Mike Viola Makes Pop Music Cool Again

Mike Viola at Abbey Road Studios | Photo by Kerri Fersel

It was unbelievable. It turns out they love pop music over there. The radio is completely different than here. My song was on the charts and shot up when I was there. I was kind of bowled over. I couldn't believe it.

So you are planning to go back?

Totally. I have a record deal there. And the label over there wants to bring me back in the next few months. The album comes out at the end of this month.

Of all the songs you have written, do you have a favorite?

In my music...well it's weird, in Mandy's record, I played a large role in writing those songs. So I feel those songs are my new songs. I guess right now, my favorite is Burn at Both Ends. It's kind of the direction where I am headed as a writer. I feel likes it's playful, yet at the same time it's wry and mature and also a little bit dark. Kind of where things are heading for me as a human being.

What is your earliest memory of music? Who did you listen to growing up?

When I was a little kid I used to write songs before I could play an instrument. I was writing melodies and putting lyrics to them. My brother was a musician and he was into some really good music. He was into Elton John, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and stuff like that. I listened to all of that growing up and was writing my own little hybrid of Black Sabbath and Elton John, when I was a kid. My earliest musical memory and my greatest inspiration was actually my brother. I would sit at the top of the stairs and watch his band play "Smoke on the Water" 36 times in a row, while their really cute girlfriends watched them. That's when I realized, that's kind of a cool thing to do with your life. That's how I got into it.

Your albums have very specific identities. Just Before Dark is very stripped down and acoustic. The production for Lurch sounds bigger with more instrumentation. Do you approach each album conceptually and thematically? What is the planning before you get started?

Each one is different. I am usually in such a different place. I have been without a manager and without a label for a long time. So I've really just been doing whatever I want to do, which can be detrimental and can also be enthralling and stoke the creative process. You can get excited about anything. For instance with Just Before Dark, I had all these songs and I was slated to go into the studio. I was actually in the studio working and I thought, you know, I am just going to all of these live and record it live. Flanagan who runs Largo, he kind of insisted that I do a live record. He really likes my live show. Something does happen when you play live that is completely different than going into the studio and recording over and over. Things can become a little threadbare when you do it that way. Each album is different. Just Before Dark was an impulse, Flanagan and me together. He said, "You should do it at my club." I said, "Really? Awesome!" It just kind of happened. I'm sure a manager would have shot that down. And with Lurch it was kind of the same thing. I had just finished "Walk Hard". I was writing so intensely and I was in such a cool inspired place, that I just decided to crank out a record. That's what Lurch was.

Your song "That Part of Me Is Dead" sounds like it has a little bit of the feel of an Elvis Costello song. Who are some of the songwriters that have influenced your music?

Definitely Costello is a big one. There were two seminal records for me when I was in my early 20s Elvis Costello's Greatest Hits and Squeeze Singles 45 and Under. I listened to all that music and I became obsessed with all that stuff. It all made its way into my music. As a lyricist it's more of a Tom Waits, Randy Newman type of thing. I have been at it for so long that I have turned a corner and I really can't explain what I am doing lyrically, but I like it.

When you write a song, what comes first - the lyrics or the melody?

It is usually a little piece of the song. The best part of the song, I think, comes to me first. Not always. "That Part of Me is Dead" I wrote in my sleep. I literally wrote it in my sleep and woke up with the verse. Then I laid in bed for about an hour and a half and finished it without an instrument. I went back to sleep, to see if I would remember it again. When I woke up, I picked up a guitar and figured out the chords. That is literally how I wrote that song. I am not kidding around. It took me like six months to write "Good Ideas Grow on Trees" on Lurch. I had the music and it was really pretty and almost classical in a way. I couldn't figure out any words. I was in China with my family and we were in the woods. My daughter was taking a nap and I started writing the lyrics really quickly, but it had taken six months to process it. Sometimes that is the process too. It is always different. When I am writing songs for other people it is pretty immediate. It happens pretty gracefully for other people. When it is for myself, it's kind of brutal.

Seems like a magical mystical process. Something that makes those of us who don't write songs very curious about it.

I am as curious as you. Sometimes I sit down and it is so effortless and I can't explain why. And others days it like banging my head against a wall.

You have collaborated with so many people from Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, to the songwriters for "Walk Hard" and now an upcoming album with Mandy Moore. How do all of these collaborations influence your solo work and life as a songwriter?

The best thing about working with other people is that if they are really talented like someone like Adam or someone like Dan Bern, who I have worked with a lot. I am actually working with on this new film too. When you work with people who are inspiring and talented, you always walk away with some sort of fringe benefit. Another way into a song. Another metaphysical way into a lyric, that you wouldn't have thought of before. Or a simple things like production. When I was working with Mandy, I took a lot of chances production-wise. I will definitely take that into my next project. Some of the things I did, some of the players I hired. All the projects I works on go into the pot. They all influence the next thing. One opportunity begets another.

