Every gig is a good gig and an important gig. And every gig is different. Sometimes you play for a listening crowd who hangs on every lyric and your bantering songwriter intros – bless those people! Sometimes you’re there for […]

Side gigs are important when you’re playing music. My day job always revolved around writing, particularly back in my days of corporate life. These days I’m doing a lot of freelance work, including a regular music column in the Santa […]

A super quick post and a super grateful THANK YOU to readers of The Santa Cruz Sentinel. For this year’s Reader’s Choice Awards, two new categories were added: Best Annual Event and Best Local Musician. The Santa Cruz County Fair […]

2023 Update: I actually get requests to post this every year, so here’s some context. Years ago we did a homemade flocked tree. (“Kids, don’t try this at home.”) Pretty funny story. This tale of our old fake tree is […]

Me and my New Best Friends just LOVE Halloween. And it’s always a fun challenge relearning a bunch of songs we’ll just play for a couple of shows. This year, as always, we redubbed ourselves Michael Gaither& His SCARY New […]

Sometimes songs just take awhile. Case in point:”Welcome Back (to the Land of the Living),” the title track from the new record. Here’s the backstory: Years ago, I had a good pal who would occasionally “go dark” (his words) and […]

*** This is a repost of the story behind the song “Day Drinking Days.” It’s a drinking-in-place tune about the early days of the Covid pandemic. The original version was “recorded in place” with me and my bandmates scattered about […]

Things are busy lately. Besides lots (and lots) of great opportunities to play music, trivia has popped up everywhere. I always say “I think there’s maybe one 7-11 store in Watsonville that DOESN’T have a trivia night!”   These days, […]