Donna Missal: Resilience & ‘Revel’

In a difficult moment of her life after being dropped by her label in 2022… Donna Missal took lemons and made lemonade; or in this case an album called “Revel”. Missal’s latest album takes her fans into the next chapter of her career filled with the experiences she has had becoming an independent artist. We caught up with Donna Missal at San Francisco’s The Independent as she kicked off her Reveling tour with artist Banoffee opening up for her.

Interview & Photos: Kris Lori (@kris_lori)

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KL: Today’s the first day of tour, right? 

DM: Yeah, we’re breaking the seal.

KL: Oh my goodness. Are you excited?

DM: So excited and like…everything… is feeling really good energetically. So I think we’re set up for like a really good one. It’s my first headline tour since my first album came out. So it’s been a lot of years and so many changes in like my life and in my music and in my experiences; and like where I am now as a person between then and now. But I’m playing a bunch of songs that have existed in my catalog for a long time. Stuff I haven’t gotten to play since my first tour. Stuff I’ve never gotten to play on tour before. So, yeah, it feels… it feels really good. 

KL: That’s amazing.

DM: I’m really excited.

KL: How do you prep for a show beforehand? Like what do you do? How do you get into that mindset?

DM: Like spiritually or literally?

KL: Your choice.

DM: In a literal sense, it’s just a lot of like unsexy stuff that comes together to make something feel like it just happened organically every night. The idea is to make it feel like no work went in, so that you just are like transported and you’re in it with us and that it doesn’t feel like a labor. And to do that like so much labor, so much rehearsal, so much like working with this like amazing small crew where everyone just has all hands on deck. Like everyone is working towards a common goal and working so hard and really cares about the outcome over anything else. And we’re just working out every, every kink until it feels good and ready to put in front of people and then ideally you get it out in front of people and it just feels like this magical thing happening. Then you know from a like emotional standpoint to get ready, I think I just like I kind of dissociate and just like let it all happen. Really my experience on stage is always pretty like… blackout like I don’t remember what happened until I get off. And that’s when I know that I was really like tapped into something. So that’s what I’m hoping for tonight that I blackout.

KL: In the best way possible! -laughs-

DM: -laughs- In the best way possible, sober blackout just like transported through music. 

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‘Revel’ is Missal’s 3rd album and her 1st as an independent artist. Having full control of how she wants to present her music to the public; she took the last track “I Saw God” and gave us an acoustic version.  Lyrics like “ I saw God, where I fall, with my face against the wall” truly feels even more angelic in the acoustic release.

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KL: So a couple questions on that; why did you choose that song (“I Saw God”) and to do it acoustically? Like what did that mean to you?

DM: The song itself was a really special anchor to the record for me, but it wasn’t um a single.

So it didn’t get like a moment. I think it’s hard to get people to listen to full bodies of work, like albums are not the preferred like industry standard for releasing music because we’re up against the attention span of the audience and just general like rules of marketing; where you only have so much money to stretch amongst your singles and those are the songs that get the push from you know. That’s that’s really where the focus tends to be on promoting and rolling out a record. So I wanted to pick a song that wasn’t a single but felt really, really important to the soul of the album and like the album couldn’t exist without it. So I just wanted to give it its own moment and to do it acoustically… I don’t know. I just think I wanted to imagine if the songs existed in a different world and like what that world would look like and what it would feel like. I tend to just take on projects that are exciting to me; and hope that they resonate and I know that no one is going to be excited about what I’m doing if I’m not really excited and inspired by what I’m doing. So, yeah, I just thought the song really, I thought it was really well suited for that kind of approach.

KL: Yeah, I think the original the and the acoustic are so different, but they’re both beautiful in their own way great. You can kind of see the range of what you can do as an artist and it’s amazing. 

DM: Thank you!

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“So I thought what better way than to like physically become something different, something that embodies strength, power , resilience, growth, change and the difficult pursuit of something”

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When Donna was dealt a difficult hand, where some might fold and walk away from an already challenging industry to stay in; she chose different. Missal took that experience of being dropped by her label and channeled it into ‘Revel’ and into some stunning music videos for songs like “God Complex” and a personal favorite “Flicker”. 