You wrote several songs for "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" for John C. Reilly to perform in the film. You had to write songs in the style of music that character was going through at the time in his biopic life. How did you and the other songwriters do the research and approach creating songs in all of the styles of music that are in the film?

John Reilly, Judd Apatow, Jake Kasdan, and Lou Morton would pitch song ideas and titles to Dan Bern and me. We would go back to our hotel room and write a couple of songs per idea. We were cranking out so many songs. I wrote a song call "A Life Without You (Is No Life at All)", I just knew it has to be Roy Orbison. Jake Kasdan told me, "This should be a really overwrought Roy Orbison song." I am such a huge fan. I played a show with him once. It made it easy to tap into that. To be honest with you, it was pretty easy to write those songs. Dewey was like a vessel. We helped create who Dewey was by writing his catalogue of songs. That totally influenced all the writing I did after it. I've thanked Jake Kasdan and all the guys for that opportunity to do that movie like that. It really did change the way I work on my own material.

You once covered "I Want It That Way" a song made famous by The Backstreet Boys. Maybe it should be on a record with Richard Thompson singing "Oops I Did It Again" and Fountains of Wayne's version of "Baby One More Time". What makes putting the singer songwriter spin of these top 40 pop songs so entertaining and fun?

It's a great song. It's hard to hear how good it is in the way it was executed, but it's a great song. It's kind of an impossible song to write because it is so mundane, so right down the middle. I could never write a song like that, I've tried. Chris Colingwood from Fountains of Wayne and I talk about this all of the time- how those songs are just impossible to write. It takes someone who only knows English as a second language to write a song like that. I think the Matrix wrote that song... or the devil. It's fun to play those songs. It's like way so beyond and so not beyond at the same time. Honestly I recorded it because I think it's beautiful.

The new project you have coming out is an album with Mandy Moore. How did the collaboration with Mandy come about?

From my friend Inara George of The Bird and the Bee. Mandy is a fan of Inara's. She called Inara to collaborate and Inara got together with Mandy. Within 20 minutes Inara said,"You know you should meet my friend Mike because he loves all the same kind of music that you love." A week went by and Mandy came over to my house and we instantly hit it off. We started listening to records. I have a big vinyl collection. She was digging into my vinyl and she was blown away that we loved all the same records. I said. "What kind of record do you want to make?" and she said, "I want to make a record that is a cross between Wings and Joni Mitchell." I said, "I'm your guy." We started writing songs. We wrote three or four songs with Inara. Then Inara went on tour. Mandy and I kept working. We developed a process, a method. We started writing some really good songs. The songs just kept getting stronger and stronger. After three or four months of hanging out with her and writing, I felt like we had a really good record on our hands. That's how it all came about.

How long ago did you move to LA?

Almost a year ago exactly.

What made you want to live here?

Well I am an East Coast person, through and through. I am from Boston and spent half of my life in New York, but we got priced out of the city. There was so much positivity here in LA. My wife and I started to research the neighborhoods and we found Angeleno Heights. We fell in love with it. We thought if we could live there, we could really live in LA. The only other parts of LA that we knew were farther west and would have been completely unlike the life that we knew back east. Angeleno Heights is great. It's got the feel of a neighborhood. You can walk to downtown Echo Park have a coffee and walk back. I don't always have to use my car. My daughter still loves to walk. She cries about getting in the car. The main reason that we moved is that we felt so positive in LA whenever we were here. I was doing so much work here and every time I was here the only thing that was missing was my wife and daughter. So we decided to move out and try it. So far we love IT and we are not going anywhere.

Any favorite restaurants so far?

We love Taix, a French restaurant on Sunset. It is such a great place to hang. We have friends who have kids too. We meet there with our kids. The kids can run around by the fireplace. It's really great.

Other favorite places in LA?

My favorite place is the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I love that little place. I actually go there for self-affirmation that in my own little quixotic way I am doing the right thing with my life. No matter what I am doing, I am doing what I want to do. There are so many great examples in that museum of weird, strange, and unanswerable paths that people took in their life. Like the guy that put together the wooden ship of toothpicks. For me, that is me in my little pop songs. If you could pile them on top of each other it could be equal to that in a way. I love that place. I also like to go to Elysian Park and go for walks with my dog.

Favorite venues for music?

I think Largo is still my favorite. I haven't really been to that many. Since I moved here, I haven't been able to go out all that much because I have been touring a lot and working out of state making records. I feel like I am living in LA, but I have been all over the place.

Mike Viola will play The Little Room at Largo Saturday, March 14. His record with Mandy Moore, Amanda Leigh, will be released on April 7. Welcome to LA, Mike. We hope you stay for a very long time.

MIke Viola on MySpace.