Mike Keneally has one of the more impressive resumes in the progressive music business. Early recognition came from his stint as a Frank Zappa "stunt guitarist", and a Zappa 1988 tour band member - playing both both guitar and keyboards. Since then he has worked with a succession of high profile musicians, ranging from Steve Vai, through Dweezil Zappa, and most recently, Dethklok.

Mike's considerable back catalog includes numerous excellent solo albums, his work with the Mike Keneally band and Beer For Dolphins, and a long list of successful collaborations with other prog luminaries.

Now, at the launch of his acclaimed Scambot 1 album, Mike answers questions from Kerry Chicoine, and Progressive Ears founder Sean Tonar.

| Sean Tonar - Progressive Ears: Does music spontaneously manifest itself in your mind, and if so, how often does it happen? Do you find it easy or difficult to translate your head-music to an instrument, or do you write it out traditionally?

Mike Keneally: It does spontaneously manifest itself, daily; probably one-quarter of each waking day there are melodic/lyric fragments racing through my head. Most of them get away from me, but now that I've got an iPhone with magical Voice Memo capability I'm capturing more of them (I have not been paid by Apple for this). Many of the fragments are so ridiculous that it's probably no significant loss when they get away, but occasionally something arrives and won't leave and will insist on being fleshed out into a song.

Figuring out the pitches and either playing them on an instrument, or writing them down on manuscript paper, isn't a problem, it's just a matter of figuring out the first pitch (I don't have perfect pitch but I have good relative pitch, and can replay an open E string in my mind and compare any note in my head to it. I also have a little tuner in my iPhone if I'm ever unsure about something. (I have not been paid by Apple for this).

PE: How much of your material is composed/improvised spontaneously while at an instrument? Could you provide a few songs you've written this way? How much comes to you whole before picking up an instrument - and could you mention a few written that way? And how often do you start with a kernel of an idea and then add to it over the course of several weeks or months? Can you mention a few done that way?

MK: A lot of the material on Boil That Dust Speck was composed in the first way you describe, I believe; I wrote a couple of ideas for some parts of a song, then turned on the tape recorder and improvised, on guitar, a completed song structure based on the few composed bits I had. Examples would be "'Cause of Breakfast," "Top Of Stove Melting," "Weekend" and "Aglow" - that's why each of those songs has so many odd bars and repeating sections which don't quite repeat - it was a stream-of-consciousness process. And the other method, in which a piece comes together slowly over time around a kernel, has certainly been used: the piano-based material from Sluggo! (like "Cardboard Dog," "I, Drum-Running, Am Clapboard Bound" and "TRANQUILLADO"), and just about all of "The Universe Will Provide" was created this way, as well as "Gita" and other pieces from Scambot 1.



Mike Keneally and Bryan Beller share a light hearted moment on stage



PE: In the early days of your solo career, how difficult was it to convey the often-baffling aspects of some of your music to other musicians? Did you ever feel as if you'd never be able to find musicians who could execute your singular vision?

MK: I was lucky from the outset; even prior to my involvement with Zappa, I always found musicians (including my older brother) who were apparently intrigued enough by what I was writing to want to take the time to learn and play it properly. And before I had a band, I was recording home demos, which made it extremely easy to convey what I was trying to do - just hand a guy a tape. When I started my post-Zappa solo career, during the Hat period, I was extremely lucky to be working with Toss Panos and Doug Lunn, who not only could execute anything I could visualize, but also embellished upon ideas in ways which opened my mind to vaster possibilities. That period laid the groundwork for the work I've done with other musicians ever since.

PE: How much musical input do you allow your bandmates with regard to the arrangements of the songs?

MK: A lot. There'd be no reason to work with musicians of this caliber if I weren't open to their interpretations. But I don't think that's different than what most rock or jazz composers would say of their own experience - there's an old wives' tale that Frank Zappa, for instance, would score out every aspect of his arrangements for his rock bands, which is absurd - he, as am I, as is any composer of intricate rock music, heavily reliant on the way his band would interpret and adapt his concepts to their own playing styles and personalities. It's an important step in how the music comes alive. Music I make by myself through overdubbing has an entirely different texture - still valid, but still necessarily the result of only one person's energy and viewpoint.

