Mike Bankhead

Mike Bankhead's latest offering, I Am Experienced, is more than just a collection of songs, but a series of vulnerable and open vignettes that form a concept album. For Bankhead, the lockdown was not just a time of shuttered venues and days spent inside wondering when “uncertain times” would end, but a time where awareness of racial injustices reached a fever pitch and the murders of Black Americans like himself became a central focus for society. He took his own experiences and the ones he witnessed to form a sonic dissertation on the brutality and beauty of the Black experience. Each of the six tracks making up his I Am Experienced have their roots in different genres but share roots in Black music. That devotion to transmuting experience into art is also why all personnel involved in the album, from the mastering engineer to mixers, art directors and musicians are Black creatives. He worked with Columbus, Ohio engineer Rizo to bring the project to life and although many of his clients skew towards pop and hip-hop, he was thrilled to work on Bankhead’s guitar songs. “As vulnerable as these songs are, this project would not have worked if I wasn’t comfortable with him and he didn’t believe in it,” he says of their relationship in the studio.