Healings FAQ No. 13, Nicole Miglis
Healings FAQ No. 13, Nicole Miglis
"The mind is always the hardest obstacle. Losing the mind is far scarier to me than death."
Hopefully no one out there has the impression that the various quasi-professional blogs and/or websites we all read are buttoned up places to work, but to give you an idea just how ramshackle they can be, here’s a little story about how I first met today’s Healings FAQ guest, musician Nicole Miglis, previously of the great band Hundred Waters, whose new single is “Lure,” and whose solo debut, Myopia, is out August 23.
It was roughly a decade ago, and I was wandering the freelance writing wildness after being laid from my cushy SF tech job, as one does. I’d picked up a nice part time gig editing the reviews section of Spin, which was years removed from its heyday but still more or less a going concern. A few months into the gig, however, ownership of Spin changed hands, and the new bosses canned the EIC with no one to replace them, and no instructions for what to do in the meantime. So for a couple months the handful of us that were left just kinda took over running the newsroom, which is how I came to use the verbatim text of the wikipedia entry for “Sushi” as my review of the new Thievery Corporation, an assessment I’d argue remains accurate.
Absent any kind of pitch process or editorial oversight, I decided it’d be a good idea to assign myself a 5,000 word feature story about Hundred Waters, and the DIY festival they were throwing to celebrate the release of their second album, The Moon Rang Like a Bell. And this is how I ended up camped out for three days on the side of a canyon at a place called Arcosanti in the middle of the Arizona desert, for what remains the most magical music festival experience of my life. In the years that followed, Form would become an extravagant yet tastefully produced (and still utterly unique) destination festival complete with glamping options, but that first year it was just a bunch of us sleeping in tents on a bluff, watching the dude from How to Dress Well do cannonballs into the commune’s pool during the day, then gathering at night in Arcosanti’s auditorium, under the milky way, as a band like Majical Cloudz transported us to the heavens.
Anyway, so Nicole Miglis. The best and most telling thing I can say about her music and its importance to me is that Danielle and I used her solo-piano version of “Show Me Love” as the opening song of our wedding ceremony, and in fact I’d encourage you to cue it up now as you read what follows, and/or listen to it every morning as your brush your teeth, because it’s as good a prayer as any I know: “Don’t let me think weakly though I know that I can break/ Keep me away from apathy while I am still awake/ And don’t let me think too long of the one I’m ‘bout to face/ Show me love/ Show me love/ Show me love.” Yes.
Needless to say, I was psyched when I found out Miglis was releasing a solo album. In case I forgot to mention it, Nicole Miglis is a certified genius—a classically trained pianist in possession of a ghostly, ethereal singing voice that also has the coiled intensity of a one-inch punch. She wrote, performed, and produced all of Myopia. And while I’m certainly biased I’m here to tell you that the song “Autograph” has all the makings of your new favorite track, especially if you enjoy cerebral pop full of references to ‘90s raves and Everything But the Girl, which I do. And as it turns out, Miglis isn’t the only one back this year—in October, Form is making its triumphant return to Arcosanti after going dormant during the pandemic, nearly ten years after that very first installment (hoo boy, I’m old).
They say never meet your heroes, but what about asking them whether they believe in god, or what happens when we die? Here’s what Nicole Miglis said when I asked her those things.
What happens when we die?
I tend to believe in reincarnation, and that we’ve all been here before in some form. I believe in the possibilities of past lives, and that time isn’t linear, though I have a hard time articulating those thoughts. I have experience with psychic dreams, and dreaming in languages I don’t speak. I also tend to believe in the idea that there may be other spirit realms existing alongside us that we don’t see. I think there are many mysteries we’ll never understand, and that life in this realm is just one piece of that puzzle.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being terrified and 1 being it’s never crossed your mind, how afraid are you of dying? Explain.
I’m not afraid of dying. I tend to believe whatever awaits us after this life is less complicated than this life, because much of our suffering is tied to the physical.
But I do fear pain, and growing old, and fear itself. The mind is always the hardest obstacle. Losing the mind is far scarier to me than death. The hardest part of facing death I think is the fear of the unknown, and of course the physical pain.
What’s the closest you come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
I’ve had a few near death experiences when I was younger. One was a dog bite as a child which I miraculously survived, the other was a car crash, which I also miraculously survived.
Recently I had a health scare that really shook me. That was far worse than the accidents I survived in childhood, because I found it incredibly hard to control my thoughts. It taught me to take care of my body more intentionally, acknowledge how finite things are, and to be more intentional with my time. There’s a lot creatively I want to do before I go. I have lists and queues of records waiting to be finished. It made me more precious and focused with my time.
Do you believe in God? Explain.
Yes, though I’m wary to use the word God because I think it’s loaded in religion, gender, and race. Whatever God is, I don't believe it’s human. And I'm not sure it's benevolent, though I do think the ultimate force beneath all life is love. A few years ago I jokingly made up another word for God in conversation, because I was frustrated with the connotations of God, and just wanted to challenge my own ways of thinking, so I started saying “Ba”.
I tend to believe that the idea of God, or “Ba” :) isn’t above us, looking down, but lives within us, in our cells, in between us, underneath us, in the Earth’s core, in the clouds, everywhere. It’s electricity, it’s frequencies, it’s vibrational. I think as humans we naturally want to personify everything, but whatever that Force is, I accept that it’s beyond comprehension.
It’s like when I’m working on music, and I just feel things in a certain key, so I start to play something in D major or something, and then a car beeps in the same key, or a bird call answers in the same note, when things align vibrationally, that to me is “Ba”. It's unifying, it’s perspective, it’s recognizing how myopic we can be as a species. It’s recognizing that there are things far greater and far beyond us at all times.
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it?
Yoga and meditation are obvious answers for me. Yoga especially, because I feel it distributes mental energy throughout the body, and I think we live more in our heads than we ever have. I believe in the idea of chakras and balancing energy throughout the body.
I also consider cooking a spiritual practice. Lately I started painting food, before I cook, really spending time with it and learning it. That to me is like a spiritual practice.
I used to consider music a spiritual practice; it’s certainly spiritual, but I’ve learned to separate craft and having a spiritual practice. They often overlap, but I think it’s important to distinguish them. Especially with how non-spiritual the music industry can feel sometimes.
Give me an example of a sacred text, for you personally
There’s a Hawaiian philosophy I came across serendipitously in a library once. I was searching for something that might heal what I was feeling at the time, and I ended up finding a Dolly Parton book and this book about an ancient Hawaiian philosophy called “Ho’oponopono” — it centers around 4 phrases, like a mantra, and it goes “I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.”
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
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