PE: At what point in your solo career did you become convinced you had a unique musical vision? When, if ever, did you realize that you'd "found your voice", musically speaking, and at what point did you realize you'd transcended your influences?

MK: I probably felt some sense of uniqueness, honestly, from the first time I started writing songs as a kid ... if I hadn't thought that I had access to something that felt in some way one-of-a-kind, I might not have the desire to continue exploring. And once I started making solo albums in 1992 I think I felt that even though there were some things which were pretty obviously redolent of Zappa and other influences in my music, in each case I thought there was something new there which I had brought to the party, that had some kind of feeling to it that I hadn't heard or felt before.

I rarely consciously ape an influence with notes; more often it's timbres or instrument combinations, which sometimes take me be surprise, that will somehow recall the "feel" of a record that I love. Sometimes it's a real delight to accidentally happen upon a sound combination that suddenly brings a record from my childhood flooding into my consciousness; I never turn away from that stuff, because I always assume that someone else who shares my musical influences is likely to feel that moment in the same way. I like those little twinges of unexpected time warp, especially when they're shared.




Universal Smoothness Onstage in Holland


PE: How has the music and attitude of Miles Davis influenced your own sense of composition, or improvisation? Have you written any music you feel owes a direct debt to Miles Davis and, if so, what songs?

MK: The usual: the importance of space in music, the deliciousness of well-applied fuck-you attitude, and how a artist's personality and history colors the way listeners assess their music, how that additional back-story makes a musical creation more nuanced and layered for the listener - just from absorbing a lot of his music, I know that all this has had an effect on me. There's also a song on The Universe Will Provide called "Room" which is a pretty open homage to the Miles Davis / Gil Evans collaborations; my friend J.Warner also described it as "Kid A meets Kind of Blue."

PE: How important is the ability to write and read music? Would The Universe Will Provide have been possible had you not known how to traditionally notate music on paper?

MK: Certain kinds of music are really only practical to do - orchestral pieces obviously being an example - by writing it down. It's just a question of what you're trying to accomplish. Universe relied on that ability - on the part of me and my co-orchestrator Chris Opperman - technically it would have been possible to do if I didn't have the ability, because Chris does and I could have just sung things to him forever, but it would have turned out quite differently. Most of what I do doesn't require it, but music I write down always has an interestingly different feel from the music I compose on an instrument. Sometimes I do have to write things out for the convenience of a specific player as well - I had to write a lot of drum charts for Marco Minnemann when KMB started happening.




KMB
Marco Minnemann, Mike Keneally, Bryan Beller


PE: Where do you find your lyrical inspiration?

MK: Stuff just shows up in my head. I find it there in my head.

PE: Tell me what's going on inside your head while you're in the middle of a guitar solo, live and onstage, tearing it up.
MK: I'm feeding on inspiration from three directions: the band, the audience, and energy from other dimensions (usually represented visually during the heat of battle by an overhead stage light or ceiling fixture). In an abstract way which is difficult to describe, I absorb information from all these sources while improvising, and all sorts of music comes flying out. It's a subconscious deal - I'm never sure what's going to happen in the seconds to come and find myself surprised very often.

PE: What affects you most deeply and speaks to you most directly - an improvised solo, or an impassioned human vocal?

MK: Neither one, as a concept, speaks to me more strongly than the other; both have the capacity to move me equally, depending on who's doing the singing and / or the playing, and on what's moving or inspiring them as they perform.


PE: Tell me how you approached the Marco Minnemann: Normalizer 2 project. How long did it take to compose the music? Did you fit any pre-existing musical themes into the project, or is it all new music?

MK: I was working on Normalizer 2: Evidence of Humanity at the same that I was working on Scambot 1 and I relished the opportunity to take a completely different approach: where I was deeply detail-oriented and painstaking with every second of music on Scambot 1, I had an opportunity with the Marco project to be much more free and intuitive. The concept of the album Marco presented me - and six other artists - with a completed 51-minute drum track that he had improvised, and the brief for each artist was to compose and record their own music for the duration of the drum track, resulting in a series of completely different albums all using the same drum performance as a foundation.

