Michael Sanchez Looks Behind the Curtain
And upon realizing there's no magic, moves onto the next thing.
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I met Michael Sanchez during the pandemic on a playground in the East Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philly where we’d both brought our kids. He happened to be reading a Stephen King book, and I happened to be wearing a Stephen King t-shirt, which is not uncommon (for me).
We started talking and eventually landed on our artistic work, which led to exchanging numbers and trading stuff we’d worked on. Soon after, he recorded my first three interviews with David Biddle, Anjan Chatterjee, and Jamey Robinson for my Perfect Recognition project, and we played a house show together during the week of the AWP conference in Philadelphia.
Going down the rabbit hole of his Vimeo and YouTube pages, it was fun digging through the different eras of his art; stand-up and sketch comedy, music videos he directed for other artists, videos for his own musical projects, and corporate marketing videos. The collection contains both silly and serious work.
Michael grew up in Newcastle, Delaware, where he started playing and recording music. One of his bands from that time, the New Death Show, eventually pared from four-piece to duo and migrated to Seattle. Later Michael would move to Brooklyn, San Francisco, Chicago, and then Philly, settling into different artistic projects along the way, including his band The Way It Is and a solo project, Electric Dylan. In San Francisco he started trying out comedy, which started to become more serious during his time in Chicago. There, he and four other comedians started a showcase called Comedians You Should Know, which ran at a local pub every Wednesday starting in 2010. In 2015 and 2016 the showcase expanded to LA and New York.
Throughout this time period, Michael was also creating videos both for himself and as a contractor for different artists and corporate institutions. Early on, he and his friends filmed a no-budget superhero movie called The Return of Great Guy, which stalled due to hard drive issues.
In our interview, he summed up his transitions between media:
Once you see behind the curtain of something, for me at least, a lot of that magic is lost and I want to go see, “What else?” I want to look behind other curtains. For a long time I was really fascinated by art — painting and drawing — and I think that kind of flowed into music. And you find ways to mingle these things, like I was always designing posters and album art and stuff like that. And one thing that I loved about filmmaking was that it incorporated all these other art forms. So you had acting and writing and dance and music and animation, and you could just do so much with film. But not as one person. If you’re just one person, it can be really hard, unless you’re doing really small-scale personal stuff. But filmmaking is such a collaborative thing, that that also takes forever. So I fell into comedy, and I loved comedy, but I don’t think ultimately that I was a comedian.
After a ten day silent mediation retreat and with a fuller sense of clarity about his life, he realized that comedy wasn’t as deeply satisfying as music, where he felt like he could be more himself. He stopped doing standup and dove back into music.
I decided to put Michael on the other side of the camera and into the interview chair for my project about intense aesthetic experiences and the role of art in people’s lives, Perfect Recognition. I asked him the same roster of questions that I’ve asked other folks in this collection, which are designed to highlight the role that the arts play in an individual’s life, and the path that led them to continue practicing art as an adult.
All the music in this episode comes from The Way It Is albums Don’t Know How to Let You Go and instrumentals from Sans Vox.
Watch video clips from the TW interviews with neurologist Anjan Chatterjee and author David Biddle.
Keep up with Michael Sanchez: