Press Archives - The Official Mike Keneally Website

THE KENEALLIST: No more teasing – TTTKCE is officially out!

February 27, 2023 Mike Keneally Album, News, Press, The Keneallist

Hallo there!

Hey, this weekend marks the official worldwide release of The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat! Happy TTTKCE Weekend!

Obviously a good bunch of you have already ordered it directly from store.keneally.com, which is brilliant and we are immensely grateful.

Now it’s going to be making appearances a bit more out in the wild, for the convenience of online shoppers and listeners who perhaps aren’t on this mailing list and/or are in the habit of visiting The Keneally Store directly. Astonishing to think that such people exist, I know, but modern life is full of surprise. In any case, the little album that could will be more widely available moving forward.

GET IT HERE!

The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat - Mike Keneally

Also, know now that TTTKCE has hit those big time streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, and Sneedfisher (okay I made that last one up).

And for everyone in Europe who’s been holding off purchasing the CD ‘cause of those ridiculously high postage costs from the U.S., the album will soon be available at Burning Shed in the U.K., where several of my titles already reside!

Unrelated Sound Guy premieres with TTTKCE music!

In the meantime, the entire short film depicting five of the new songs visually, The Complete Adventures of the Unrelated Sound Guy, has now premiered in full at unrelatedsoundguy.com. If you’ve seen Mikko Keinonen’s separate videos for “Big Hit Song,” “Celery” and “Spigot,” this film pulls them all together along with additional videos for “Lana” and “The Carousel of Progress.” It all makes for fascinating viewing, I think – I sure do like it a lot and am very grateful to Mikko for his wonderful creativity and generosity.

I was just in Tampere, Finland, at the wonderfully-named venue Tampereen Tullikamari, where we played the third show on the current Devin Townsend European Tour. The first two shows, in Oslo and Helsinki, went incredibly well – if things are going this well this early in the tour, it should be getting utterly astonishing as things progress. I love this little band (Devin, Darby Todd, James Leach and myself) and feel very grateful to be out here doing these shows.

Premiere party for the Unrelated Sound Guy film

Between soundcheck and show, I wandered over to a little bar nearby called Telakka, across the street from the venue, where Mikko Keinonen arranged an intimate premiere party for the Unrelated Sound Guy film.

My dear friend Jaan Wessman (bassist in The Mike Keneally Report) was also in attendance at the premiere party, as were James and Darby from Devin’s band, and many of the actors who appear in the film (whom I’d never met before, since my appearances in the film were done remotely at home).

So it’s already happened by the time you read this, but I still wanted to capture for posterity the fact that it happened!

More things to read, watch, and listen to

Here, have a bunch of recent reviews and interviews:

Why, there’s one on Page 20 of the North Coast Voice.
Here’s another from S.Victor Aaron at Something Else!, a really nice site who’s been there for us multiple times in the past and I’m really grateful for that.
And how about this happy exchange with Groovy Moody Music TV, a new YouTube channel created by my dear friends Rick Musallam (of Beer for Dolphins fame) and Stan Ausmus?
Not to forget Cedric Hendrix’s CirdecSongs Interview from a couple of months ago – a very engaging session that unfortunately loses my Zoom feed at 57:00. But it was fun while it lasted!
Pete Pardo has been a longtime booster of my music on his Sea of Tranquility website, and he shares his thoughts on TTTKCE in this YouTube review. I appreciate your insight, Pete!

I am most thankful for all attention being shown to this album! Damn!

Yipe, soundcheck is about to begin, I have to transition to band-guy mode. I’ll be back soon enough I’m sure! Thank you, as always, for being attentive and supportive and great.

Oh I want to mention my Patreon page again because at the beginning of this month I posted a bunch of unreleased audio and I’m going to be posting more soon, and you might want to check it out – patreon.com/MikeKeneally.

All right thank you I love you bye!

THE KENEALLIST: TTTKCE downloads out now! The Mistakes are on Bandcamp today!

February 3, 2023 Mike Keneally Album, News, Press, The Keneallist

Hi!

It’s me, Mike again, with a few things to discuss with you. Well I guess it’s a little bit one-way on my end, so not exactly a discussion, but I absolutely welcome you to respond verbally, even if I can’t hear you.

