This time I’m letting Mike Viola talk.
I’ve enjoyed Mike’s music even before I knew he was the one doing it. It all started with an amazing little movie called That Thing You Do! It was – and remains – one of my favorite movies of all time, about the brief life and times of a ‘60s one-hit wonder band called the Oneders, a.k.a. The Wonders. Big thanks go out to Tom Hanks, of course, since he wrote and directed the film, but when you’re doing a film about a one-hit wonder, you’ve got to have a song that can be played over and over and over again without anyone growing tired of it. That’s what the late, great Adam Schlesinger gave us…and Mike took it, sang it, and hit it out of the park.
Long story short, I’ve been a Mike Viola fan ever since, but it wasn’t until a few years later that I stumbled upon his band, the Candy Butchers, on the soundtrack to the 1998 film Zero Effect. By the next year, the Candy Butchers had put out their full-length debut album, 1999’s Falling into Place, and they were off and running.
By the time you’re listening to this, Mike will have released a book, Superkid, about the earliest years of his music career, and on October 30th he’s releasing his latest album, Chum. Just to clarify, these days Mike is releasing his music under his own name, but if you aren’t familiar with his band catalog, let me assure you that there are several great Candy Butchers albums out there that you should familiarize yourself with first, after which it’s time to bask in the full Mike Viola catalog. But it’s all great stuff, I can assure you.
Mike and I ended up having a wide and ranging conversation that lasted longer than most episodes – you guys, I really have been trying to start wrapping things up by the hour mark, just to keep it easily digestible – but it’s a really enjoyable chat in which we discuss his additional soundtrack work on Walk Hard and Get Him to the Greek, his stint as an A&R guy for Verve Records that led him to sign a particularly wicked artist, teaming up with Adam Schlesinger to record an Andy Partridge song for the Monkees, writing for Panic at the Disco, working with Mandy Moore, covering a plethora of Paul McCartney songs, and much more. Oh, yes, and in addition to reading him a note that my 21-year-old daughter wrote for him about the importance of his music in her daily life, I reveal how his music was part of the soundtrack for my wife and I as we worked through the in vitro process and got our daughter into the world in the first place.
Okay, that’s probably enough of an intro. It’s time to let Mike Viola talk.
