When did you first start playing the guitar and how did you learn?
I first started messing around with the guitar as a kid. My father bought an acoustic guitar and signed up for a course at the local elementary school. I can still clearly remember him working on “Tom Dooley”—and that was pretty much the extent of Dad’s guitar playing. But that little spark was all it took to get my brother and me interested. My real passion for it didn’t kick in, though, until I was around 15 or so.
As for how I learned: I’m mostly self-taught, except for a music theory course I took in college. The Beatles were truly my main teachers—I learned by playing their songs. Since I knew the recordings so well, I could instantly tell if I was getting the parts right or not.
When did you start writing your own music?
I started writing when I was around 18 years old. My brother and I formed a band with our friend Jeff. Initially, it was just the three of us until Max, a huge Keith Moon fan, joined later on. Writing original music was our primary focus. Playing covers was a way to warm up or have fun, but our main goal was to write our own compositions.
Do you remember the first song you wrote?
If my memory serves me right, the very first one was a song called “Long Live The Queen.” Unfortunately, I don’t have any recording of it—unless my brother has it tucked away somewhere.
One of our earliest songs that we actually wrote and recorded back in 1979 is “Vacation In Your Mind.” We were heavily influenced by the Canadian band Klaatu at the time, so it definitely has that Klaatu vibe. The psychedelic lyrics were inspired by a poem written by my brother, and Jeff wrote the music, but it was a collaborative effort between the three of us.
Oddly enough, my brother wasn’t a big fan of the song, but I absolutely loved it. It’s one of the tracks I ended up re-recording for my Yesteryear Project.
Did you pursue a recording contract?
Yes, we did. And of course, being young and naïve, we had no real idea how to go about it. We didn't play live at all—our main focus was on writing and recording. We basically bought into the Beatles/Steely Dan mindset: stay in the studio, craft the songs, perfect the recordings, and let the music speak for itself. In hindsight, it was a mistake.
Around 1979, we recorded our first demo on a two-track reel-to-reel that belonged to our friend Phil. Although the music was creative, we were just getting started, so the songs lacked the polish that comes with more experience and better recording gear. We kept at it and got better and better, and ended up making a three-song demo in 1981 that was quite good.
Whenever we went to the studio to record, we were always well-rehearsed and had our parts down. We all had part-time jobs while attending college, so at $75 an hour, you needed to get in and out as cost-effectively as possible.
For a short time, we had another guitar player who was quirky to say the least. When he arrived at the studio, he thought it would be a good idea to change the strings on his 12-string guitar before recording his track. His little dalliance cost us an hour, so after the session, me, my brother, and Jeff told him not to come back.
We sent the demo to record companies, but unsolicited material is rarely accepted by the labels—something we were unaware of at the time (yes, we were naïve).
Jeff, our main songwriter and piano/keyboard player from the very start, left the band sometime in 1982. Before he departed, another friend, Mark, had already been drifting in and out of the lineup, recording with us both during Jeff’s time and for a while after. Mark stayed with us for roughly two years—a really solid guitarist and incredibly versatile. Years later, at a high school reunion, my brother heard the heartbreaking news that Mark had died in a motorcycle accident. It hit hard. He was a genuinely good guy and a terrific musician.
With both Jeff and then Mark gone, it came down to just me, my brother, and Max to keep things going. That meant reshuffling roles. My brother and I shared the piano responsibilities between us. He’d originally been our drummer before Max came along, but now he moved over to bass—a spot I’d handled before, along with guitar. In the end, the new lineup felt natural: me on guitar, piano, and lead vocals; my brother handling bass, keys, and piano too; and Max holding down the drums. By that point I’d become the primary songwriter, so we headed back into the studio to record our third demo—six songs in all, including a couple of my originals that had carried over from the Workshoppe Recording sessions.
This time we recorded on 8 tracks at Bayside Recording Studios in Queens, New York. Dave Weiner, the owner, was a great guy—a Juilliard graduate who really loved working with us because we always came in well-prepared. According to my brother, he also threw fantastic parties. He had another location in Whitestone, New York, that doubled as a rehearsal space for bands, and we booked time there regularly. Sadly, Dave passed away in 2017.
Aside from practicing at home and at my girlfriend’s parents’ house, we also used to rehearse in a friend’s martial arts studio out on the east end of Long Island. It was a perfect setup—the space was completely free. We’d play for hours on end, and every now and then a crowd would gather outside, just listening in.
The Bayside recordings turned out to be a very good demo, but once again, being exclusively a studio band worked against us—the labels wanted to see live acts.
After our third demo, my brother and I decided we’d had enough of chasing a big break. We stopped pursuing record deals and shifted to writing and recording purely for ourselves at his 4-track studio in Maryland. At that point, the band was just the two of us.
It was during this period—from the mid-to-late 1980s through the mid-1990s—that we created some of our most creative and inventive songs. Freed from the rigid formulas record companies always tried to force on bands, we could finally let our creativity and imagination run completely wild. It was a truly fun, liberating time.
Tell us about your Yesteryear Project. What’s it all about?
In the end, around two dozen songs—written and recorded in various forms, some mostly finished, others still works in progress—ended up sitting on a shelf, quietly collecting dust.
So, I decided to reimagine and re-record ten of those songs, approaching them with a fresh perspective while staying completely faithful to the original melodies and the heart of what they were. It’s a bit surreal—going back 40 years to revisit songs I wrote when I was so much younger. Mind-boggling, really, when I stop and think about it.
My goal is to release the 10-song Yesteryear album by March 2026, with both a vinyl edition and a digital version planned. If everything comes together as hoped, I have a tentative plan to follow it up with another 10-song album sometime in 2027. The whole process has been incredibly rewarding—finally giving these old songs the care and attention they’ve deserved after all these years.
