Vince Mira Won't Walk the Line

Billed as the Second Coming of Johnny Cash, a teenager from Federal Way wowed rock stars, morning news shows, Ellen DeGeneres, and the Cash estate. There’s just one problem: Vince Mira is done parroting the Man in Black.

By James Ross Gardner

Fine with Snell. That was his plan all along. He enlisted local singer-songwriter Michael Vermillion to work with Emmanuel. They came up with a handful of songs by “Vince Mira,” the easy-to-remember name they all brainstormed and voted on.

Mira, Snell, and Lupe joined John Carter for a week in September 2007 at the Cash Cabin. Along with Cash bassist Dave Roe and Walk the Line guitarist Jamie Hartford, Mira recorded original material, including “Cold Hearted Woman,” Vermillion’s soulful “Lonely Heart,” and—in Spanish—Cash’s “I Walk the Line” and “Ring of Fire.”

Vince Mira from John Keatley on Vimeo.

After that events unfolded like the jump-cut sequence in a Hollywood flick about a rising star. Snell flies home to Seattle, runs to a bar near the Can Can and plays the recordings for friends, one of whom works at KOMO TV, which features Mira on the five o’clock news. Then—the vignettes shorter now, the transitions choppier—a Good Morning America producer sees the news spot, calls Snell, invites Mira on the show. In November Mira, Lupe, and Snell fly to New York, where a live Good Morning America audience (cooing girls melting at the knees and all) gasps at the Boy in Black in faux-Western attire blazing through “Ring of Fire,” while 4.2 million home viewers lose their collective Cash-loving minds. Jump to later that same day at a bar in the East Village, where Snell checks the voicemail on his BlackBerry: “Hello, this is the Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

Mira does Ellen. He befriends Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard, who invites him on tour. The Tuesday crowd at the Can Can grows into a fire marshal’s nightmare. Life at Todd Beamer High School changes, too. The students, at the time swept up in the media circus surrounding another fellow classmate, American Idol finalist Sanjaya Malakar, crowd Mira, all wanting to be his friend. He starts lunching in the principal’s office to get away from all the attention. But it’s still too much. Lupe takes him out of Todd Beamer, signs him up for an online correspondence school. He plays festivals, including Sasquatch, performing his expanding repertoire of originals.

Next: Will Mira ditch his Cash persona?

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Published: July 2009