Mike Viola mines childhood Super-8 footage for “That Seems Impossible Now,” Discusses new album w/ Sodajerker podcast, Rock & Roll Globe.

Heavily influenced by untimely passing of dear friend, Adam Schlesinger, “Godmuffin” reveals a “renowned pop auteur” who is a master of his craft.
 
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Mike Viola as photographed by Silvia Grav
 
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“Legend has it that vampires can’t expose themselves to sunlight, but Mike Viola begs to differ,” explains Rolling Stone in its coverage of Viola’s horror short for his latest single. “He’s a pool-lazing vampire in the new video for ‘Drug Rug,’ a track off his latest LP Godmuffin. Directed by Caitlin Gerard, the video opens with Viola lying on a float in Mandy Moore’s pool.
 
“Viola channels his preternatural gift for directness and warmth into a celebration of youth,” BuzzBands.LA says it its premiere post of the song. Viola explains that the tune is “a look back at my icy days in NYC. This is an ode to my beloved classic rock, as well.”

[VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXQokPDo77c

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Mike Viola | “That Seems Impossible Now”

 

 
“In the early 1970s, my oldest brother Larry bought a Super-8 movie camera. Funny thing about the first rolls of film he shot – none of us really knew what to do when the camera rolled. So, we usually waved like it was a regular camera,” Mike Viola explains of the resulting footage that now comprises the video for “That Seems Impossible Now,” from his latest album Godmuffin.
 
See the video and read an interview with Viola now at Rock & Roll Globe. Viola also recently made an appearance on the popular Sodakjerker podcast, where he talks about “how he makes time for creativity, how the past informs his present, and how he is coping with the loss of his friend Adam Schlesinger.”
 
Viola continues describing the “That Seems Impossible Now” video, saying, “When we got the first few rolls back from the Kodak shack and saw how stupid we looked, we got comfortable and really started to play with the camera, and come up with dumb little horror movie plots and messing around with special effects.
 
“I started looking through these reels of Super-8 and found footage of me and my brother Dave doing the magic trick of making ourselves disappear on film. It was the first and only film trick we learned to do. We never needed anything else to top it.
 
“All the repetition of us as kids disappearing really pulled me in and spoke to the subject of the song in such a poignant, unplanned way. I cut it in with footage of my parents happy and alive, and footage of Stoughton (the town I grew up in), and the house, yard, and highways around my suburban upbringing to try and paint a picture of a specific feeling of loss without tragedy.
 
“There’s nothing tragic about time going by, it’s more like the magic trick we performed inside the camera – now you see us now you don’t – that is still repeating itself all these years later to tell me yet another story.”
 
[MUSIC VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2vjYqhHjK4
 
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Mike Viola
Godmuffin
Out Now
(Good Morning Monkey / Grand Phony)
 
Streaming Link:
STREAM FULL LP
  

Track Listing:
01. USA Up All Night
02. Creeper (STREAM)
03. Drug Rug (STREAM | VIDEO | LYRIC VIDEO | MAKING OF)
04. We May Never Be This Young Again (VIDEO | LYRIC VIDEO | MAKING OF)
05. All You Can Eat (MAKING OF)
06. The Littles
07. Superkid 2, Trying To Do The Thing I Was Born To Do
08. Honorable Mention With Jam Show
09. People Pleaser, You’re The Man Of The House Now
10. Ordinary Girl (STREAM | VIDEO | LYRIC VIDEO)
11. That Seems Impossible Now (VIDEO)
 
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Mike Viola | “We May Never Be This Young Again”
 

 
 

“I’m a huge fan of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ especially the episodes where Rod Serling addresses some nuanced existential dilemma hidden inside a gimmicky science fiction idea,” says Mike Viola of the video for his single “We May Never Be This Young Again.” Hear it now at Brooklyn Vegan and see the video via The Big Takeover.
 
“For this video, the director, Silvia Grav, envisioned me running, just vaguely running through Los Angeles at night. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be running from, but she had this vision while listening to the song over and over.
 
“There are a handful of ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes about Air Force pilots who are distressed and disoriented by something or other. I bought a blue jumpsuit online and put together a little crew and we drove around filming me running in downtown Los Angeles late at night, which during COVID, was empty.
 
“We knew we wanted to have vignettes of a couple not getting along great, Like, normal stuff we all go through in our relationships, nothing too dramatic. Just that kind of subtly that can slowly tear apart a marriage. Something always saves us in these moments of subtle destruction. You guessed it, love.”

[MUSIC VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I51HAhtVsXs

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 Mike Viola | “Ordinary Girl”
 

 

“It’s a girl power song,” Mike Viola tells American Songwriter in its premiere coverage of his single “Ordinary Girl.” “We all have superpowers. For me, the scariest thing out there in the world is blending in, disappearing into the status quo. This is like a John Hughes version of that concept.”
 
