Leave it to Kevin and Michael Bacon to drop a roots-rock record right when Taylor Swift and Pearl Jam are hogging the release day spotlight. “That’s beef for them,” Kevin cracks, not even pretending they’re playing the same pop radio game.
But Ballad of the Brothers feels like a record that’s not worried about competition anyway. “There’s a little bit of magic in this record,” Kevin says, half-apologetic for sounding like a Hallmark card. Michael agrees: “We’ll take magic.”
If you think the Bacon Brothers have some big grand plan after nearly 30 years, guess again. “There’s no driving moment where we say, ‘Hey, time for a new group of music,’” Kevin shrugs. “You write one, Mike writes one, I write one, and then we go, wait a second — there’s enough to make a record.”
Still, there’s a dusty thread here — an unlikely attraction to the cowboy mythos for two Philly kids raised in a row house tricked out like a mad scientist’s stereo lab. “Our father was an architect,” Michael remembers. “Our first floor was really a gigantic mono speaker.” Opera, African music, The Weavers — “it was a gift,” he says. That eclectic ear eventually turned into western dreams: “It’s like Morricone meets Marty Robbins somewhere in the middle,” Kevin laughs.
They talk about Take Off This Tattoo — inspired by Kevin’s son rewriting his own skin, literally. “I was like, what about a song about someone with a regrettable tattoo?” Kevin says. The tune went from country demo to a fiddle-driven rock bruiser, thanks to his son producing it and telling the fiddle player, “Think electric guitar.”
Kevin leans into his actor brain when he sings: “I’m a character actor. The voice is something I always have to find.” Michael’s not so lucky: “I can’t sing in any other voice than what I sing in. I’m stuck with myself at this point — for better or worse.”
When they’re not playing the road songs (Airport Bar) or stripping pop hits down to the bone (We Belong), Kevin’s got his Monday Blues series to feed the muse. “It forces me to keep coming up with songs I love. Listening to a great song makes me want to write.”
Thirty years in, they’re still trying to write songs that pass the “worth it for a ticket” test. “It’s gotta be worthy of that,” Michael says. “Our wives are the first test."
So sure — they’ll share a release day with Taylor and Pearl Jam. But they’ve got cowboy ghosts, airport bars, and an auto harp they swear will knock Swift off #1. “There’s room for everybody,” Kevin says, “but we’re gonna do our best.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
