Three guests and three distinct flavors this week on MI Local, along with three new songs from Michigan artists!

We started off with a new track by the Traverse City based psych-rock/shoegaze duo known as Hail Your Highness, with “Treegaze,” from their new EP, “Wonderlust” that comes out this weekend.

Then we played “Black Cat Operator” by the Detroit-based darkwave-pop duo, Rogue Satellites, from their third “Horrors” EP, part of a series that they’ve consistently released around Halloween.

After that, we heard an interview I did with the eclectic, brilliant, multi-faceted singer-songwriter Laurel Premo, who’s based up in Traverse City, combining what’s been, for her, a lifelong admiration for American traditional folk styles with orchestral elements and Nordic arrangements.

Premo has been writing, arranging, and touring internationally since 2009. In 2021, she released “Golden Loam,” her first album as a proper solo-artist. On Halloween, she released the poignant EP, “Laments”—four orchestral folk pieces as odes of griefwork, exploring the possibility of grief being an ecstatic act that helps connect oneself with the tremendous energy and love that leads to these immense feelings, with a focus on how this love and loss is all about the deep connections we’ve forged.

You can hear my interview with Premo on this week’s show, and then stay tuned for the full, un-cut, podcast-length chat with her about this project in a couple of weeks, which will be close to the time when she’ll be releasing a music video for the first song on “Laments.”

Up next, we had The Muggs in studio to talk about their upcoming gig, opening for Blue Oyster Cult. The Muggs have been a Detroit blues/garage-rock institution for 25 years, born out of a high school friendship between its founding members, best known today as Danny Muggs and Tony Muggs.

Over the years, they’ve released several albums and gained worldwide acclaim, appearing on nationally broadcast television programs and touring Europe several times! The Muggs will be opening for Blue Oyster Cult at the Royal Oak Music Theatre next Saturday, Nov. 22.

My other guest this week, a returning guest to MI Local, is MRKT, a trio of prog-rock jazz-punk fusionists, who can tend to be a little reserved and taciturn in person, but on stage and on their recordings they turn in to frenetic awe-inspiring tornadoes of humans! They have a new album out this Friday and they treated WDET listeners to an exclusive listen of quite an epic track, titled “The Wheel!”

Check the playlist below and listen to the episode for two weeks after it airs using the player above.

• “Treegaze” – Hail Your Highness
• “Black Cat Operator” – Rogue Satellites
• “Outer Rim” – Twinn
• “On With The Show” – The Muggs
• “Applecart Blues” – The Muggs
• “Magnet & Steel” – The Muggs
• “Regional Deities” – MRKT
• “The Wheel” – MRKT
• “Vespre” – Ancient Language