An obsessive monster movie fan, Viola continues the series he started with the video (see below) for “Drug Rug” (which co-stars Mandy Moore (and her swimming pool) alongside a hilarious turn as a vampire by Viola himself) with the video for “Ordinary Girl.”
 
With a team comprised of all women creators, including sisters and co-directors Kelsey and Rémy Bennett, alongside acclaimed 26-year-old photographer turned cinematographer, Silvia Grav, “Ordinary Girl” redefines power as we know it through the perspective of a horror obsessed suburban girl.
 
The video, shot like a short film, bears witness to the main character as she harnesses her transgressive creative gifts in a manifestation of self-reflection, exploration, and an otherworldly growth of inner strength that will break your heart just to see what it’s made of.
 
The lyric video for the song finds Viola in a real moment with his “monster thumb,” following his young daughter around the sidewalks of Los Angeles as he teaches her to roller skate.
 
Stereo Embers says, “While Springsteen’s songbook is filled with tracks told from the perspective of a guy who wants to get out of town, ‘Ordinary Girl’ might very well be the first song written from the point of view of a parent wishing the same for his children.”
 
[MUSIC VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBQYXSlgeFM
 
[LYRIC VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQXY_HlkEOw
 
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Mike Viola | About
 

 Music lives in Mike Viola. Shit, it’s his last name, right?

 
Godmuffin (Good Morning Monkey / Grand Phony) even opens with strings and man, do they tug.
 
Hard.
 
“Don’t be afraid, no don’t be afraid / We still have time, we still have time / There’s so much I wanna do”
 
“I wrote ’Creeper’ the morning I got the news my close friend died,” Viola says. “He was my age. Now he can’t make music. I still can. I can still spend my time looking for the secret cause, the next new song, even when it feels too late, ‘cause I still have time.”
 
Viola’s friend is the artistically immortal, Adam Schlesinger, to whom Viola will forever be publicly tied as the voice of his friend’s perfect, Oscar®-nominated pop song “That Thing You Do!”
 
At any other time, this association would be a fun fact. A bullet point in a career full of them. But right now it’s painful to listen to with Viola’s real-life tragedy in mind. Somehow, he makes it sound beautiful.
 
Godmuffin follows-up Viola’s 2018 album The American Egypt, and is his first return in over a decade to the more conventional rock and pop sound that he first broke through with as front man of Candy Butchers during that band’s string of major label records in the late-90s to mid-2000s.
 
Godmuffin was written and recorded alone in Viola’s home studio. He describes it as “11 songs about transformation” and Viola isn’t afraid to let you see.
 
“It’s youthful in the chances it takes,” he says. “It doesn’t give a fuck.”
 
In the face of fine-tuning everything into oblivion, Godmuffin is the least experimental-sounding experimental record you’ll hear this year. Viola records on half-inch tape and mixes on a vintage Auditronics console without the advantage of digital editing.
 
“The recording is linear, ‘cause I can’t punch and fix things very easily, especially when I’m playing drums.  On the computer, you can repair all of your mistakes ‘til you sound perfect. Or even worse, tune or beat detective the life out of it. I prefer rock music that’s beautifully flawed.”
 
“It’s human,” he says.
 
“Only the dead get to heaven / Here on earth we just get lost”
 
Human it is.
 
Viola sings the chorus of the album’s first single “Drug Rug,” and it’s as if you’re listening to recently re-discovered dedications from a high school yearbook.
 
It’s not nostalgia, it’s time traveling written from the point of view of the graduated Viola, “who’s spent a lifetime doing windmills on Big Star guitars, slick with Todd Rundgren syrup hand-drawn from the tree.”
 
Elsewhere on Godmuffin, Viola sings about being a teenager (“USA Up All Night”), about being the father of teenagers (“The Littles,” “Ordinary Girl”), and even offers up a sequel (“Superkid 2, Trying To Do The Thing I Was Born To Do”) to a previously released song (“Superkid”) about being a teenager.
 
Youthful. Not giving a fuck.
 
Is there a time in our lives when we feel more invincible? Godmuffin is the sound of fearlessness.
 
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Mike Viola | Links
 
ASSETS : WEBSITE : FACEBOOK : INSTAGRAM : SPOTIFY : APPLE : GRAND PHONY
 
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Josh Bloom at Fanatic Promotion | Contact
 
WEBSITE : FACEBOOK : TWITTER : YOUTUBE : INSTAGRAM : SOUNDCLOUD : SPOTIFY : BLOG : E-MAIL