I had John Czajkowski from Hectic Watermelon as an engineer, taking care of all technical details and even providing 90% of the gear I used, so I was able to be entirely right-brained during the process. I didn't have any pre-composed music; I would show up at John's place and ask him to play me the next couple of minutes of drum track. I'd listen to the drums for a little while until some musical idea lodged itself in my head, I'd quickly decide which instrument to play it on and slam it down on the recording. Then I'd orchestrate that section to a reasonable degree before moving on to the next chunk of drums, and the next musical decision.

John had already recorded his own album using the drum track and was very familiar with it - to the point of having programmed a click track that followed Marco's every tempo and time change. I probably used the click track 30% of the time - the rest of the time I just related to Marco's performance as though we were playing onstage together, and would be moved in certain directions the same way I am during live playing. The result is quite unlike anything else I've done, and for people who prefer the instrumental side of my work it will be an exciting release for them. Hope it comes out soon! All the release details for the series have yet to be worked out. Trey Gunn has done a compilation CD using sections from each of the artists' completed albums, and that's all ready to go too.

PE: Do you think there is a certain personality type that gravitates to the particular instrument they play? You know how drummers are always described as the "animal" of the band and such?

MK: You know, it would seem that I would have developed some kind of opinion about this through the years, but I really haven't - I've seen every imaginable personality represented on each instrument. I guess I've just lived long enough to meet enough players so that I've had a lot of those cliches exploded for me. But one thing is certain - all oboe players really like pepper.

PE: Who is the 'actor' in "Eno And The Actor"? And was that some true story or what?
MK: Total flight of fancy. No real actor there, just a weird story I thought up.




Dethklok


PE: I am sure you've gone over this a lot elsewhere but could you tell us about how you became involved in Dethklok and how it's affected you as a player and person? It must feel really cool to step into a different "picture" like that.

MK: It's been a great big breath of fresh air. I can honestly I never expected anything like this to happen at this stage of my career, or life. I'm immensely grateful that it's happening. Brendon Small is a very inspiring artist: the way he's managed to create a hugely popular TV show and two successful albums, write scripts, voice characters, compose and record music, and continue to maintain creative control of every episode and song that's created, while keeping a very healthy and wise attitude about celebrity in our present culture, is simply completely bad-ass.

And then to go on tour and play these insane guitar parts while doing lead vocals at the same time -- as I say, he's very inspirational. My own guitar chops have sharpened considerably from playing his music, and the opportunity to have gone on the road with the cool groups we've toured with - hanging out with the Mastodon guys is a real pleasure - and to have thousands of people going nuts at the shows each night -- it's all fantastic. No complaints.

PE: A few words about your prog rock roots as a fan and musician would be cool. How you got into it and how the scene has changed since then. Your faves, and inspirations and what they brought to the table you found so enticing.

MK: From the time I got interested in music of any sort, from hearing things on AM radio in the sixties, I was always drawn to music which seemed unconventional in some way. Starting on electric organ at age seven probably set me up as a prog fan from the get-go. And then hearing the title song of "Tarkus" on FM radio when I was nine thoroughly sealed the deal. Keith Emerson was certainly my primary keyboard inspiration growing up -- I now see that he was a primary compositional influence as well - his angular, unsentimental and mathematically fascinating writing on the first few ELP albums were like oxygen to me. Gentle Giant demonstrated a million worthwhile arrangement strategies on every album they recorded, and I devoured each one gratefully.

When I was sixteen I learned every Gary Green guitar part - by this point I'd begun to teach myself guitar - learning how the parts fit into the architecture of the whole was very essential to my development. And then Todd Rundgren, especially on the albums Todd Initiation and the first Utopia album, opened my mind to the cosmic, consciousness-building possibilities of music. Regarding how the scene has changed since then, I'm not sure I can comment with any great significance...I think the effectiveness of music has everything to do with where the listener is in their life when they experience it.

