doing some DJing or something in Portland. So I just changed the spelling.
RB: Cartinglee. So I actually was in middle school, I think or maybe even elementary school. And I was homeschooled. And I wrote stories, like I would wake up every day and do morning pages. I wish I still had a habit like that, where I wrote every day. But I wrote about this place like this imaginary place called Cartinglee. So the lee comes from the part of a boat that is more protected from the wind and the storms. And carting, it means carrying something. So it's like carrying your shelter with you, I think is what I had probably had in mind when I named it and it kind of makes sense. I don't know Cartinglee is very much a place for me. And I feel like it's like a turtle shell. But I do feel like, in particular, the album I'm working on right now has a lot of songs that are about places. Particularly places around here in Tennessee, that I frequent, that I love, and like the valley down beneath this mountain, and like the mountain that I live on, it's very much centralized to a place, so that's where it comes from.
“I wrote about this imaginary place called Cartinglee.”
JCM: That sounds beautiful. How often do you record and make music or play together?
ZS: We always try to have a project going. And it kind of depends. We have different workflows, I think. I don't think any of us, as a collective, have a coherent workflow. Like with Rachelle, we're kind of arranging music together. And then recording songs. Tracking stuff. My workflow is obviously very different, because I'm kind of recording and writing at the same time. But I don't know. When are we playing together?
RB: Well, I think playing together is something that we need to do more of, because we all love it when we do it. But we ended up being adults and having children and full-time jobs. I mean, like the other night was a Thursday night and Erik and I were like, alright, let’s do this, it's you know, 7:30. And so we lay down a bunch of acoustic tracks. And it was hard to kind of push through that because at 7:30 like, you'd rather just sit there and watch Netflix all night.
MDB: It is a miracle that we get anything done. Because our projects are not small projects, either. My album ended up being this colossal endeavor where there were tons of different parts that everybody had contributed. And it was this massive album. And now we're doing Rachelle's.
RB: Honestly, I feel like if it weren't for the lockdown that happened in March, Mike’s album might not have happened. There was like, this weird time where there was more space in our lives to actually think about taking on a project.
ES: I mean, it helped that three of us were in the same quarantine loop.
MDB: I was not if you're wondering who the outlier was, however.
ES: But notice it was Michael’s album that got recorded. I was like, Michael, I'm coming over, we're going to record this album, you're going to stand in your kitchen, and I'm going to sit out on your porch. We're going to record this album. And we did. And I mean, I was there for eight hours sitting outside on his porch while he was inside. And we just kind of like talked through the door.
JCM: What are the differences in the style among the four of you? I know that you collaborate a lot as well. Like, is there a different vibe for Dream Jurnal than there is for Michael?
ES: I well, I think it goes back to our influences. As a teenager, I listened to a lot of vocalists who were punk singers or emo singers. And so I think you can hear that come out in my vocals. For me, and I think that's one of the things that, you know, I write kind of these sad, bulky songs, but then my vocals have a little bit of that in them. I’ve tried to tone down over the years. But also, I think sometimes, especially with The Great Unnecessary With, it was three years of music. So I can't say that there's like this overarching style. It's just that I was recording stuff, and then finally compiled it and put it all out.
ZS: I have a lot of songs that are fictional. I think it's hard for me to kind of write about myself sometimes. So I write and I tend to find myself in stories about other people. A song that Erik actually really loves, “Chesapeake,” is about a fictional breakdown of a relationship, kind of based on stuff that was happening in my life, but nothing really direct you know. In February, I was writing songs about these characters that are, I don't know, entirely fictitious and so I guess this is sort of storytelling. Musically, I really like chorus guitar. I like distortion — my most recent single “Tuesdays in Yemen” is just a rock song. But also kind of experimental. It's really psychedelic.
RB: I feel like the album that is going to come out is going to represent my style better than anything that I've done so far. Because I feel like I've always had that vision that I've never been able to accomplish or achieve. I don't know what my style is — I think it is shifting — but dystopian folk! We're gonna stick with that one.
