Meet New York City’s newest folk-rock duo Mikey Leão

Mikey Leão, New York City’s newest folk-rock duo, is fast launching with the release of their first single, “Leftovers,” on February 23rd. The first of many to come, the duo's newest project is composed of Michael McCanna and Maia Leão. They have combined each other's skill sets to fit together perfectly, like that last puzzle piece that makes the picture complete. 

“Leftovers” recounts young teenage energy and the complicated emotions that come with it. The title song opens with a nostalgia-inducing acoustic guitar strum as the lyrics cut in. “Teen angst makes it so hard to enjoy things just as they are,” the chorus reads, a phrase that everyone can relate to and interpret personally. The lyric “just as they are'' repeats continuously towards the end of the song, spinning round and round hypnotically. The soothing vocals paired with a steady acoustic guitar rhythm and a soft electric guitar riff continue until the song fades away to silence. 

Okay, so let's just start by talking about how this new idea for the project came about.

Maia: I feel like it wasn't so much as an idea, we just started. We've known each other for a long time and always kind of played music together. And then when I moved up here last year we started. He has a studio because he plays with Sue Your Landlord. So I started just going and playing along with some music that he had semi-started. We kind of started working together, and then we started liking some of the songs that we worked on, and then it just became a more regular thing. We ended up with three songs, and then it just felt like we should keep going, and it felt very natural.

Michael:  Yeah. I was trying to just practice in my studio recording techniques, just trying to get better at home recording stuff. So I was just making very simple songs, and I hated singing them. Maia sings really well. Like she said, she moved up here a year or so ago. So I was just like, "hey, come through and sing on these songs." We got three or four songs really quickly, so almost not like an intentional thing, just us hanging around.

Why a duo specifically?

Michael: I'm in a different band, and I struggle with recording because I want to be in control of what instruments do what, but you can't do that. You’ve got to let your bass player play bass, your drummer drum. So, I again was just making these, and I needed a singer. I like female vocalists a lot, just for the stuff we're making. I feel like the majority of the vocalists that I like are female vocalists in the city. So I was going to try to get some of them. And then with Maia, we just turned it around quickly in a couple days. We finished the vocal tracks for some of the songs we had.

Maia: We're already kind of a silly duo of friends anyways, so we're having fun, hanging out, and doing it. It's been chill. Just the two of us, being able to create together and play, and then have some of our other friends getting to play drums and bass and other elements of it too. So, I think having us and then pulling from our friend group to add things has been kind of liberating. We basically run ideas through each other. And then everything else can be an extremity in which you pull people from your friends and from the scene, be a community thing.

Michael: Outsourcing the parts that we struggle with. Drumming is my least applicable skill that I can apply. So having different drummers makes a song sound different sometimes. We have a friend named Jack who's in a band called Makeout City. His drumming style is very smooth, almost lo-fi, hip hop type drums. He's really good at that. And then this other drummer, Matt, who's in Sue Your Landlord, the band I'm in, is way heavier handed. And so it's nice to be able to puzzle piece songs together by using different musicians. We are aligned on what the song's trying to be. It feels like us two and then a collaboration every time.

Maia: And when it's just the two of us, it can get really sad folk really fast. So it's nice to have a friend come in and add another layer of it, and pick it up. We're like, "Okay, cool. We'll bring it up."

For your new single, what was the creation process like from start to finish?

Maia:  Mike walked by something that sparked the initial idea.

Michael: I mean it went through a bunch of names, but it was based on something I saw. There was a quinceanera happening. If you've seen a quinceanera dress, they're massive. And I saw five people from this quinceanera in this pizza parlor, and this one girl's eating pizza by herself. And I was just like, dang, it looks so sad to be in your big quinceanera dress eating a piece of pizza alone. It just made me want to cry. So I told Maia that and she was like, “Yeah, that's funny, but it's not funny.”