Although I haven't been moved in a profound way by new prog in a long time, I think that may have more to do with where I am in my life than where the music is; and I still think that a nine-year old, coming to new prog for the first time today, has every chance of having their life changed by it the way mine was changed by "Tarkus" back then. Progressive music is rock music which accepts that other possibilities exist, other options are available, than what mainstream music would lead one to believe. That's always been its function and I think it always will be.





PE: Do you sense any sort of thaw in the last five to ten years when it comes to it? It was terribly out of style for so long - though fans like us loved it all along. And if so, what's brought it about now?

MK: I think that games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have done a tremendous amount to bring young people more deeply into the reality of what makes music tick, and has given a lot of kids much more appreciation for and insight into musical technique, having to learn how to execute crazy lines in unison with the recordings. Even if it's on a fake plastic guitar, it still takes practice and skill to do it. It took a while for the reverberations of the anti-technique mindset of the early 90s to fade, and gradually a new generation has arrived which thinks that it's cool for musicians to know how to operate their instruments well.

The sad thing for today's pop music is that, in concurrence with the anti-technique mindset in the early 90s, there was real emphasis placed on songcraft and personal expression in a lot of popular bands then -- I don't see that as much nowadays. I hear a lot of slacking and mimicry in pop songcraft nowadays. But it does get harder to write a good simple song with every year; due to simple physics, it just gets harder to write something which hasn't been written already.

There's also the nerd-chic aspect, the sci-fi aspect, and other "underdog" aspects which seem to have been on the rise over the last several years. I think there are all kinds of social and political reasons for this -- very OT! Progressive music is naturally appealing to many people in this sort of climate. I think. I ain't no sociologist and have no data to back up any of this.

PE: What has inspired your choices in guitars over the years? Seems like you used the 7-Up green Strat for years and then got into that Charvel, and with Dethklok, what's that? A Jackson V?? How do they inspire you to play differently and what is it you find appealing about each?

MK: Good luck and the generosity of my musical instrument benefactors, mostly. I'm really not a gear hound but I'm always delighted to accept new equipment! Thanks to my association with Fender, which now also encompasses Jackson and Charvel, and Taylor who are now making superb electric guitars as well as acoustic, I've been blessedly fortunate to have a lot of fantastic instruments offered to me, and I've been able to make satisfying music with all of them. The guitar I play with Dethklok is a Jackson Randy Rhodes model - way too much fun to play, especially when the whole thing is tuned down a major third. Charvel is making me a new guitar based on the green Clapton Strat, which was my signature instrument for a very long time, and I'm excited to see what they come up with!

PE: Tell us about the origins & inspirations of Scambot 1.

MK: While I was doing the Wooden Smoke album I kept a sketchbook, which quickly filled with drawings and writing that helped to inspire that particular album. One of the things in the sketchbook was a one-page comic strip I called "Scambot"; just a bizarre, random stream-of-consciousness thing, but something about the name and design of the title character really stuck with me, for years, and from a off-the-cuff doodle in the sketchbook, this weird little character became the focal point of this large-scale trilogy, for which Scambot 1 constitutes the opening shot.

PE: Did you conceive it in advance, whole and then set about creating each piece or was it more like you had some pieces and after they started to pile up they started to say "This is going to be Scambot"?

MK: Much closer to the second option. Some of the music was created independent of any specific album project- "Gita," for instance, was written as a string quartet for an ensemble in the Netherlands and I wasn't originally intending to record it myself. And some of it was originally intended for other album projects I was working on - but once the Scambot concept started to really take hold in my mind I started creating a lot of music specifically for it. In the final tally, probably something like 75% of the music on the 2-CD version was created with "This is going to be Scambot" in mind.

PE: The flow of the CD is amazing. What that planned in advance? It's one that really is best taken as a whole, isn't it? (It's great that people still write like that occasionally - thanks!)

MK: You're seriously welcome, and I'm grateful that there are people like you and all the citizens of Progressive Ears who still take time to appreciate the flow of an album. It was planned in a sense, I suppose. I always knew that I wanted a narrative-musical continuity to it which would constitute a "flow," but didn't have the actual pieces of the puzzle that would make up Scambot 1 until late in the game, because for most of the time I was working on it I thought I was going to release the entire Scambot saga at once.

