Michael Munnik is a Canadian singer-songwriter living in Cardiff, Wales. His latest album, If Words Could Mend a Heart, follows up his 2023 return to writing and recording, Driving Though America at Night. The new record is another home-made affair that stretches in two directions: the pared down simplicity of voice and acoustic guitar with just one additional element, like a cello or a harmonica, and the amped-up expansion into modular synths and skronky guitars.
His music infuses indie folk and Americana with a background buzz of 90s grunge and 70s songwriter. They say, “They don’t write songs like that anymore”, but Munnik gives attention to well-crafted lyrics, nesting them in music with guitar, ukulele, or bouzouki at their acoustic heart, embroidered with more wide-ranging elements. Each song takes you on a journey to the places he’s lived and travelled – a dark American highway, an ancient pilgrim trail in Spain, or a second-floor apartment looking out onto a rainy Bronson Avenue.
Michael put a new three-song EP out this autumn, just in time for US mid-terms and Ed Sheeran-sized questions about the place political expression has in music. Available for download on Bandcamp, Anti-Captialist Dream looks to the past and speaks to the present. The songs follow If Words Could Mend a Heart released earlier in 2026, streaming in most places and available for purchase as download, CD, and for the first time through the magic of vinyl-on-demand, LP record. This record joins three previous albums of original music – 2006 EP Long Shadows in the Afternoon and full-length records I Am with the Hunters (2009) and Driving Through America at Night (2023). All are available to buy and download at Bandcamp or stream on your service of choice. You can hear his writing, bouzouki and backing vocals as a member of Ottawa Celt-punk sextet Siobhan. The early, raw demos of his high school grunge band Gone, from Nanaimo, BC, are Creative Commons-licensed at archive.org.
