The day of this interview is June 1, and The Bacon Brothers are in Rocky Mount, Va., for the first stop on their U.S. tour -- the one that brings them to The Sheid at Arkansas State University-Mountain Home for a show Wednesday.
Do they get butterflies before tour-opening gigs, especially one where they are playing songs off a new record -- in this case the pair's just-released, self-titled, ninth LP?
The Bacon Brothers
7 p.m. Wednesday, The Sheid, 1600 South College St., Mountain Home
Admission: $35, $17.50 students
(800) 965-9324
"We'll be playing new songs, and the set will be in a different order," Michael Bacon says via phone. "But it's less butterflies and more like, 'What can I do in the next few hours to get better prepared for tonight?'"
By the time they return to The Natural State -- they were in Hot Springs to grand marshal the World's Shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade in 2016 -- the brothers and their band, which includes Paul Guzzone (bass, backing vocals), Joe Mennonna (keyboards, accordion), Ira Siegel (lead guitar, mandolin and backing vocals) and Frank Vilardi (drums), should be in fine form.
"After you've been on the road a couple of weeks, it gets so tight and you really don't even have to think about stuff," Michael says.
At 69, he is the older of the two and the one that makes music for a living. As a composer for film and television, his work has been heard in documentaries like HBO's RX: Early Detection With Sandra Lee, All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State, the PBS program Finding Your Roots, and a long list of other movies and shows. He's also a distinguished lecturer at Lehman College in New York.
The younger Bacon, 59-year-old Kevin, is the actor. Perhaps you've seen him in such films as Footloose, Animal House, Mystic River, JFK, Apollo 13 or any of the other 80 or so movies and dozens of TV appearances he's made.
They grew up in Philadelphia with four other siblings, and their parents -- Ruth and Edmund -- encouraged their artistic pursuits.
"Mom played mandolin a little bit, but our father was pretty tone deaf," Kevin says. "Their influence was that they loved music and the possibility of creating anything. They loved if you picked up pen and paper, or a piece of charcoal or clay, or if you put on a play. If you were being creative, that was their focus."
When Kevin was old enough to play along, he and Michael began making music together.
"One of the curses I carry around is that I can recognize talent in other people instantaneously," Michael says. "And I knew from a very early age that Kevin had a knack for communicating what was going on inside him to other people, so I was always very encouraging."
Long before there was a Bacon Brothers band, the two were writing songs, Michael says. They released their first album, Forosoco, in 1997 and have kept up a steady stream of releases and tours ever since. The latest is a 10-song collection of Americana-based rock.
The first single is the nostalgic "Tom Petty T-Shirt," which is about trying to fix a crumbling relationship.
Incredibly, neither Bacon had ever crossed paths with the late Petty -- an obvious influence on their sound -- who died last year.
"He was a big, big part of my musical focus," Kevin says. "Right around the time I was moving to New York, the summer I turned 18, I was knocked out by his stuff. I'd been listening to punk and disco and a lot of Springsteen. But all of a sudden here's this Tom Petty stuff that was rock, but also kind of edgy, with a punk attitude."
The brothers usually write independently of each other and bring their work to the studio to be fine-tuned, Kevin says, with each singing lead on their own compositions.
"We'll do our home demos and come up with a template for the way we hear it," he says. "Then we will start to work it up with the band. Sometimes they're close to the original idea and sometimes they're real different."
An example of the latter can be heard on "Broken Glass," a Kevin-penned track that starts as a quiet little ballad before it gets interrupted by an electric guitar squall. Then it returns to its original tranquility. In the recording process, Kevin wanted to break from the song's innate sweetness.
"I said, 'Make it as ugly as you can make it,'" he says. "I wanted it to feel angry and almost scary."
At Michael's suggestion, Kevin's daughter, Sosie, added an improvised background vocal.
"There's a lot going on in that song," Kevin says.
Style on 06/19/2018