Imaginary astronaut and singer-songwriter Mike Vitale has decided to punch holes in his own analogy to create stars as a backdrop for his latest inner-space journey DESERT DOGS—an album he is foolishly releasing, one single at a time, throughout 2023 and early 2024, in order to continually inundate both suspecting and unsuspecting bystanders with troubadourian exploits of waxing and waning pandemic meanderings, mental flatulence, stories—what have yous—carefully laid over predetermined blocks of music. What am I trying to say in third-person? Witness this monkey, playing music he wrote, with his imagination. Can I get a witness?

Mike Vitale is a singer-songwriter based out of Los Angeles, CA. He is currently out touring the United States in support of a full length album called φ: 12 new songs written by Vitale over the course of the past several years, as well as 11 new singles he is releasing over the course of 2023, that will eventually lead to a complete 12 song album called DESERT DOGS.

The third single from DESERT DOGS was released on May 27th 2023 and is entitled "Coyote." It's a tip of the hat to the great cowboy country writers of the 1940's and 1950’s, to Mark Twain (quite possibly one of the funniest people I have ever read), and to the end of a long pandemic—finally being able to appreciate the fact that I can tour again, and to count the many blessings of good health and the freedom to roam that which has never been explored by me. I am so very lucky. We are all so very lucky to live in such a beautiful country full of natural splendor.

The fourth single from this record is being released Friday July 7th. Capturing the feeling of deep attraction when seeing a beauty across the bar from the narrator, "Drunk on Your Mystique" is a summer vibe, frothing with the energy and excitement behind a crush on a total stranger. It's music and lyrics convey the Caribbean local and estuary of a port city where people are free to indulge in the fantasy and reverie of romantic whimsy. I plan to play this song all over the U.S. on my tour that starts this week and to promote on socials and playlists.

DESERT DOGS is immediately available as a BANDCAMP download to anyone who would like to contribute to Mike’s 2023 tours through his GoFundMe page: https://gofund.me/e6dcc0b9

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – Mike Vitale is here with ϕ, and you don’t have to try and say it. You just need to listen to it. (In case you’re wondering, it means “Phi”).

The roots indie musician from LA has been in the process of creating ϕ for quite some time. A labour of love that began four years ago in Long Beach, Vitale fuses heart and love and musings on a 12-track full-length that finds him yodeling, to enchanting us with wanderlust; inviting us to spin starry circles in lovers lengths. ϕ is a beautiful lullaby that leaves you lingering on each hook.

His first full-length acoustic, Idiosyncrasies, dropped in 2007, followed by his six-track self-titled album featuring a full band in 2012. Following the release, Vitale took the show on the road along the West Coast, playing wineries, venues, bars, and colleges in support of the album.

“The album is called PHI as this is the Greek letter representing the Golden Ratio,” Vitale explains. “It is an irrational number that goes on forever, just like Pi, but Pi deals with the circumference of circles, where as Phi deals with spirals and can be found in much of life we see around us. The way plants and trees organize the spread of their leaves for maximum sunlight to accomplish photosynthesis, for example—or the layout of a pinecone or a pineapple (it is a spiral if you look closely). The Fibonacci sequence is directly related to Phi, as well as platonic solids. It is a mystery, written in math—I adore concepts such as this.”

Vitale says the album began from a love story and grew into a collection of chapters of life teachings. While he perused an “Americana” vibe on the album, truth be told, he fell in love with simply trying to write a good song and putting out an album that didn’t specify a certain genre. Self-produced, Vitale’s fingers touched every inch of the songs that came to tying ϕ into the collective it became. “I’ve been teaching myself how to produce music for the past 10 or 12 years,” Vitale explains. “I studied music theory and composition in college, so I am an astute student of music and instrumentation—I also have many talented friends who played on this album, and as a friend of mine said, “your songs are only as good as the people playing on them.” I believe this to be true and I feel that a good producer tries to utilize their strengths in order to highlight the song. The song is king.”

And each song has its own specific story and is bookended by these two in particular: “Kathy’s Song”: a love letter to a friend’s mother who lost her battle to ALS. “Younger Days” is what he refers to as “a love letter to my life. To my friends I have made throughout the years, that lead parallel lives to my own. We grow together—yet, sometimes we also grow apart—and our perpendicular intersections of life experience are special—however, nothing is more sacred than the present moment. Now is when we choose to be the best version of our self.”

“Time Machine” triumphantly proclaims that we are travelers through time and space, fragile in our bodies, and strong in our ability to move freely within our own memories and to create and abstract our own future; we will our dreams into existence. “Empty Circle,” “No Vacancy,” and “Gone” all ruminate on the loss of love and confidence at the hands of an aborted relationship.

Also featured is “Running Away From Home”; an anecdote of a second grade Vitale, running away from home to become a Werewolf like his hero, Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. “Imagine filtering “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Tom Sawyer” through the lens of my own personal ambitions to be a werewolf in second grade after watching “Teen Wolf” 347 times—you know, for research purposes.” The song was originally released in 2015, exclusively on Bandcamp, with proceeds donated to the Michael J. Fox Parkinson's Research Foundation as a one-year-long campaign to raise money for Parkinson's Research.