Today’s items of interest:

1. THE THING THAT KNOWLEDGE CAN’T EAT now available for download-only purchase!

We are pleased to announce, for those of you who prefer to sidestep (for personal and/or environmental reasons) the physical Compact Disc issue of my new album The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat, that you can now purchase it as a high-quality 320kpbs mp3 album, or an absurdly high-quality FLAC album. Both come with a high-res digital replica of ALL of the album art (right down to the CD label) with all the lyrics, liner notes, a photo of a windmill I saw out of a van window in Germany last year, another photo of the rabbit-shaped finial that lives on top of my bedroom lamp etc. etc.

Those of you who’ve requested this download-only option, we have heard you and we aim to please you! All you need do is visit the download page at the Keneally Store and there it awaits, along with another three pages worth of album, EP and single downloads you might really enjoy filling up your hard drive with (including a passel of free downloads you should know about).

DOWNLOAD TTTKCE HERE!

2. THE MISTAKES are now on Bandcamp!

Released in 1995, only 1000 copies ever printed, this collaboration between me, Henry Kaiser, Andy West and Prairie Prince once prompted Matt Resnicoff to suggest in the pages of Guitar Player magazine that we should “consider this all-star aggregate the new Traveling Wilburys – roaming the underground and armed with automatic weapons.”

It is undoubtedly a unique release, and one of the more notable one-shot deals in the history of avant-rock.

Several tracks from The Mistakes – most notably “Aye-Aye Monster” and “Career Politicians” – became staples in the live Beer For Dolphins repertoire, so if you know those songs but haven’t heard the original versions, now’s a good time to get acquainted…especially since today is Bandcamp Friday, the magical day when all proceeds go to the artist without Bandcamp taking their customary cut – a selfless act, thank you Bandcamp!

Your Bandcamp download includes all original artwork, plus newer liner notes I wrote in 2009.

DOWNLOAD
THE MISTAKES HERE!

3. European TTTKCE distribution in the works!

To our friends in Europe who would like to order the new The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat CD, but have been understandably put off by excessive postage costs, talks are in the works to defray some of those costs for you by obtaining new distribution on the European continent. Please remain patient a while longer while the details are worked out – we really do want to make this easier for you, and we’re sorry that the postage situation is so ridiculous. Hang tight, please, and thank you.

4. Two new YouTube vids of note!

Here’s a two-and-a-half hour conversation I did with Chris Siebold this week, discussing pretty much my entire solo album catalogue:

This was an epic talk, and I’m tremendously grateful to Chris (who is a really amazing guitarist) for his passion on the subject, for instigating this conversation and for pulling so much information out of me. Even if you’re super familiar with my work and past discussions about it, I’m hopeful that there’s something in this talk that will be new and interesting to you.

Another YouTube interview hit the airwaves this week, this one with Kyle Yates at The Vibes Broadcast – Kyle is a very attentive, patient interviewer and I enjoyed this talk a great deal.

5. Anything else?

TTTKCE review by Kevan Furbank at The Progressive Aspect

For now I’ll just leave you with this review by Kevan Furbank at The Progressive Aspect of the new album. I was really moved by this review – many thanks to Kevan for this.

That’ll do! Thanks everyone, have a marvelous weekend! If pizza is involved, just you enjoy the heck out of that pizza!

Love,

English translation of new Italian interview

October 13, 2014 Mike Keneally News, Press

Recently an interview with me was posted on the Cronaca Torino newspaper website, link here. With the kind permission of the interviewer Alessandro Gazzera, here are the original interview questions and answers in English as conducted via email:

1. Hello, mr. Keneally and thank you so much for the interview, It’s really a pleasure for me. First of all, why don’t we start with the new tour with Joe Satriani in South America? How to play with musician like him?

I’m having a great time playing with Joe. It’s constantly inspiring and challenging to play guitar next to him – he plays with such ease and mastery, and when we’re trading solos on guitar I definitely need to be at the top of my game. It was an unexpected surprise to get a call from him in 2010 asking me to work in the studio with him, and there has been a lot of recording and touring in the years since, and it’s always enjoyable. I’m glad he called me.

2. Mike Keneally have a really long career with a lot of collaboration. What is the secret of your success?

I just refuse to stop making music. I keep at it and over time I guess more and more people find out about what I’m doing. It’s important to remain open to collaboration; even though I spend a great deal of time working on my own projects, I try to do as much work with other musicians as I can when I’m called about doing other recordings and live gigs. It’s good to mix my own energy with that of other artists, and in terms of career exposure it makes a lot of sense to put myself out in front of different audiences. Playing in front of Satriani’s audience the last few years has been great, and I also play live with a metal band called Dethklok which has given me a very different sort of exposure that I would never have expected. It’s all great and it’s all helpful.

