The Official Mike Keneally Website

New Keneally Album!

You Must Be This Tall out now!

You Must Be This Tall

NEW ALBUM: YOU MUST BE THIS TALL

Hello Keneallistians! Making this quick ’cause it’s Sarah’s birthday and we’re about to go out for lunch, but we wanted to let you know that today is the official release date for You Must Be This Tall.

It’s been pre-orderable for a couple of weeks as a CD + download, but as of today it’s fully officially available – and for those of you who have enough three-dimensional objects in your life, it’s now available as a download-only purchase if you wish.

If you buy the download directly from us you will also get the full album artwork as it appears in the CD package – even including the label art (we are obsessive about such things). Available in both mp3 and FLAC options for the same low, low, low, low, low price.

You can also check out a collage of song samples there. And some reviews are coming in here, here and here (broken link).

The response to the album has been really wonderful so far. Thanks to everyone who’s had such nice things to say about it!

New Keneally Album You Must Be This Tall

It’s pretty out there. But in a good way, I think – I’m really thrilled with this album. I think all of the composition, arranging, production and playing is strong and it all just comes off right, to my ears.

There’s a lot of guitar playing on it, a lot of crazy writing, and we focused hard on doing mixes which got the best out of the arrangements. A number of people who don’t lie to me have said they think it might be my best album. I sure can’t say, but I know I really enjoy hearing it.

I play a lot of the instruments myself, and also had some killer assistance on key tracks from Bryan Beller, Marco Minnemann, Joe Travers, Rick Musallam, Missy Andersen and Andy Partridge (Andy plays guitar on the song “Indicator,” an additional composition from the songwriting sessions that resulted in Wing Beat Fantastic).

The title song was written for the Metropole Orkest in 2006 for a live performance with Peter Tiehuis; this recording is my original version of it, shined up all nicely for you.

New Keneally Album PopesThere’s a phenomenally strange song called “Kidzapunk” which has an insane Minnemann performance and various indefensible sounds. There are epic guitar hero moves on “Pitch Pipe” and “The Rider” (that one also has a beautiful vocal from Missy Andersen). Some moody electronics on “Bolarius” and “5th St.” Some utter insanity on “Glop.” A prog standard in the making in “Cavanaugh.”

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You Are Welcomed, Kind Surfer

August 28 2013

Mike here!

We welcome you with outstretched cyber-arms, probably with some sort of waving blue CGI tendrils attached, to the brand-new, entirely re-designed Keneally.com. In tandem with the new album You Must Be This Tall, we are bloody well pleased to present this major website reboot.

Keneally.com was started in 1994 by Scott Chatfield. Scott introduced me to the concepts of the Internet, websites and email. That original website became a cornerstone of my career back when websites were still something of a secret to the wider world; it featured endless reams of content, me blogging before blogging was blogging, and heavy interaction between me and my fans (which led to fans posting reviews of my albums, guest-hosting our gigs, putting us up in their homes, having us play in their backyards etc.).

Mike KeneallyIn 1998 I asked Scott to become my manager, and in 1999 he and I began our record label Exowax Recordings. Scott has heroically continued to maintain Keneally.com ever since, but the total workload has been more than any one human should ever be asked to endure.

Then, a few months ago, came Antal Adriaanse, suggesting that the time had come for a complete overhaul for the website. For many years Antal has maintained the Mike Keneally Tour Chronology, a repository for information about all of my live performances (for me, a crucial reference work that I’ve relied upon many times; the Tour Chronology has now been folded into this new Keneally.com).

Antal offered to take on the job of making this new site, and within what seemed like moments, showed us something we hadn’t been able to execute for a few years – a fully updated discography. We were suitably impressed.

Scott then suggested getting Dimitriya, the wonderful animator who did our recent “Popes” video, to design some new art for the page, and she quickly came through with beautiful designs.

I’m very happy for the opportunity to freshen things up, and I’ve done a lot of writing for the different pages. I still have a lot more to do; in the past few weeks, while I’ve been on the road with Joe Satriani or while working on the upcoming Sluggo! reissue, I’ve written short pieces for various pages and new discography entries for many of my albums up until Wooden Smoke, but still have more to write about my solo albums, as well as other albums I’ve appeared on, and some of the key productions for other artists that I’ve done which haven’t gotten the attention they’ve deserved (like Matt Resnicoff’s The History Of Now, Dane Runyon’s Looking Below and the self-titled debut from The Assumptions).

We are also reviving the “Mike Types To You” section, for which I did a whole lot of writing in the 90s and which I believe was one of the first artist blogs (although no one, including us, called it that at the time) online. We’re now calling it Mike Types 2 U, in a little nod to how, as time goes on, letters are being removed from more and more words in life. People are busy, we understand. Ltrs take a long tym 2 read. The first new Mike Types 2 U entries will come soon – I’ll be on the touring the US with Joe Satriani for the next couple of months and I’m looking forward to doing some diary entries from the road.

All in all, I will be doing a lot more writing for this site than I have managed to do for Keneally.com in a long time. It’ll be a challenge but I’m looking forward to it.

(By the way, if you miss any of the content from the old Keneally.com, check out the “Archives” section – we’ve kept all the old stuff online for you as well, so you can fall into a nostalgic rabbit hole for hours if you like.)

Hope you enjoy the new digs.

Very much more, very soon!

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