Mitch at work in the studio: "Getting sick changed the meaning of my songs for me."
Some people put together a song playlist to be the soundtrack of their battle with cancer. Paul Mitch unknowingly wrote his.
The Madison musician composed all the tracks to his new album Echoes & Shadows by spring 2021. The songs were polished and ready for studio recording. Then, just before production was to start, he learned that the annoying pain in his back wasn’t a muscle pull after all. It was large B-cell lymphoma. Suddenly, finishing a record seemed like more than just an important task. He decided, along with the “shoebox of pills” he took every day, making the record was going to be medicine. “I would say my diagnosis was a flint to that fire,” he says.
Mitch graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in music education. He’s been in bands since high school in Green Bay, but is best known for his work with Corey Mathew Hart as the folk pop duo Lost Lakes, a project he’s been involved with for the last 10 years.
Mitch, 41, first felt pain in the middle of his back in April. Even though his back barked every time he took a stride and he definitely knew something was wrong, cancer was as close to his thoughts as Ebola was. The sharp pain persisted, but instead of seeing his primary physician, he went to a physical therapist. Things didn’t get better.
When he did see doctors, X-rays showed nothing. Blood work results came back within the green. His primary doc ordered an MRI. The scan revealed a mass on his L2 vertebra. There was a compression fracture at the site as well. A CT-guided biopsy of the mass was taken. As Mitch awaited results, he occupied himself the same way any person in his situation would do: He surfed the ever-loving Jesus out of the internet looking for lymphoma information. He was able to draw only one conclusion: “Dr. Google’s bedside manner is shit,” he says.
There’s a towel that hangs on the hook of Mitch’s office door at Epic Systems where he’s a media tech and composer. He uses it to mop off in the warm months when a bike ride to work can get a person sweaty. On Aug. 26, 2021, Mitch was at work when the call he was waiting for came through. When the call ended Mitch put down the phone, walked over to his office door, took the towel, and crushed it into his face.
Mitch climbed into bed that evening with a question in his head on repeat. “What am I going to do now?”
What he did was to dive into a regimen of six chemo treatments. During the clinic visits Mitch sat through a multi-drug drip into his arm over several hours per sitting. The chemo cocktail included a red Kool Aid-colored concoction so toxic that nurses administering it dressed in head-to-toe protective suits. During the treatment Mitch resolved to focus on doing his best to get better and on getting his 11 new songs into the studio for recording and mastering.
Cancer is the kind of experience that can change the meaning of a song you hear on the radio, let alone the meaning of a song you wrote. “Getting sick changed the meaning of most of my songs for me and the journeys in my songs became something else,” Mitch tells me during one of our Zoom interviews. His hair and eyebrows long gone, Mitch peers into the camera through thick glasses making his eyes seem larger and even more piercing.
Once in the studio Mitch realized the songs he had finished before he became ill were certainly not finished with him. The allusions he had drawn within them had become something else.
Mitch’s songs fly somewhere on the radar with those who most influence him: Wilco, the Jayhawks, Counting Crows and Toad the Wet Sprocket.
Before our interviews, I assumed the songs on Echoes & Shadows were composed after Mitch learned his cancer diagnosis. The song “Weathervanes” is a good example of meaning one thing before cancer and another thing after the diagnosis.
The song was written about an artist Mitch once worked with. The kind of person who is his own worst enemy and who winds up having to deal with the consequences. “There’s a line in that song, ‘Friends are only there to disappear,’” Mitch says. “Going through cancer, you sort of feel that from people. There are certain people who are comfortable with it. There are certain people who come out of the woodwork for you that you didn’t know were going to step up and help. And there are people that you thought were going to evaporate. I had never thought about that in the same way before going through this battle — but I wrote that well in advance of being sick.”
Fortunately, Mitch had built a home studio prior to his illness and it was just a stair climb away. If he had had to travel out of the house for studio work, he says, the record would not have even been attempted.
For Mitch, making the album wasn’t a choice. “I needed to be able to do it. For the first time in my life now, after chemo, I feel like [I’m] the kind of artist that if I don’t do certain things, I’m going to explode.” And that’s something different for him.
Nearly every song touches Mitch in a different way now than when it was composed. The shifty, organ-infused “I Don’t Dare” was about Mitch’s experience as a co-parent during the pandemic. “Trying to be strong for my kids without having any idea about what the next day was going to bring,” he says. “Take that into this next context, and it means the same thing, but it takes on a different gravity.”
Mitch's album will be released February 11.
The album was co-produced by Milwaukee singer-songwriter Hayward Williams (who is spending more time in the studio these days helping produce others, including a new three-song EP for WAMI Award winner and fellow Milwaukeean Bryan Cherry).
Mitch has high praise for Williams, whom, he points out, never sang a note or played a chord on the album but had a way with keeping things in order, giving things priority. As for Williams, he points to the concentration Mitch brought to the project, a clarity born of more pressing things than pressing wax. “Nothing will focus you more than having a constraint that you have no control over,” Williams says.
Mitch finished his album. It will be released Feb. 11. He finished his chemo. By the time you read this, his post-chemo scan will show in what tense his cancer lives: present or past. For Mitch and all survivors, life will never again be a sure bet. But one thing is certain. He’ll hear things differently from now on.