Once I realized that I was working on too much music to intelligently release it all at the same time - over the course of years I've worked on over sixty pieces of music for Scambot- and settled on the idea of three separate albums, the pieces which would make up Scambot 1 became very clear to me and settled into place, creating their own flow in the process, and also dictating how the plotline for the first installment would pan out.

PE: You have a variety of musicians on this CD. Did each piece dictate who would be on it? How did you choose?

MK: When I started working on it I was playing everything myself, and for a while I'd thought that the final version might indeed have featured only me. This would have resulted in a much more insular album, one where the overall tone would have been closer to material like "Cat Bran Sammich" and "Behind The Door," but this was well before I'd gotten a glimpse of how the final album was really going to feel. In the meantime though, I'd been working on several other projects simultaneously; two of them were firstly - an acoustic duo studio album with Bryan Beller."Hallmark" and "DaDunDa" came from those sessions. And secondly, a 40-minute recording with ten members of the Metropole Orkest from the Netherlands - the 50-piece orchestra who had played on "The Universe Will Provide" - I called the smaller ensemble "the Minipole" - "Chee" was taken from this session.

After several years with a variety of unfinished albums on my plate, I decided it made more sense to cull some of the best of that material and inject "Scambot" with it. Then I did a session with the Keneally Band from Guitar Therapy Live. This resulted in "Saturate" and "Life's Too Small." I had already done an experimental session with Marco Minnemann in 2006, which I did a bunch of overdubs on a couple or years later; this resulted in "We Are The Quiet Children," "Foam" and "Ophunji's Theme." And in 2009 I had Marco overdub drums on a lot of the material I had started by myself. Ultimately rather than simply doing a one-man-band thing, I ended up with an album with a lot more humanity on it, via the simple option of inviting a lot more humans to play on it! For music this intricate and potentially daunting, I think that was a good move. And everyone plays incredibly well on it.

PE: Was it a conscious attempt to do an all encompassing work? It seems your past albums - while varied - managed to have a certain cohesive vibe regardless. This does too, but it feels like a bit of everything you've done in the past, plus some new things, all rolled into one... A Keneally "Whitman's Sampler".





MK: Once I made that choice to include material originally created for other projects, suddenly "Scambot" got a lot richer-feeling and I started to get a vibe that this indeed could be something of an all-encompassing work. Obviously it became extremely varied stylistically, but rather than thinking that this was a new thing for me, I got a feeling that it was actually a return to an earlier approach for me, one closer to the vibe of Hat," Boil That Dust Speck and Sluggo!, all of which covered a lot of ground in style and sound without much regard for an imposed cohesiveness, other than whatever unification naturally resulted from the juxtaposition of these styles, and from wherever I was at as a musician at the time that I was making them.

I was interested to realize that, without really intending it to be so, most all of the albums I'd done since those first three could be considered almost genre exercises, or at least a thorough exploration of one approach: Nonkertompf being a one-man-band all-instrumental thing, Dancing being a document of the 8-piece band I had at the time, Wooden Smoke being an acoustic album, Dog being my idealized version of a hard rock album, The Universe Will Provide being my guitar-with-orchestra album - you get the drift. It really wasn't since Sluggo! that I'd done an album where it was all just music for its own sake without a specific approach or group of musicians to tie it all together, and I got very excited about the return to making that sort of album, even if it was still being tied together by the storyline, which a listener can choose to ignore if they wish - the story is all laid out in the liner notes, but I was quite intentional in not spelling out all the plot points on the CD itself. It's music, first and foremost.

PE: Did the story come in advance or after the fact? If it was prior to the music being written how did it inspire the music at hand? Did you write a piece for each peak in the storyline?

