mikekanesongwriter.com

If your world isn’t strange enough already, welcome to mine.

If you live long enough, crazy things happen… 

I’ve learned languages, crashed in a helicopter, rocked babies to sleep. I’ve seen Scorpio rise above the Indian Ocean, I’ve flipped motorcycles. I’ve watched the sunrise from the deck of a Russian trawler. I’ve slept for months on a bamboo mat in a mud hut.

I’ve been a drummer my entire musical life, working my first paid gigs when I was 15. Like most of the guys I’ve played with, I started young, alone in a basement with a lesson book. The Haskell W. Harr Drum Method, that was my first. I didn’t start writing songs until much later and had no way to arrange them so about 10 years ago I picked up a guitar. I won’t live long enough to get good at it.

There’s a thing we used to say as we’d collect our pay at the end of a gig here in the great industrial Northeast: “There are hundreds of dollars to be made in the music business.” We’d laugh because we knew the truth of why we were still awake at 2:00 a.m., packing up our gear. We were there because people straggled in from their hard days and their weird lives to keep company with us. They wanted to hear a story, they wanted to reach out and be reached out to.

In the end it’s about communion. There’s no band or barroom but there’s still us. I’m glad we’re both here. There are stories to be told, maybe one of them is yours.

-Mike Kane, Boston, Massachusetts, 2023