Pranks, Sketches and Repeat Mode to Promote his Music
Whether it’s watching him doing headstands in the mud, playing chess by himself while performing a comedic sketch, or seeing multiple video snippets of his catchy (Long As) We Got Honkytonks song (“You can take away my job and pay, tell me to drink alone. But long’s I got good friends to meet, headin’ down to the honkytonk”), former longtime Reno resident and quirky renaissance man Michael Sion provides a social media balm for these mostly dreary times.
“You get nowhere being negative,” Sion, who goes by Smiley Mikey on his YouTube channel and lists his age as OAF (Old as F) told us during a recent phone interview. “Artists are supposed to reflect the world around them, but there is also a duty incumbent upon artists to make the world better. What better way to make it a better place now than to be positive and lift people's spirits?”
Sion sees the pandemic and uncertain political times as an opportunity to adapt and keep moving forward, using more social media, finding animators and others online to make his style come alive from Tik Tok to YouTube, not forgetting Facebook and Instagram either.
“My mind is a weird place and I'm not consciously trying to do music or comedy,” he said of his style, which he described as unpredictable, multi-level and irreverent. “It just happens that way, that when I write songs, I approach a topic in a way that nobody else has, because I have my own weirdness.”
“On one level it's parody of cowboy country music,” Sion said of the song above. “I wrote one of the most ludicrous lines I could think of to make fun of current country music. Most of it just talking about alcohol, I wrote ‘long as we got honky-tonks, this country will be free.’ However, it also works as a fun spirit lifting, you know, two-step song, and it also does say in a very positive way, on another level, let's get out there and party and have fun and not let COVID or the recession get us down. And, you know, I'm not telling people to go out there and not distance and not wear masks or anything like that, but I'm saying, ‘Hey, if your bar is open and it's following the guidelines for safety, get out there and have some fun and quit staying at home, binging on Netflix and Hulu. And so the song works on different levels and that's because my mind is a weird place and approaches topics from different angles just naturally.”
“Reno as a Chrysalis”
Sion is also a non-stop self promoter. “I take official videos and chop them up into 15 or 20 seconds and put those smaller versions out there. I send them out there and it makes people happy,” he said of one of his tactics. “Even once in a while, when you encounter a troll,… well, even that gives them a nice adrenaline rush or a rush of serotonin. So in that regard, it's made them happy.” He adapts strategies to different platforms and has noticed love on Facebook being more “rustic and rural. “
“As long as it makes them happy or angry, just as long as it has some reaction, then I've done my job. And my ultimate goal is just to get my songs stuck in people's heads for the rest of their lives, become part of them. That's my goal,” he said.
In a previous incarnation, as an investigative journalist for the Reno Gazette-Journal, Sion used to cover the methamphetamine crisis, prostitution, gambling as well as the cultural scene coming from and through the Biggest Little City.
“Reno is a very strange and fascinating crossroads of the world,” he said. Sion also had a four-year stint as the Silver and Blue magazine editor at UNR, and along the way became a ghostwriter and massage therapist. He started doing music and comedy at local open mic nights, and then started writing songs and getting them recorded, moving on to playing local stages and being featured on KTHX-FM.
In Reno, he explained in our interview, “even total beginners can explore their passions and develop, whether it's on community stages, as an actor or as burlesque performer, whatever it is, this is a great place to start. And you can take it to the next level. I've met young performers who I used to collaborate with going on to Nashville, LA, New York, Paris, wherever, and really forging, you know, international careers or national caliber careers. Or even if you stay in Reno, you can still do quite well. Use Reno as your chrysalis, as your cocoon.”
Sion is now in Santa Rosa, California, “for a variety of reasons,” but says he may end up moving back to Reno “by the end of this year, possibly or not, but possibly nevertheless.” For his recent music videos, he’s worked with fire dancers, circus performers, aerialists, jugglers, models, a tattoo artist, actors, sound engineers, videographers and other musicians from Reno.
Don’t Wanna Buy a Gun, a family affair involving two Sion sons, which was recorded in Reno, has gotten nearly 40,000 views since its release on YouTube several months ago. “I’m promoting it hard and it's doing very well and I'm hoping it'll get to a hundred thousand views by April and then hopefully a million views by the end of the year,” he said.
Counteracting the COVID Blues
For those feeling the COVID-19 blues, Sion recommends taking action. “If you're business-minded with any kind of business you have in any field, you play the field as the field is, you don't sit around, not doing anything, not taking risks, not trying to find out how to get your art out in front of people,” he said.
“You do not do that. Nothing ever good comes from that. Nothing ever positive comes from negative thinking. You simply adapt and you find new ways to get your art out there. If you don't have a burning passion to get your art out there, so be it, but that's on you, not the universe. There are so many avenues to try. Not everything you do is going to work in life. But if you have a burning passion to connect with people and get your art out there, you will find a way. And the internet is obviously an easy way to do it.”
What does he miss about Reno?
“Reno, historically going back to its roots as Lake’s Crossing was a crossroads of the world and it had an uncanny amount of creativity and an entrepreneurship far out of proportion to its small population,” he said. (Reno’s first name was for the toll bridge that spanned the Truckee River close to the present day Virginia Street bridge.) “I miss the rugged individualism of Nevada,” he added. “Sometimes it could get very hardcore, but I kind of miss that because it's part of me now.”
Sion worries Reno is becoming “homogenized because greed in the real estate market brings out the worst in people. And, it brings a lot of people moving in to the market from elsewhere who don't have that rugged individualistic attitude, or they don't have an appreciation for Reno's culture and its past, they're just coming as equity migrants to buy a lot of land. And then not really contributing to the culture that's already there so that it won't be as interesting anymore. That's a fear, but maybe it's unjustified,” he said.
Before releasing new songs, Sion is dead set on having his recent ones reach more people.
He’s also working on two book projects and says it’s never too late to get six-pack abs. “I’m going for it, man, even at my age. So hopefully in a few months, I'll have six-pack abs. And by the end of 2021, I'll possibly be returning to the BLC, the 775, the baddest little city in the world.”
“I wanted to try animation because I thought that it would just be a cool way to present the songs,” he said of a recent approach. “And it would be very different from having live humans in it, like my other ones, my other videos have had. Anytime you try to put together a creative project involving many people, it's the same as running a business, you've got to manage and recruit and get the best out of the people you bring along. I'm the kind of person when I hire other creatives to do work on my creative projects, I do not micromanage. I give general guidance. I give input along the way, but I let them do things. So they come up with their own visions that works.”