Mike Goodrick on Returning to Music with ‘Songs I Still Skip’ and ‘Try’
- Myren Ozaki
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Photo: Suzy Goodrick Photography
After spending 15 years away from releasing original music, Mike Goodrick has found himself back in a place he never quite expected to be: writing, recording, and releasing songs again.
The return to original music didn't happen in isolation. It actually grew out of the success of the Emo Night events Goodrick began putting together in Arizona, where he performs emo and pop-punk songs with just his guitar and takes requests from the audience.
For Goodrick, Emo Night became an alternative to his typical cover gigs. “And so I was just playing ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ like 4 times a night at hotel bars. And that got very tiring.”
He approached one of the bars where he played and suggested a themed night. The first show unexpectedly did extremely well and bloomed into a full business for Goodrick. “We posted a flyer, and I think I spent 20 bucks on an Instagram ad, and it was like standing room only. And we were all like, what is happening?”
That success has now created an unusual kind of artistic freedom. “And the cool thing about this now is like Emo Night's my full-time job. So, all the music I get to put out now is just what I like. And if people like it, that's awesome. But it's just for me because I'm not like depending on it to pay my bills.”
In that freedom, Goodrick fully embraced 2000s music for his writing and recording process. “Emo Night’s my thing. I love that kind of music. I love music that sounds like it came out in 2006.”
With that, he is trying to balance the music he grew up with against the way music is made now. “It's like that combination of like sounding like it came out now, but the song, not necessarily the recording, but the song could have come out in 2006… I still want it to connect to who I am, which is, you know, a 30-something who loves emo and pop-punk music from when I was in high school while also sounding like it came out today, you know?” he continued.
Goodrick's connection to emo and pop-punk isn't just nostalgia, though. Much of it comes from the Arizona music scene where he grew up. He points to bands including Jimmy Eat World, The Maine, The Summer Set, Authority Zero, Blessthefall, Greeley Estates, and Lydia as part of the musical world that shaped him.
That connection has carried into his Emo Night shows, where local familiarity can completely change what audiences request. “And now, 20 years later, a lot of the people that come to Emo Night grew up here. So when I play a song by The Format or The Maine or Jimmy [Eat World], there's a connection to that that I think is really special.”
The all-request nature of his shows also means every city brings its own flavor to the night. “It was interesting to see that even the different requests that happened in a place like LA versus a place, and even in parts of Arizona, northern Arizona. I'll drive 2 hours north to play a show up there, and those people request different songs than the people do in Phoenix.”
When discussing changes to his process, the recording itself is dramatically different from what Goodrick experienced earlier in his career. “I used to have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to go into a studio, and I had to get those takes right then or like it was more money and all this stuff, and now like I'm recording with producers over Zoom, and like, it's a totally different world, like from my house, you know?”
Jumping back into the music creation world, Goodrick said that, for the most part, his songwriting stopped during those 15 years, but it wasn’t the deep end. “I still, through that 15 years, still sort of played music,” Goodrick explained. “But a lot of it was cover gigs, and I was still sort of paying my bills with my guitar a little bit. But it wasn't in a band setting, and it wasn't original music by any means.”
That absence now informs the music he's making: “When people ask me about this music now, I always say like, it's all the songs I should have been writing over the last 15 years.”
That has made the process feel “a little bit like my first album again,” as Goodrick compared the experience to the common idea that an artist has their entire life to write their first album, only to have much less life experience between that record and their second. “And so it feels sort of like I'm writing my first album again because it's been so long and I have so much material, life experience, that kind of stuff to write about.”
That perspective is especially apparent in “Songs I Still Skip,” the first song he chose to release. The song contains references to the emo and pop-punk music that Goodrick has spent years performing through Emo Night, making it a natural connection between the two sides of his musical life. Goodrick shared that “Songs I Still Skip” was chosen as the first release because “it felt like it was the right song to kind of bridge those two things together to then be able to release everything else later.”
His newest release, “Try,” comes from a similarly personal place. Rather than writing about one specific person, Goodrick said the song combines several experiences: “It's not about one person necessarily, but it's about a couple situations I found myself in that we kind of combined.”
The main story behind the song came from a relationship that didn't exactly end the way Goodrick expected (and one that he finds more amusing than anything else at this point in his life). “It mainly came from this girl who we were like, you know, talking or whatever. And it kind of got to the point where she was like, I don't want a relationship with anybody at all.”
Less than two weeks later, she was dating another Mike G from their school. “And so I think being able to look back on a situation like that now and laugh about it because it's a funny story, like I think gives that like, ‘let's be honest, you just wanted to try.’”
That ability to revisit old experiences has become a recurring theme in his songwriting process, where Goodrick described it as trying to return to the emotional headspace of an older version of himself. “I think looking back, there's going to be a lot of that kind of thing in these songs because so many of them are written about things that happened a long time ago rather than things that are happening to me right now.”
TOP8’s Take:
Mike Goodrick is an artist who takes what you know and love about your favorite emo songs and creates something new that resonates emotionally and sonically. His two new releases have us excited for what he has lined up next!
You can find Mike Goodrick on Instagram or his website. Follow along with his return to original music on Spotify or Apple Music.
Spin the record and throw in a classic 2000’s emo song in there too.
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