With his debut solo EP, Golden Hour: First Things First (604 Records), Marianas Trench bassist, Mike Ayley (under the moniker, MIKEH), presents a compact set of songs that are highly personal but leave plenty of room for listeners to see their own lives and the kind of uncertainties so many of us have experienced over the past two years and change reflected in them.
His new single, “Kaleidoscope” was inspired by an unexpected chance meeting. It’s about falling in love, feeling lost, floating through life like you have no home – then being completely found, grounded and exactly where you belong. It’s about how time can be so fleeting. It’s about having to live and leave a dream all in the same day.
The song feels dreamy and surreal – it’s like the moment when you first realize that you’re falling in love. The vocals are like two worlds coming together in a way that shouldn’t make sense but somehow works in an almost magical way.
“During the pandemic, I started having a hard time, wondering, why can I not get happy? That confused me because I’m a happy, optimistic person,” says Ayley. “But life’s going to be hard at times – you get through. So, in all these songs, there’s hope. That’s what the song ‘Kaleidoscope’ is about, meeting my wife, Emily, but thinking I’d never see her again, that it’s never going to work because we lived thousands of miles apart. But here I am, literally in the best place I’ve ever been. That’s reaffirmed for me that the decisions I’ve made personally and professionally – whether they felt right or wrong at the time – still led me to the place I need to be.”