3. What is the most important moment of your career?

Probably when I decided to pick up the phone in late 1987, call Frank Zappa’s office and ask for a job. Frank had no idea who I was – hardly anyone did – so there was no reason to expect he would hire me, but if I hadn’t taken that ridiculous leap, things would have turned out very, very different for me.

4. When did you start to play the guitar and the keyboard?

The keyboard was my first instrument. I received an electric organ for my seventh birthday and loved it immediately. Never having played one before it still felt somehow familiar to me, and I remember walking up to it and picking out the melody to “Paint It, Black” by the Rolling Stones. I still wanted a guitar very badly, mainly because of my love for The Beatles. Four years later, on my eleventh birthday, I got my first acoustic guitar and began teaching myself to play based on what I knew about music from playing the organ.

5. In Italy we really love Frank Zappa and you played in his band for very long time. What do you remember of that period?

I was in constant disbelief that I was in his band at all. I was such a huge fan of Frank’s while I was growing up, and the idea of playing with him seemed like an unobtainable dream. I remember watching Frank onstage during his guitar solos on “Inca Roads” and being practically dizzy in the surreality of the moment. But I also remember hours of laughter during rehearsals putting new music together, and Frank using my familiarity with his repertoire to help bring older, long-unplayed songs back into the setlist, like “Who Needs The Peace Corps?” – if I hadn’t been in the band it’s quite possible that song wouldn’t have found its way back into the repertoire. I’m glad I was there!

6. The italian fans really like you work with Steve Vai. What, in your opinion, the best album you worked on?

“Alive In An Ultra World” was really special because Steve kept writing new songs during the tour for us to learn and play at the shows. He was very busy writing and we were very busy learning, and that made it an extremely unusual tour and I’m glad there’s such a good document of it. But the most special for me is “Vai Piano Reductions Vol. 1,” where I did solo piano arrangements and performances of 11 of his songs. He chose the songs, but gave me total freedom in how I chose to interpret them. It was the hardest album I ever made because solo piano is such a naked and unforgiving medium. But I was very happy with the results, many people have enjoyed the album and most importantly, Steve himself was thrilled with what I did. I couldn’t ask for a better result.

7. For know better you: what do you think about Italy? Here you have some fans…

I am half Italian (on my mother’s side) so it’s always a good feeling when I get to Italy. The people are wonderful, I love the architecture and sense of history. And the food of course! I’ve had countless great experiences on tour in Italy and look forward to many more.

8. Project for the future?

At the moment I’m primarily concerned with completing work on my next album, Scambot 2. It’s the middle installment in a trilogy; Scambot 1 came out five years ago so I’m very eager to continue work on the second volume. I’ve done a lot of work on it already, in fact I’ve been working on some arranging for it while on the road with Joe Satriani in South America. My hope is to complete the album in the first part of next year, but part of the Scambot concept is that I don’t push too hard with it – it’s a very intricate, multi-layered, narrative work and it kind of has to happen on its own schedule. I’m excited about it though and am eager to share it with the world. But first I’ve got some more touring with Satriani in a few weeks in New Zealand, Australia and Singapore, and early next year I’ll be in the studio with Joe working on his next album. So Scambot 2 has some competition for my attention – but it will be completed next year.

9. Is there a particular artist that you’d like to work with?

Wayne Shorter and Neil Young – ideally both at the same time.

10. Favourite Food?

I don’t think so. There’s so much good food I can’t think of one that stands above all. I wouldn’t want to make any other food feel bad by neglecting it.

11. What do you do in your free time?

I relax with my girlfriend Sarah playing various computer and board games, going on walks, and I love to draw ridiculous pictures.

12. Is there a model for you? Who has most influenced your music?

So many people have had major influences on my music – The Beatles were the first and were a huge influence, Frank Zappa obviously and perhaps he had the greatest impace. But Andy Partridge’s songs for XTC were also a major influence, Todd Rundgren had a major impact on the way I write chord progressions, and John Coltrane was like a lightning bolt for me in terms of improvisational approaches. Miles Davis and Bob Dylan in terms of staying true to your artistic impulses, and The Residents and Captain Beefheart for being unafraid to be absolutely incomprehensible at times. Radiohead for atmospheres and emotion. And a million others.

13. A message for our readers

I very much appreciate anyone who’s taken the time to read this interview, and I look forward to returning to Italy soon. I always relish the chance to play there. I’d also encourage anyone who’d like to know more about my music to visitwww.keneally.com, and you can link from there to my Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as to Radio Keneally, on online radio station playing my music 24 hours a day.