Mike Viola is a producer, musician, songwriter and singer. Viola may be best known for his work with Panic! at the Disco, Andrew Bird, Ryan Adams, Jenny Lewis and Mandy Moore, but his solo career stands on its own starting with a number of acclaimed records as the leader of New York based cult favourite Candy Butchers and 7 critically adored Mike Viola records. His original music has been featured on soundtracks for movies such as That Thing You Do!, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Get Him to the Greek.
Decades into his career his music continues to resonate with and inspire new generations of musicians and music lovers.
Paul McCarthy was recorded over the summer of 2022 on 1/2” tape at “Barebones”, Viola’s home studio in Los Angeles. Joined by his friends Jake Sinclair on bass and Brendon Urie on drums. Viola says, “I set out to make a sonic monster using the legs of James Gang Rides Again, the heart of Black Sabbath Paranoid, with my kid brain inside my greying middle aged head on top. I’ve hit a point in my life where instinct has taken the reins fully, logic now waits in the wings to sweep up the stage and pay the taxi fare home. This album is the result of committing to this path fully and laughing all the way.”
In first single, Paul McCarthy, Viola imagines a universe where his favourite contemporary visual artist Paul McCarthy joins the Beatles as the “fifth Beatle”. Viola adds “the concept kind of ends there and the song itself is just me playing around in this colourful world. It can all be kind of heady and heavy if you want it to be, go ahead and connect the dots if you want, but it’s more fun as a romp in the eternal purposeless of it all”
Second single Bill Viola is another song about the construct of self seen through the lens of a handheld VHS. Mike Viola changes to Bill Viola changes to Frank Viola at Fenway Park watching a ball fly over the Green Monster, a home run. A song about ambition, swinging for the fences, shape shifting, the past stays alive in images in songs, movements in cameras, ever changing. “Scotch n’ Sounds was a club in a bowling alley on the outskirts of Boston. While writing this song I visualized myself as a teenager in the 80’s playing there, a kid brain packed with the know-how of older Mike now. If I only knew now what I didn’t know then fantasy.”
“I started so young. By 13 I was playing sold out shows in Boston and it was drilled into me that I would be a star. That never happened but the 1980s version of what it was to be a rock star kind of never left my psyche. I used to be ashamed of it, like… let it go man! But, at some point i found a way to draw from it, like a well, there was more there than a sense of failure or success, there was the simple fact that it was me down there, I’m the same person now as I was then.” Third single I Think I Thought Forever Proof allows Viola the alternate life of being that young rock star who joined the circus. Falling in and out of sleep, one foot in the future one foot in the past, once again blurring the lines of the narrative to create a sense of longing for the thing all over again.
Viola will support the album release with his first tour in over a decade with dates in Europe and the US in Winter/Spring 2023, and more dates to follow later in 2023.