You have released 6 albums since 2013. Can you tell us about those albums?
From mid-to-late 1990 until 2010, I was very busy with my family and career, so writing and recording were on pause. I would still play my guitar, but I wasn't writing much. Maybe a song here or there. In 2011, I decided to get back into the game and record my album Leaving Dystopia. I bought a Tascam 2488neo, which is a 24-track digital recorder. I wrote nine new songs and performed a cover of John Lennon's 'Working Class Hero'. I did all the mixing and mastering by myself. Tunecore, my publisher, released the album in February 2013.
In February 2018, I released my second album, Hollow Moon. I wrote all the songs and did the mixing, but the mastering was done using LANDR. Leaving Dystopia kept things raw and stripped down, but Hollow Moon stepped up with more polish, especially in the layering and production. Whereas most of the songs on Leaving Dystopia were written within a single 12-month period, the eight songs on Hollow Moon were composed over the course of four years.
In May 2023, I released No More Gods, featuring 10 new songs I wrote—all of which had previously come out as singles. I released them as singles first to make sure there wasn’t another five-year stretch without any new music.
While some tracks on No More Gods offer the same kind of pointed social commentary you’ll find on my earlier albums, others are deeply introspective and personal. When you write music, you’re capturing your exact emotional state and thoughts right in that moment—and I truly believe listeners can sense that honesty when they hear the album. Five of the songs from No More Gods—the ones that came from that deeper emotional place—eventually made their way onto my current album, Love Roller Coaster.
In December 2023, I released two compilation albums, A Decade of Rockers and A Decade of Blues and Ballads, which cover my music from 2013 to 2023.
Since the February 2013 release of Leaving Dystopia, my catalog has been streamed over 8.8 million times across major platforms, with around half a million listens on SoundCloud and nearly 30,000 plays on ReverbNation.
What do you think of yourself as a guitar player?
That's an interesting question because I tend to be my own worst critic. When someone tells me, “You're a great guitar player,” I usually say, “No, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Eddie Van Halen are great guitar players.”
I think I'm a solid, good guitar player who knows his limitations. That said, when I can step back, be objective, and stop over-critiquing myself, I can listen to my own songs and think, “You know, that's pretty good—I did alright.”
Do you play most of the instruments on your songs?
Yes, everything you hear is me. The only exception is the lead guitar on the title track of my first album, Leaving Dystopia, where my youngest brother came in and laid down the solo.
I play guitar, bass, piano, and keyboards, and I handle all the arranging. Drums come from an Alesis SR-18 or Zoom RT-223 drum machine. Sure, a few of my drummer friends—some of them pros—rib me about it, but at this point in my life, music is something I do when inspiration hits. I’m not chasing perfection.
At the end of the day, if the song works and feels right to you, that’s all that counts.
How do you feel about AI in the music industry?
It really depends on how it’s being used.
I’m totally fine with AI as a tool for mastering—something like LANDR, which I actually use. To me, it’s no different from pulling up any other plugin or app to dial in EQ, compression, or dynamics on a track that humans wrote and performed. For independent artists especially, professional mastering can get expensive. Tools like LANDR deliver solid, reliable results at a fraction of the cost, and that’s a win.
I’m also okay with pitch correction when it’s used lightly—fixing the occasional off note while keeping 99% of the raw, organic vocal performance intact. But the moment you start pitch-correcting every single note of a vocal take, that’s a completely different conversation.
Where I draw a hard line is using AI to generate full songs. To me, that’s fundamentally inauthentic and honestly a bit disturbing. It’s one more step toward digitizing and dehumanizing what makes music human in the first place.
And let’s be clear: when someone says they “created” a song with AI, that’s an oxymoron. The AI created it—by scraping and recombining countless real human performances and songwriting decisions it was trained on. AI isn’t sentient. It has no taste, no heartbreak, no late-night epiphanies. It’s a very clever machine that needs human creativity to even exist in the first place.
So when a person with zero musical training or songwriting experience types a prompt and claims they “wrote” the song… that mindset really bothers me. Songwriting is a craft. It’s imagination, perseverance, failure, and those hard-won breakthroughs that hit you at 3 a.m. Turning it into nothing more than typing out a prompt strips away everything that actually matters about the art.
Do you think you’ll ever collaborate in the future?
It’s possible, I guess, and I have been asked several times by friends who are musicians—some of whom are in the business.
One friend, who drums for a fairly well-known band, once told me I was prolific in my songwriting. I never thought of myself that way at all. I just write songs when the inspiration emerges. When he said it, it was flattering, but it’s not how I see myself.
Now, regarding collaboration—if you’ve ever been in a band, I’m sure plenty of musicians would agree: it almost always involves egos (and yes, that includes mine). There are disagreements, arguments, and at times hurt feelings. The drummer might think they’ve absolutely nailed the track, but as the songwriter you just don’t hear it the same way. A guitarist overdubs what they believe is a perfect part, but it’s nothing like what you had in mind. In our band, the standing rule was always that the songwriter had the final say—and even with that, things could still get tense.
So, while the door isn’t completely closed, I’m happy working alone for now. After all these years, I enjoy the freedom of doing things on my own terms.
In addition to your Yesteryear Project, do you have any other plans for music in the future?
Tragically, my stepdaughter—a gifted musician and songwriter—passed away in October this year. She was part of a band on the West Coast that had real potential. She was an incredibly talented songwriter; her lyrics were brilliant. There are simply no words to describe the depth of the heartache her loss has brought. I loved her dearly.
Before she passed, she sent me 17 demos of songs she had written, with the hope that we could work on them together someday. I plan to record some of those songs—to bring them to life the way she envisioned and to honor her memory through the music she created. That will be a deeply meaningful project for me moving forward.
Mike's Music Website: https://laboroflovemusic.com/
