INTERVIEW: MICHAEL ISAAK

Thank you for sitting down and talking to FLEX, can you tell us a bit about how you got into music?

Music has always been this steady presence in my life, from singing hymns in the Coptic Church to playing around on my grandparents’ piano, to joining choir in school, and eventually learning the ukulele and guitar and composing music digitally by my teenage years. By 15, I landed my first production credit, and by 18, I was producing for friends and writing my own songs.

I never really saw music as a career path until finishing my first year of university and felt this irresistible calling to pursue my passion, which led me to move back to my hometown of Los Angeles and start putting out music, performing in town, and joining a community of indie artists, many of whom have become some of my closest friends. I put out my first EP in January of 2024, and now one year later I am showing listeners a different side of my music, one that takes more risks and feels more grown-up.

Who would you say are your biggest musical influences?

I’ve been a fan of guitar driven music and folk since high school, especially when I started listening to Sufjan Stevens, Jose Gonzalez, and soon after Phoebe Bridgers. I feel like these artists taught me how to put my feelings into words and to make sense of emotions I wouldn’t otherwise understand. My family is from Egypt, so I have been listening to Arabic music from a really young age. Umm, Kulthum is huge for me, along with Farid al-Atrash, Abdel Halim Hafez, and Mohamed Mounir.

Congratulations on your brand-new single ‘Wrong Version of Me’—what inspired this particular release?

‘Wrong Version of Me’ falls on my journey of discovering not only a mature sound in music but also an emotional maturity and entrance into adulthood. I wrote this around the time I decided to move to New York and leave home, which is a complex thing for me. My hometown of Los Angeles was where I began my career in music, it is where I was born, and I attach so much of my identity to that place. I wrote this song as a way of remembering certain pieces of myself, even when contexts and environments change.

How do you channel personal experiences into your songwriting, and what do you hope listeners gain from connecting with your music?

I never write songs about one particular moment in time but rather blend several experiences into general themes that persist in my life–insecurity about the past and future, feeling lost in one’s own culture(s), and discovering what it means to live authentically. I don’t talk much on stage when I perform. I really want the music to speak for itself. As much as my music depends on my personal experiences, I don’t necessarily want people to think of them like that. Because in the end, I don’t really want it to be all about me. I’m always interested in the meaning people draw from my songs to a much larger extent than the concrete experiences that prompted me to write them.

Each aspect of music—writing, recording, practicing, and playing live—offers something different. Can you share a particularly meaningful moment from each?

Writing is such a personal experience for me, which almost always occurs when I am by myself, in my bed, usually late at night, with my notebook, my guitar, and my phone recording. When I write, I actually black out; I can never pinpoint how I decided to go with a specific melody or guitar part. Sometimes it feels like songs pop out of thin air, which is one of the coolest experiences I’ve had with making music. While writing is an individual, introspective experience, the other aspects of making music are extremely communal for me. Recording these latest two singles with Charlie Hickey and Tyler Graham has been the most fun I’ve ever had creating music. One moment from WVOM that stands out to me is when Charlie and I took turns sitting at the piano recording takes for the track, and we both kept messing up like crazy, but we ended up keeping a lot of the mistakes. There was something really organic about that process that I wanted to preserve in the recording. Practicing and playing live is also such a crucial thing for WVOM because my band and I played this one live before I even thought about releasing it. I showed up to practice one day last summer with this new song I wanted to jam with my bandmates. We kept playing the song over and over again until we all synced up, and suddenly we had this awesome full band arrangement. I remember we kept singing that melody all day really looking forward to playing it at the show. To this day, it is one of my favourite songs to perform, and it is one of the songs audience members always approach me about after hoping to stream it. Now they can.

Is there a song in your repertoire that holds a particularly deep personal meaning for you?  Can you share the story or inspiration behind it?

One of my earliest songs is called “hey boy,” which I wrote as a love letter to my younger self. I picked it as the first song of my first EP because I feel like it is an introduction to who I am as an artist and as a human being. It is quite special to me because I feel like the song is alive. I’m constantly extracting new meaning from it, and every time I perform it, I manage to find yet another version of myself to sing it to. I don’t think I will ever stop performing it.

What are your goals for the future with your music?

My next major goal is definitely to record a full length studio album. Since I moved to New York I’ve really immersed myself in both the indie folk scene and the Arabic music community, as well as studying the Arabic language and learning to play the oud. I envision my debut album being a self-portrait of my several identities, and how they interact with each other.

What message or feeling do you hope listeners take away from your music? 

I write these songs for people who feel the way I do. Maybe you are also moving away from home soon. Maybe you just moved back home. Maybe you are still figuring out who you are. In a way, it’s to tell people, it’s normal to worry about your place in this world, it’s okay to feel unsure about yourself. And when people do relate to my music, it makes me feel less crazy as well.

To wrap things up, is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Thank you so much to FLEX for setting up this interview and showcasing my work. For my returning listeners, thank you for following me thus far on this journey of discovery of self and the world around me. For those who are joining me now, thanks for taking a chance on my music. I hope you stick around.

Please feel free to follow me on Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify. You can also subscribe to my newsletter via my Official Website.

Stream 'Wrong Version of Me' now: