Album Archives - Page 6 of 10 - The Official Mike Keneally Website

The Bird Brain is a new band and we are on Bandcamp

October 7, 2022 Mike Keneally Album, News

The Bird Brain is a band that’s been meeting, on the sneak, every few months-ish since 2015 (with a significant pandemic break in there) to compose and practice new music together.

We have created a three-song, 23-minute EP and it’s now on Bandcamp: thebirdbrain.bandcamp.com

The component parts of The Bird Brain are:

myself (whom you know),

Pete Griffin (bassist with ZPZ, Paul Gilbert, Dethklok when Beller is unavailable, and newly a member of ProgJect as well),

Kris Myers (drummer with the celebrated Umphrey’s McGee, and along with Pete the core rhythm unit on Scambot 2),

Jonathan Sindelman (brilliant keyboardist with the Alan White Band [he was just a part of the core band for the Alan White tribute that occurred in Seattle, like, moments ago] as well as the Keith Emerson Band and the marvelous Yes tribute act Parallels), and,

Ben Thomas (vocalist, trombonist-trumpetist-percussionist-guitarist, formerly frontman of ZPZ and also collaborator with Aloe Blacc, Danny Carey and others, as well as another vital ingredient within Scambot 2).

The music we make together is unlike any other music I’ve heard. Fiercely rhythmic, texturally trippy and complex, lyrically a product of Ben’s under-tapped obsessions, and spiritually proudly free and forward-looking.

My hope is that YOU, the sort of person who peruses Keneally.com for a good time, will find The Bird Brain to be a vital part of your musical menu.

I really look forward to doing more with these guys, and am deeply grateful to be able to present this EP (after seven years!) as an outward demonstration of our collaborative energy. There’s more to come, for sure. (We’ve got another four tunes in the works.)

Enough of this yappin’. (I sure can yap, can’t I?) It’s time for you to go to Bandcamp and hear what we sound like!

thebirdbrain.bandcamp.com

(And if you are seeing this on Fri. Oct. 7 which is Bandcamp Friday which is when Bandcamp doesn’t take any percentage of any proceeds and all money goes to the artists, well, shucks, all the better! And thanks!)

“Pup” EP Now Streaming For The First Time – On Bandcamp

February 4, 2022 Mike Keneally Album, Exowax, News

Today is Bandcamp Friday! We are participating in this now-venerable tradition by releasing, for the first time in a streaming format, the Mike Keneally Band Pup EP from 2004. This was a very private pressing made available at the time only to those who pre-ordered the Dog album.

In addition to three otherwise unavailable live Keneally Band tracks, it contains a long studio take of the song “Li’l.” This freaky instrumental, in a later recording, ended up on Wine And Pickles, but this earlier version is longer, faster and rawer, and also contains the mysterious sounds of the Mattel Optigan that was available for our use at Stanley Recordings.

There’s also two one-man-band studio recordings, “Sun Flute” and “Party Poopers,” both recorded at Chatfield Manor in the span of time after Wooden Smoke and Dog, and very different from both of those albums. This was during the period when I was just beginning to sink my claws into Pro Tools. They are pretty sturdy examples of bizarre home-recording experimentalism.

All the music pieces are tied together with radio-style announcements and jingles, as this EP also functioned as promo for the then-brand-new Radio Keneally streaming service (no longer with us, and may its light forever shine in our memories). Pup captures the vibe of Radio Keneally in kind of the same way that The Who Sell Out captured the vibe of pirate radio of the ’60s.

Thank you to Chris Opperman for suggesting to Scott Chatfield and I that we make Pup available on Bandcamp, and then put his hard work where his ideas were and uploaded Pup to Bandcamp himself along with all of the supplementary textual material I prepared to accompany it. The hope is to continue uploading recordings from my catalogue to Bandcamp every month until we finally have it all up there.

For now, this is the first step, and it is here: https://mikekeneallymusic.bandcamp.com/releases

"Pup" EP Now Streaming For The First Time - On Bandcamp

MFTJ – My Mom’s Getting A Horse: everything you need to know

June 3, 2021 Mike Keneally Album, News

The last post I wrote in March 2020 was about the first MFTJ album, called MFTJ. How many of you who read that then figured that the next time I posted anything substantial here would be over 14 months later, heralding the second MFTJ album?

Four of you, I believe! Four of you figured that!

In any case, the second MFTJ album, My Mom’s Getting A Horse, was released on Bandcamp on January 10 2021. It’s the first full album project I worked on using my new pandemic-prompted home-recording set-up (made possible by the generosity of many wonderful friends at GoFundMe).