MANSFIELD — When Ricky Mitchell came to town in 2016, he hit the ground running.
That December he moved into his friend’s house in Shelby and began recording his first Richland County album, Monday Morning After.
He poured himself into a personal album about getting over past relationships, becoming more mature and getting comfortable with himself again. But the project wasn’t completed.
“I’ve never made real money,” Mitchell said, explaining the abrupt end to the project. “A lot of the decisions on albums have been because I’ve been up against a wall, and I had to do something.”
Mitchell said he had a gig coming up at a pizza shop in his hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee where he wanted to be able to sell the project.
“I still have screen shots of the conversation I had with my drummer (Scott Fugate, of Kingston, Tennessee) about my doubts,” he said. “But I had to get the project done by the pizza gig.”
At the pizza shop gig, which he dubbed an Album Release Party, Mitchell was so worried about the project he said he played none of the songs on it.
“I only played covers,” he said. “It was the most disheartening thing. I was embarrassed by the state of it.”
In 2018, he tried to make up for it. He released an album titled Wishing Wells in May 2018.
But even that never felt right.
“It would be akin to writing one of your stories, but not getting to use the same words twice,” the Knoxville native said. “I had to recapture the same story, but in a different way. I didn’t want to repeat myself and I don’t think it ended up sounding like me.
“It’s not that any of the songs were bad, it just didn’t sound like something that I would do.”
He talked it over with his family, his girlfriend and his band, The Yak Pack. In the end, he scrapped Wishing Wells.
“I didn’t play the songs live, and I got to the point where If I’m getting to play my original music, I should play stuff that is me.”
On Jan. 14, he released a video on Facebook announcing he had returned to Monday Morning After.
The album is now finished, he confirmed, and will be released with music videos on Monday mornings, he said smiling.
“There were originally 15 songs (in 2017) but there are now 13 because there was an introduction that was never meant to make it on there and a song toward the end which wan’t supposed to make it on there at all.”
It’s a relief, he said, being able to revisit an imperfect representation of himself.
He has since deleted Wishing Wells and the original Monday Morning After and an earlier album, Self Harmony, which he recorded in his parent’s attic.
Mitchell said he knew this was the right way to go because he saw with data from music providers like Spotify and iTunes showed more people were listening to the 2017 edition of Monday Morning After than his album Wishing Wells.
“If you listen to the original version, it’s just out of place,” he said.
Now, lyrically, Mitchell feels like its a story better told.
“I’m finally able to finish this sentence,” he said. “And I can move on to the next one.”