MDB: I don't know what I am. Definitely folk influence, a lot, until this month. “Cinematic folk” is what we kind of landed on for my album because it’s all like soundtrack kind of music, you know, all really sad shit that you hear. “Glad Morning,” the last song on my album. I wrote that after watching A Marriage Story. Because I lived A Marriage Story. And so I wrote that as a track that plays underneath that movie as it's going, but now I’ve got an electric guitar and I'm getting back to my rock roots. When I was in high school, I played in a rock band, a Christian rock band. Super awful. I'm also writing pop music now too. I just had this itch to write really catchy pop music. So much of my serious stuff I feel like doesn't get heard and so I get frustrated, and I am an attention whore and I want people to pay attention to me.
RB: One thing that's cool about this group of people is because we've been musicians for so long is that we're really capable of doing pretty much anything we want. So like, in some ways, it's almost too much freedom sometimes I think. But the other night, we're doing a song of mine. And it's totally it's gypsy jazz, yet the single that we released of mine was a totally a '90s rock song. We've talked about having a group of very Americana songs; we could play jazz if we wanted to. It's both really good because we can have all these elements, but it also sometimes it feels like we have this palette that is maybe too broad.
ZS: I think we get bored. We want to try things.
RB: We want to have the freedom to play.
JCM: Where do you get the inspiration for your music and lyrics — you've talked on it a little bit throughout the interview — but Erik used to occasionally send me songs, and I used to try to guess what they were about. Are they autobiographical based on your own life? Or is it like with Zak, where you make up a fictional story in your songs?
ZS: I do have a couple of autobiographical songs. I was gonna say Oklahoma itself is autobiographical. It's not, it's more about my mom. To me, you have a character or you think of a story. And what you've been through informs that perspective. So in a way you're writing your own memories. Or you're projecting them into some fictional scenario, like I wrote a song called “Danny Weaver” — we're all laughing because it's 16 minutes long. And it's entirely fictional, but it's based on the story of a guy who runs away from an abusive home. I didn't do that. But I have been homeless before. And so I brought that on this kid who's like, busking and riding trains and stuff. When I start writing a song, I almost never know what it's gonna be about until until I'm in it.
RB: I think that all of my songs are pretty much just straight from this deep emotional core. I don't feel like there's any kind of fiction in most of my music; it might become storytelling or metaphor. For me, the stories are always metaphors for things that I have experienced or felt, but I don't they like they don't feel autobiographical, necessarily, but they're definitely all like, from that same place.
MDB: My songs are kind of a patchwork. Some of it’s creative. A lot of it draws from my own life. It Was Always Morning is pretty much the story of my divorce and recovery from it. It's got songs in there from two weeks before I split up with my wife. “Darling” is this song I wrote to say, let's stay together. And then two weeks later, I would move out of the house and everything was in shambles. “Can’t Get Warm” is about me looking at my son one night and just thinking like, everything blows, you know, like, this sucks. “Hey You Two” is about me getting sober, and the song of hope to my kids.
ES: I have this theory about my songwriting, that every song is about the same exact thing. Which is, one day, all of this will end and we’ll all be dead. But there's a hope that we can make it good while we're still alive. Which, I mean, most of my songs are kind of like that.
JCM: We all came from Lee University. I grew up in Cleveland, Tennessee but I moved around a lot in middle school and high school. And came back for college. I’ve lived in Richmond now since 2015. I'm not the most traveled person in the world, but I will say, when I was at Lee, I felt there was just a higher concentration of talented and artistic people. I don't know if that's bias or anything. I just felt like I was always meeting people who were doing something extraordinary. That’s had a big influence on me. I don’t know if it’s something about Pentecostalism. Something about religion in general makes you more drawn to being musical and more creative. I just want to know how that shaped where you are now, in your religious journeys. I've always had this horrific dichotomy of like, just love and hate with so many aspects of it.
RB: I don't know if the church I grew up in was really Pentecostal. But then when I came to Lee, the Pentecost experience was like, wow, okay. My church wasn't even that traditional that I grew up in — really, it was nondenominational. But Lee was still like, “whoa, alright. Alright, this is what we're doing.” You know, like being slain in the spirit and stuff, like I was like, alright… but I definitely think that one of the beautiful things of that movement is that it does value expression. In a lot of ways, it then puts limits on that expression, which I think is not good. But it encourages it in the first place. And so maybe that's where a lot of our trauma comes from. I definitely think that that influenced me. I guess where I come to now? I don't know, I heard Allison Russell from Birds of Chicago, she called herself a “hopeful agnostic” and I thought that was really beautiful. I think that, for me, it's probably a little bit more on the hopeful side than the agnostic side. But I really related to that coming from my background at Lee. I definitely think you're right, that the concentration of creativity encouraged a freedom of thought.
ZS: I found the school experience at Lee — there's tons of talented people. And I was surrounded by a lot of really intelligent people, like, I got into a crew that was like, just super smart. And not that religion creates intelligence, to the contrary! But I think that sort of talent made those people felt driven in a way. The word “purpose” came into my head, I think that's a big thing. And evangelicalism is purpose, like your calling. You are supposed to be doing something for God. Which is kind of weird, because they put so much emphasis on just saying the words, “I believe in Jesus, I give my heart to Jesus.” “You got to get saved, man. Gotta get saved!” So I am now like a vaguely spiritual atheist. I was very Christian when I went to Lee at first, and I started majoring in theology. But I felt like I was deconverting as soon as I became a Christian, because I kept learning about it. And the more I learned, the more I was like, this is a lot of bullshit. And I started thinking about the problem of evil later on in college, and it just didn't seem to jive like that a God that we call good, or in a way that we understand good to be, is letting all this shit happen. And he cares about us. And I don't know, it didn't make sense to me. So I had a very traumatic deconversion, because my faith was really everything to me. I'm kind of over it now, the wound has been cauterized. But I do remember when I went to Lee, every young person is like, what am I going to do with my life? I was always thinking, I really want to do music, but maybe I should do something else. And it was this battle I had the entire time, but the question that was really in my mind was, what is my purpose? What is my calling? And I think that that was something that the church put in my head. Not that achievement and having a sense of purpose isn't important to every human being. But I know that the context and the message was and I was hearing it all the time. And I wonder if that has to do with why we met a lot of really driven, talented, performing people at Lee University.
“I had a very traumatic deconversion, because my faith was really everything to me.”
MDB: I have never actually thought about the people I've met having anything to do with some sort of religious thing. At Lee, I just thought, we're all in college. This is where you meet super talented people, because we're all burgeoning idealistic. I never actually associated it with anything to do with evangelicalism or anything or Pentecostalism; I was never Pentecostal. I kind of ended up at the university by accident because my best friend was going there and I went with him so that we could be roommates. He left after the first semester, and Zak and I became roommates. And then it's all history from there. What religion has done for me in terms of music, though, has definitely showed me how not to talk about religious things in music. Because I grew up listening to Christian music, and it is something I look back on with this kind of icky revulsion. You know, this this cloying, sickly, sweet, Jesus-y stuff, I hate it. I don't like it at all. Now, I don't like worship music. It always bothered me, I could never find worship music that ever felt was very genuine or real. You can tell when somebody's kind of lying to you, or they're trying to make themselves believe something and you know that they don't believe it. So I kind of really, when it comes to religion and music… I don't. I'd never write things very explicitly religious in my songs because it doesn't feel right. The first time I experienced somebody writing about religious themes that felt genuine was mewithoutYou. Listening to [lead singer] Aaron Weiss talk about religious things poetically, because he did it with such beauty, but also with a lot of heart. He was enraptured or enamored by it. And then you get into the writings of like Rumi, or any of the mystical poetry. I understand now this feels real, but I've never found a way to replicate it in my own music. So I just don't, right? So I always write these kind of vague themes into my music, like things of dawn, or light, or daybreak, that come from religious hopes of mine, but I don't name it because it doesn't belong there. I don't think I haven't found a way to make it belong there. And I've kind of ended up in a very, you know, different place religiously. I've kind of ping-ponged all over the place. I went very liberal, and then I went completely nontheistic, and then to Buddhism, and then back to liberal Christianity, and now to Eastern Orthodoxy, which is a very conservative type of Christianity. Part of the reason why is because iconography in the theology of that — I found something very beautiful. And so beauty is like, the real thing that draws me I guess, you know, and compels me. And that's the reason why I've never liked a lot of religious art that's in the kind of evangelical vein is because it doesn't strike me as very beautiful, because it doesn't strike me as very true. And so if it doesn't sound beautiful or true, I don't do it.