Maia: So then we started writing a song about being 15 and getting ditched. And then from that I started thinking about when I was 15. I got into a silly, not silly hammock accident where I broke my head open. It fucked up my face pretty bad. And for that whole summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, which was supposed to be fun summer, I wanted to get fucked up with my friends. I looked like the sloth from The Goonies. So for two months, I was just really out of it at home. And so then I started thinking about that, and that's where some of the lyrics came from.

Michael: And it's another good reason to have Maia around. She's really good at writing lyrics where I just feel like I'm rhyming dog, frog, and log. I can't write those things to save my life. But I also think the music style fits really well too. When I'm writing the music portion of it, normally the bands I play in are kind of heavier, not necessarily punk rock, but almost way closer there. But now when I'm recording in this studio, for whatever reason, they've just been really coming out very soft and gentle. So I don't know, it just seemed to fit with that whole sad 16-year-old, 15-year-old situation that's happening.

Maia: I think he has a way of writing simple lines that are pretty deep actually, but they're simple and I like that. I feel like I can get too in my head, and then he'll be like, “We can actually cut that down a little bit.” 

Well, one line that I really liked was "Teen angst makes it so hard to enjoy things just as they are." I feel like that's so simple but hits.

Michael: That's a Maia original.

Maia: That's really how I felt. I mean teenage angst I feel carries through. I've been feeling my teenage angst shit lately.

How did the title of the song come about? 

Michael: That was a progression because it started as the longest song name ever. We named it right as André 3000’s flute album came out. So I think we were all just like, "These song titles are called fucking what?" And so we had it just like, this is the quinceanera song. It's like pizza quinceanera.

Maia: “Pizza Quinceanera” was the original name.

Michael: It's like a bit of a mouthful, and then it got even crazier. It was just like, "I witnessed a quinceanera at a pizza parlor and it was sad." It just got really big.

Maia: So Mike wanted to expand the name, and I liked the line that I had about watching her food spinning around, watching leftovers heat up, and being sad. I don't know about you, but when I look into a microwave sometimes, it's a little sad. I don't know if it's the rays, but it got me fucked up. Then I was just like, let's go shorter. I like when artists release music that's just like, "stick" or "table." I don't know. That's my preference.

Michael: Also it's like I think you can get hung up on that type of stuff so quickly. It doesn't need as much thought as maybe you want.

Maia: It can be very intentional.

What are your upcoming plans for the future?

Michael: That's a good question. We should talk about that.

Maia: Yeah. Well, I feel like we have some shows in the works not lined up.

Michael: We didn't know if this is a recording project, or if we wanted to start playing shows too. Again, it started from recording practice, and I was like, "How do I get better at recording vocals? How do I get better at recording drums?" And now it's like we hit a groove. We’ve got two or three songs down. We have two other recordings that we're going to put out in the next twelve weeks over two or three months. In terms of playing shows, that's something we definitely have expressed interest in. We just need to assemble the cast and that feels like a ways away.

Maia: The easier thing for us to do is to just keep making music. I feel like for us right now, having a little bit of an archive of stuff we've recorded feels kind of nice, like a buffer, because then if we do play shows, we can relax on that a little bit and start slowly releasing things, maybe. It feels like we've hit a pretty good groove with things, and I don't want to stop that while we are in that groove. We can keep working on making songs and editing the ones that we have. I feel like we have so many friends within the community that are doing a lot of shows. But I want to do some open mics and stuff a lot more and practice more. I haven't played live in a while. I used to play some in college, but now I'm like an adult who gets perceived too hard. I'm like, I need some practice.

Michael: Trying to maybe decide how that band's actually going to be put together is something we've been talking about.

Maia: Yeah, that is a good point too, because we are a duo, so we mostly work together, but then the live bands who we want to work with more consistently. That is the future kind of. It's like, “What does that look like?”

Follow Michael McCanna and Maia Leão on Instagram for more updates regarding Mikey Leão. Stream “Leftovers” on all platforms on February 23rd.