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DM: Well, to be honest, I was at a point in my career where I didn’t have any funding. It came later when I was pitching the record around but when I was coming up with the idea for the music video; I wanted to make a music video I was just looking around me at what I had at my disposal.  My physical body was one of the few things that I actually had to use, to create something. So I thought well, “that’s the foundation of the video” and “how do I use my physical body to its full extent so that I have something to create with?” At that time,  there was no there was no budget, right? So it really it kind of came from that place, which is how I tend to operate from like there’s a framework and it’s usually because of restrictions and then that’s what inspires the choices that I made creatively. Usually they tend to like be really, really real to me because it’s a direct extension of my real life. I just wanted to like transform my body and like physically embody the song and learn how to do something really, really hard. I think the album itself is about transcendence and about experiencing this total loss. Trying to still like push and find light and find meaning and find a reason to move forward. So I wanted that to be encapsulated in that first video and flicker was the first single. I wanted that to set the tone of the record. So I thought what better way than to like physically become something different, something that embodies strength, power , resilience, growth, change and the difficult pursuit of something…I worked really hard on it. I worked with a choreographer who is incredible her name is Sadie Wilking; and we worked for three months on the prep for that video. She just taught me how to dance in that period of time. Sadie is amazing!

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With a new album under her belt and now on tour promoting it. We felt curious to now to see how Donna Missal plans, to not only promote herself as an artist but how will she be approaching the industry from a new point of view. 

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KL: Now you’ve been in both worlds. You’ve been with a label You’re now independent. How do you how do you see yourself season the world now as an independent artist? How do you plan to seize the music world in the world? 

DM: I think there’s…we’re in a period such a period of change. This particular time in music industry is like unlike we’ve I think ever seen before. I think this happens, you know, you get introduced something, gets introduced that really like shakes up an institution. Something like MTV or YouTube or Spotify that comes in and really just breaks the paradigm and forces a wave of change. I think we’re in a growth period and we’re in a bit of an in-between; between the way it used to be and the way it’s going to be. It leaves people like me in the position to either kind of get swept under or find a way to like create a new lane, a new way of doing things because there isn’t necessarily a standard, a set “this is how it is now”. We haven’t gotten there yet, and so it gives people like me the opportunity to like build a business in a completely different way. Build releases in a totally different way. I’m really working on trying to change the fan expectation of a rollout. We’re really at a point I think where fans have been taught to expect you know everything that you’ve made over a couple of years to come out within six weeks and then have like have your cycle end. I would really love for just as much time going into the project is just as much time as I spend telling people about it, showing them different facets of it. So that’s what I’m working on now. I haven’t really seen that from the industry side and I don’t think that that would be supported if I were on a label, because they haven’t caught up to what things are eventually, maybe, going to be. I get a chance to just reimagine what it could look like and I’m really excited about that

KL: That’s amazing. Really, breaking the mold. 

DM: Yeah, exactly. And I don’t know that I would have been really had the opportunity to do that. If I hadn’t been dropped. If I hadn’t gone about making music outside of the major label structure. To make ‘Revel’ and to yeah, to just like keep myself making music. So it’s been really cool actually.

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As for her fans who have stuck through the evolving stages of Missal’s career and sound… 

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KL: Your fans have been through all these changes with you; if you had all your fans gathered room…what would you say to them? 

DM: Just thank you…and I would want to give them… I would want to just say that I was proud of them for evolving their taste. Being open to supporting something that doesn’t remain the same all the time. That, that’s not the easiest thing to do from like a consumer standpoint.  I think that, that makes them true fans of art and music for what it’s meant to be; which is like genuine expression like someone turning themselves into a vessel and genuinely expressing something. To have people stick by me as I find new ways to to reinvent or to have to have the the vessel of what my interests are and what’s inspiring me. To have that constantly be in a growing changing fluid state and have people support it; I feel like that speaks so much more to the fan of art, music, and culture over a fan of good marketing or a commercial. So I feel like that really let’s me know that these are really genuine fans who care about things, that I care about. That’s really special. I feel really connected to people for that reason.

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Donna Missal is a resilient artist who has seen highs and lows of the music industry. Who has shared her world and experiences through her album ‘Revel’. She holds so much love, respect, and compassion for both her fans and her crew. Her performance was nothing short of breathtaking and we are excited to see how Missal will shake up the music scene next.