questions

Sooo...is Amateur Hopscotch League a band? A gang? A parallel universe? Just you? The mystery is killing us!

Amateur Hopscotch League is a lot of things. In terms of physically creating the music, AHL is me writing songs and asking my very talented friends to help me record them and bring them from messy Garageband demos to real, actualized pieces of music. But in a more spiritual-existential-what-are-we-made-of type of way, AHL is an amalgamation of the people I’ve loved and the people I love now!

You have traveled and studied abroad, in Rome? How did that change you? How has it impacted your music and writing?

Yes! My study abroad experience in Rome was genuinely one of the most insane couple of months of my life. Honestly, I could ramble on and on about study abroad, one of the most surprising aspects of study abroad was that I learned to appreciate calm and quiet in a way that I never had before. In my day-to-day life I have a bad habit of constantly overstimulating myself so that I’m not alone with my thoughts, but with the intensity of the city I found myself enjoying quiet and calm moments that much more. Learning to embrace this allowed me to be more honest with myself, not only as a songwriter, but as a person, too.

Your lyrics are BADASS and you should never stop writing, never let anyone take that from you, please... it matters! Tell us about these lines from Atheist, it hits, music if anything should make us feel something :)

I dream that I'm covered in blood
Could be yours, could be mine
You reach out a hand
Tell me you don't mind
In those dreams you love me
The way you were supposed to
And in those dreams I'm falling, falling
With nothing to hold on to

Atheist as a whole is a reflection on my complicated relationship and history with my birth mother. Our relationship was really rocky my whole life, and when I was about 13 she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. My senior year of high school, which also happened to be the nightmare year that was 2020, the doctors told us there was nothing else they could do for her and she was put into hospice care. She ended up passing away that October. This song, and specifically this part of the song, is about that time between her being taken off of treatments and her death. I spent a lot of that time trying to figure out what our relationship meant to me, and I was in constant flux between my instinct to hide from the scary things and my desire to repair our relationship in whatever way I could before she died. This verse is sort of about my attempt to grapple with the fact that I would never get the chance to have a normal, healthy mother-daughter relationship with her.

Ok so you died, and went to wherever your spiritual place is for 100 years, and then you get a second chance somehow, and come back to earth and find that Micah SD is like the Picasso of the 21st century, your music is priceless and people are just obsessed with it...what do you think is in your music that created this amazing response? Why does shit take so long to sink in for people?

Oh goodness. What a question! Hopefully, if something like this did happen, people would connect with my lyrics. That’s what I consider to be the most important part of my songwriting. Instrumentation and melody and harmonies and all that jazz are significant, don’t get me wrong, but my lyrics are who I am. They’re really the centerpiece of my music. So I think that if people are resonating with my songs, it’s probably because they connect with the lyrics.

As for why shit takes so long to sink in… honestly, I don’t know. Sometimes I think we aren’t ready for things, but sometimes I think it’s just the way it goes. I’ve never really cared too much about how many people are listening to me or how many people like something, though. As long as I’m able to express myself, that’s what’s most important to me. And if other people like it, then that’s amazing! But it’s more of an added bonus, rather than the goal.

What do you want people to know about your music that they may not realize as casual listeners? If there was only one song they could listen to that helps them learn about you, Micah SD, what would it be?

I think people who are casual listeners should know that everything I write, down to every word, is carefully chosen and deeply personal. I used to joke that my songs are basically just my diary, and I happen to put music to them. But frankly, it’s not a joke. My journal and my songwriting notebook are one and the same. So if you want to get to know me, listen to quite literally any of my songs! Before releasing songs under AHL, I spent a long time in a band called Forever Unknown, and the songs I released with them are in the same boat– every song I’ve ever written is incredibly personal to me. So if the four AHL songs aren’t enough for you, then check out Forever Unknown to tide you over while I write more stuff!