ES: Mike teaches theology.
MDB: Yeah, I do teach theology. But that has nothing to do with… I can’t translate those things into this conversation, if that makes sense. You know what I mean?
JCM: I like that you keep it distinct, I find it impossible to keep all the different areas and things in my life distinct at all.
MDB: Okay, so let's put it this way. There are things that are very, very precious to me, about religion, right. And if I were to try and express it in a certain way that took away from the preciousness, I would feel like I'm devaluing it. And so, it's not so much that I try and keep them separate is that I feel impotent in in translating it, you know what I mean? So my poetry fails me.
ES: I will say my involvement with church is what made me a guitarist. That's the only reason. So if I had not been in church, I would probably just have learned a few chords. But the fact that you had to have new music every week — that was teaching you. I mean, I was learning guitar, and luckily, there was a good guitarist there who was showing me the ropes anytime I needed it. So I think as far as the church’s influence on my musicianship, I would not be the musician I am today, were it not for church, were it not for the sickly sweet worship songs. I do want to say that I don't think we should throw out an entire genre of music. Ever.
ZS: Erik has a very beautiful worship song voice.
JCM: Do you still do worship music? I know you were doing it for a while.
ES: I do. I sing every other Sunday at a Methodist church. So in 2005 I came to to Lee, basically a nondenominational Pentecostal, I was roommates with a guy named Andrew Morgan, who's still one of our good friends. He lives down in Alabama. He teaches philosophy and I learned how to think from Andrew, and it was in that year that I stopped being a Christian. I stopped being a Christian for years, because things were not lining up. The things you read in the Bible weren’t lining up with the way you see people act in church. There are all these questions, like you grew up in the church thinking that like, homosexuality is a sin, and then hear these people saying, you can be gay and a Christian. And, you know, you the the shame of realizing the untruth of your belief —it's humiliation! And humiliation, obviously, brings humility. Zak, what did you say about your deconversion? What was the word you used? It was “traumatic." It’s traumatic to let go of these heavy coats you wore. But then years later, in 2013, my whole world shattered because I went through a split with my wife at the time. And I had not thought about it at all, I was just ignoring the fact that spirituality exists, and that people still think about things like God, and people still think about things like the afterlife, and and I just totally ignored them. All these thoughts that people have, and I’d just written them off. I went through this, like deep, deep spiritual change, and actually came back to Christianity. What Zak said about when he came to college is like, the more he learned, the more he deconverted. But I was like, okay, let's try this out again. Because nothing else is working, I'm having a nervous breakdown, I need something to latch on to. So I kind of regressed to what I had in college or what I had in high school. How does it get into my music? I think there are these feelings that there's more than what we think we know, like the mystery of life and some real experiences with my friends. And when I write, I want to make sure that I write with those feelings of oneness and inclusiveness. And to come back to the class I had a couple years ago — Philosophy of Music. We read a book called Unceasing Worship [by Harold Best.] It says that when we were born, we were born worshiping. And I really loved that idea. Because it takes away the pressure to have to write some sort of worshipful anything, right? Every life that we live is kind of the extension of the created and the creation of the universe. The universe wasn't created, the universe is still creating. And I mean, you talk about fodder for songwriting? To think that weirdly about the continual creation of the universe, I think, is just absolutely beautiful.
“The universe wasn’t created, the universe is still creating.”