The Official Mike Keneally Website

Tag: Music

Mike Keneally & Beer For Dolphins To Play Five Southern California Shows In January

Album, Live, News

Happy new year, beautiful people!

I’ve got a new album coming out in February, and we’re going to do some shows to celebrate that.

The album is called The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat, and I’ll be back here soon with some pre-order information about it so you can buy the thing online.

But, if you should happen to be in Southern California for any of the following shows, you can buy the CD at the merch table several weeks before the official release date. Plus you get to see a smokin’ Beer For Dolphins show.

Mike Keneally & Beer For Dolphins for the purposes of these January 2023 shows consist of:
Mike Keneally
Rick Musallam
Pete Griffin
Joe Travers
(with a special appearance by Griff Peters at the Escondido gig on Friday the 13th).

Bryan Beller is unavailable to perform for secret reasons. I am immensely grateful that Pete is willing to learn a LOT of hard bass parts in order to make it possible for me to do these shows.

The Escondido show will be the official Album Release Party gig for The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat. There will be a Q + A period, and I will dance with merry abandon in celebration of the fact that the album is finally coming out!

Friday Jan. 13th: the official Album Release Party gig for The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat

We are playing songs from all twelve of my major albums (hat., Boil That Dust Speck, Sluggo!, Nonkertompf, Dancing, Wooden Smoke, Dog, Scambot 1, Wing Beat Fantastic, You Must Be This Tall, Scambot 2, The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat – the primary canon, not counting bonus discs and live albums and the like) at these shows, the closest thing to a retrospective show I’ve ever presented.

The wonderful Travis Larson Band will be with us on all of the dates, I’m delighted to say!

The five dates are these:
Jan 13 – The Grand Ritz, Escondido (record release party/concert for The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat) – 7pm | Tickets
Jan 14 – Alvas Showroom, San Pedro – 7pm | Tickets 
Jan 15 – Alvas Showroom, San Pedro – 4pm | Tickets
Jan 16 – The Siren, Morro Bay – 6:30pm | Tickets
Jan 17 – The Baked Potato, LA – two sets, 8 and 10pm | Tickets

MIKE KENEALLY & BEER FOR DOLPHINS TO PLAY FIVE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SHOWS IN JANUARY

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

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

Big Eye Cutie

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!)

The Bird Brain

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

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

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