The Mirror: When you guys were younger and just playing around on instruments, did you hope it would develop into a band?

Michael Bacon: Yeah, I can’t really remember a time since Kevin was able to walk and just banging on a pot that we didn’t play music together and didn’t really enjoy playing music together. Whether I ever thought it would ever turn into what it has, probably hadn’t specifically thought of that, but I always hoped that we would have this bond together and enjoy making music together.

The Mirror: Michael, was it a little strange to play music with your younger brother with the nine-year age difference?

MB: Well, it’s still pretty strange. I never got over that. (Laughs) No, not really. One of the great things about the music industry now compared to when I first started out in the late-60s, it was ‘age 30, hang it up guy.’ Don’t trust anybody over the age of 30. What’s really happened in the next generation, people really appreciate no matter what age they are, music that came before them, so you see, our son is now 26, when he was 16, all he thought about was the grateful dead, guys that are older than I am. I think the music business changed in that sense. You have the Rolling Stones traveling all over the world, kind of the number one live performing band and they’re pretty old guys and so I think the whole age component in music has disappeared.

The Mirror: How did you guys decided to start a band in the middle of your careers, Michael as a solo artist and Kevin, as an actor?

Kevin Bacon: We were just kind of playing and we had some stuff that we’d written for years. A friend of mine heard a demo of ours and he said, ‘Why don’t you guys come down and play a Bacon Brothers show.’ We hadn’t even thought of ourselves as the Bacon Brothers. And I turned to him and really thought about it. I mean, I’d always kind of dreamed of playing music live, but I hadn’t really thought about it in that capacity. But we said, ‘Sure why not, what’s the worst that could happen?’ We’ll go out for one gig. Mike said, ‘So you’re going to play guitar.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said you’re going to have to play guitar so it’s not just me playing. Then we got a bass player who’s an old friend of Michael’s whose still playing with the band, and a percussionist. So we had a real kind of small, acoustic band. And we did the one gig. It was terrifying, but really fun and it just kind of turned into another and another one and another one. Then we just started to make records.

The Mirror: Growing up, what kind of music did you listen to? Did you share the same musical tastes?

MB: Since we are nine years apart, there was that nine-year lag. I was more exposed to folk music than my brother was. Rock-and-roll hadn’t caught on exactly the way it did by the time he was growing up more in the 60s and 70s. When the British invasion hit, I was completely smitten by it that when I really moved away from folk music and into more rock-and-roll kind of stuff. I played in a rock band during college and that’s th thing that turned me around. That being said though, Philly is a really eclectic music town and there’s lots to discuss music and lots of people started in Philly and made an impact in the music business.

The Mirror: How does your creative process work? Do you both write the songs? What inspires you?

KB: Writing comes from all different places. It’s hard to really say. I wouldn’t say it’s the type of thing where we sit down every day for two hours and try to write songs. It’s more kind of comes. Something hits you, you have some kind of experience, or some thought crosses your mind, or I don’t know, you read something in the paper, you just have some kind of feeling and a song just comes out of it. I think we both tend to write music and lyrics at the same time. It’s not like we have a whole a file of lyrics or a lyric book and we’re going to put music to it. We just tend to write both to come together.

The Mirror: Kevin, you’ve been pretty well-known as an actor, do you think that helps or hurts your band’s image and its popularity?

KB: Well, I would say for the most part it hasn’t. I wouldn’t say that it’s helped. A lot people have a lot of disdain for the idea that an actor would form a band, and a lot of distrust that it’s a joke. So that’s something that we are pretty much on an on-going basis confronting and trying to get past. But I always knew that that would be the deal just because I know when I hear about an actor that is forming a band; I do a little bit of eye-rolling myself. So, for whatever reason, that’s just the way people react to it. You can’t really do anything about that except to play as well as you can and keep the level of writing up and keep plugging away.

The Mirror: Joaquin Phoenix recently quit the film industry to focus on music. Kevin, do you see that as a possibility for yourself?

KB: You know, I still really love making movies. I love directing and I love producing. I love acting. So I don’t really see that as a possibility in my life. I read that from Joaquin today, I haven’t actually spoken to him about it, but it seems like it is as much out of frustration with the movie business as it was he wanted play music.

MB: I decided today I’m quitting music and going into acting full-time. (Laughs).

The Mirror: You have your sixth album about coming out, has you seen a progress in your music from your first album to this most recent one?

MB: Well, I do see that, but those things are hard to judge. It’s kind like these songs and CD’s are your children, so you can be all objective about it. But the thing that I see that gives me a lot of happiness is that if you look at the musicians that Kevin and I were when we were making our first record and where we are now, we’ve both, even though I’ve been involved in music a long time before that, we’re both better singers, better songwriters, better instrumentalists, better performers. We know our audiences better. Publicity and other kinds of things that go along with music. I take a lot of pride in that and if the music’s gotten better, that’s more for someone else to judge. At the same time, I feel really good about this new record and there are some songs that are kind of accessible enough that could possibly get in the public domain. We’re going to do everything we possibly can to get it out there. In the meantime, the band is so much farther and has gone so much longer than we ever expected it to. If you gauge success, I put a lot of value in what we’ve achieved in the last 13 years.

The Mirror: What genre would you consider classify yourselves as? Your music seems to be a blend of rock and country with some other things as well.

KB: Well, you know we had a joke our first record, it was called Forosoco. It stands for Folk, Rock, Soul, Country. It was a new category of music that we made up. It was basically because people reacted to our music the same way that you said, ‘It seems like a blend.’ And it is. We have a lot of different influences. We like a lot of different kinds of music. We try to write the song and then let the song take you musically where it’s trying to go. As opposed to trying to just having one specific sound and have the band sound in one specific way.

The Mirror: How did you come to play at Fairfield? Did Fairfield contact you?

KB: They contacted us.

MB: We have a booking agency out of Monterrey, California. And we’re on a list of acts that they circulate to pretty much every venue. Someone at Fairfield either heard about the band or knew the band well and decided to try to book us and it worked out great. We’re happy to be playing at Fairfield.

The Mirror: The concert is on a college campus. Is that something your looking forward to, do you expect a lot of students to come out?

KB: We don’t get the chance to play campuses all that much. But it is fun because it’s a different kind of vibe. We just played in upstate New York at Geneseo on campus, it was a fun gig, we had a good time. And we hope to get some students there.’

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