MK: The music and story developed simultaneously, with advances on one front continually inspiring development in the other. The plotline, perhaps inevitably, had far more impact on the lyrics than it did on the music; however, the sound of musical passages or simply the feel of a particular section often suggested very specific things for me to put into the story. A track like "We Are The Quiet Children" was created and shaped quite independently of what part it might play in the storyline; but as I worked on the track and became more familiar with its character and intricacies, it easily suggested - to my abstractly constructed brain, anyway - what the corresponding action in the plotline should be. No music was fashioned specifically and wholly to serve the storyline, but in some cases my awareness of how the story was developing would affect how I might orchestrate, embellish and or mix part of a song.

PE: After pulling out the stops for Scambot 1, what could possibly be left for 2? Have you thought about it yet? Are you drained, or are there new ideas brewing that could be used?

MK: Since I was working on pieces for the proposed entire Scambot saga, and it was only late in the process that I decided I would separate the work into three volumes. I've already worked on a lot of music which will find its way onto the next two installments. On last count, I already have somewhere from 15 to 20 pieces in varying states of completion for Scambot 2" some of which are likely to be part of the 2nd disc of the Scambot 2 Special Edition - yes, by the time it's all over and done with "Scambot" in its complete form will comprise six CDs, released as three 2-disc Special Editions - plus the 15-minute "Scambot Holiday Special" which is available as a download from keneally.com - and came out in late 2008. It consists of music and dialogue which will not appear elsewhere in the Scambot saga, but will figure into the Scambot online comic strip I'm working on. I will also be recording a lot of new music for the next two volumes. Scambot 2 will feel very different from Scambot 1. Heavier, the probably inevitable result of all the touring I've been doing with Dethklok, but also more melodic in the accessible pop sense and generally less abstract, with more direct and memorable guitar riffing and such. Scambot 3 will be airier and more symphonic - if I had my druthers I'd get the Metropole Orkest involved with that one, but if I have to do most of the orchestration myself so be it.

PE: What would you say to a fan that just got the CD to prep them for such a journey?

MK: To the best of their ability, please try to abandon expectations, and hopefully they're not terrified by sporadic doses of dissonance and abstraction -- as weird as it can get, I find every moment of the record beautiful in some way, and I worked very diligently in the writing, playing and mixing to craft it that way. I completely understand someone finding it too abstract for their liking - something that I sometimes forget is that not everyone was steeped in the same music I was, and I shouldn't expect everyone else - hell, anyone else, really - to receive it in the way that I do. "We Are The Quiet Children" is a rigorously abstract eight-minute instrumental totally in thrall to Sun Ra and John Coltrane, so I shouldn't be surprised that not everyone finds it as accessible and melodic as I do!

I was reading the Sluggo! thread on Progressive Ears and someone mentioned that I showcase my weaknesses as often as I do my strengths, and that really rang true to me - I do put everything of myself out there, because it's my joy to do so, and I do love to explore as many avenues as I possibly can, and publish the results of my explorations on these albums I put out. While I'm rabbiting away at one piece or another I'm never conscious of whether I'm working in an area that represents my weakness or my strength - I'm only aware that it's something that fascinates me in the moment and I've got to see it through. The point could be made - and has been - that I don't necessarily serve my own best commercial interests by producing myself, and maybe someday I'll decide to have someone produce me, to see what that process might elicit from me as an artist. I just have too much fun being in charge though! It's hard to stop.

That Progressive Ears post made a good point in a way I'd never seen it put before; while I might have wondered at times in the past why more progressive music fans don't seem intrigued by my work, I think I got a clue from that. But I guess ultimately I can't really care; I'll carry on doing what I do the way I do it regardless, because I can't help myself. I also know that a lot of people do get a kick out of me pursuing every freakish whim, and I'm intensely grateful to those people. They are on my mind constantly while I'm working and I do take their time and attention and the money they pay for my music very, very seriously. I know what a drag it is when your favorite artist starts putting out crap. Even if not all of my fans can get into every album I do, I would hope they at least understand that I'm never slacking, and I do all I can to keep the quality of my work at a high level.

Wow, long answer!

PE: I haven't seen you wear a big hat in a long time. Did you retire them?

MK: Pretty much, yeah. They're too fucking big.






Pictures published with permission from Mike Keneally




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