The lead single off ϕ is “Home”. An alternative roots ditty with a subsequent music video that hears Vitale promising, offering, and providing; the song finds our protagonist prepared to be there for her. “Somewhat embarrassingly—or probably more accurately, just in time: I wrote the chorus of this song well over ten years ago,” Vitale explains. “However, that is where the song stopped. For the life of me, I had nothing more to provide to the contents of its possession. It had no walls or interior in which to stretch one’s legs, or to relax comfortably on the couch and admire its inner being. It had no kitchen to create soul food. It had no bedroom to make love, and to rest a weary head—let alone two—and so it sat, in my creative nexus, forgotten and alone, looking for a mate. No verses. No Pre-chorus. No body. No arms or hands to softly caress the listener. No legs to dance on. I moved from Fullerton to Anaheim to Long Beach. Nothing,” he says, explaining, “Finally, I moved to Los Angeles, California and met a girl who became its muse. She provided inspiration that manifested several verses—and the verses reverberated, yet, not off walls or roof or floor—but off of a person. People. They are home—more so than any bed in a room, in a floor plan, of a wooden house, on a block, in a neighborhood, in a town or city, could ever be.” The subsequent music video for the song was directed and edited by Vitale who taught himself how to video edit by watching instructional Youtube videos during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It became an exercise in seeing if I could tell a story with a small amount of footage,” he says. “I had approximately 1.5 minutes worth. Could I make a four-minute music video out of such little footage? I tried my best.”

Despite the set back in sheer length of time the album took from start to completion, what Vitale provides is an entire book-ended storyboard of life experiences, mashed over beautiful melodies and cozy harmonies. From “Puppy Loves” adorable yodels, to “Time Machine” asking life’s most perilous questions and seeking answers like a gentle hug to each of us, Mike Vitale invites us to push play on an album that simply chronicles the simplicity of life. It can be that simple.

Stream “Home” from ϕ wherever you find music!

- Eric Alper

(Host of @ThatEricAlper Show on Sirius XM.)

Mike Vitale is a singer-songwriter/hyphen enthusiast based out of Los Angeles, CA. The greatest compliment he ever received was from a 7-Eleven attendant who said that he was dressed like Indiana Jones. Coincidentally, that’s what his music sounds like as well. His name fits perfectly in a Google search engine—but like Lavar Burton from Reading Rainbow says, don’t take my word for it.

Mike Vitale is a singer-songwriter based out of Los Angeles, CA. He has spent years performing at local and regional venues, coffeeshops, bars, restaurants, resorts, hotels, shopping centers, street corners, corporate events, private parties, record stores, colleges, and universities. His first official release was a full length acoustic album recorded on a shoe-string budget, called Idiosyncrasies, in 2007. He toured the west coast, the midwest, and sporadic shows along the east coast in support of this first release.

In 2012, he funded his second album using the crowdsourcing platform, Kickstarter. His desire was to fulfill a life long dream of recording his songs with a band.

The subsequent release was simply titled Mike Vitale, and features 6 of Mike’s songs, which he produced with the help of musical friends from all over Southern California including Frank Reina (drums and engineering), Brad Cummings (bass), Jon Lacroix (keys), Johnny Gomez (electric guitar), Cory Clark (electric guitar), Justin Burrow (electric guitar), Brett Bixby (keys), Anthony Gonzalez (Percussion), Bryan Lynch (drums), Robbie Gullage (bass).

The album was released digitally and on compact disc in 2014 at The Constellation Room in Santa Ana, California. Mike Vitale set up his own tours along the west coast playing wineries, venues, bars, and colleges in support of this self-titled effort.

In 2015, Mike released an americana tune entitled Running Away From Home and exclusively made it available for purchase on Bandcamp. All proceeds from the song were donated to the Michael J. Fox Parkinson's Research Foundation as a one-year-long campaign to raise money for Parkinson's Research.

The song is a story about him running away from home in order to become a werewolf, when he was in Elementary School, after seeing the movie “Teen Wolf” starring Michael J. Fox approximately 347 times. On July 20th 2017, Mike Vitale re-released "Running Away From Home" on all streaming services such Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. The single was also made available for purchase on all major digital distribution websites including Google Play, iTunes, Amazon Music, and the like.

Mike released a new collection of acoustic songs in 2018 entitled EMPTY CIRCLE. He also plans to release several full band arrangements of his songs, as singles, the first of which called THE JUNGLE on May 26th 2018, using the crowdsourcing platform, Patreon, to help fund this artistic endeavor. He plans on releasing five more singles in rapid succession of one another, each representing a Platonic solid, and leading towards a full length album called ϕ (or PHI).

He is currently in the process of touring the summer and fall of 2021 across the United States in support of his brand new album entitled ϕ, a collection of Americana inspired songs which was released late summer of 2021 and is exclusively available on COMPACT DISC at live shows, before it is made available on all the streaming services September 21st 2021. The album was made using the crowd sourcing platform Patreon, to help fund his artistic endeavors.

He is very active on Youtube, making a consolidated effort to release one new cover or original song, once a week, and just recently began using the Twitter owned app, Periscope to find an audience world wide; his live streams have been showing up on the main feed and have averaged 7,000 to 10,000 viewers per hour before permanently closing to the public in 2020. In addition to live streaming on Periscope, he also actively live streams on his INSTAGRAM and FACEBOOK like page. He is also maintaining a busy schedule of playing live shows, both solo acoustic and with a band behind him, to support this new material.

His full length acoustic album EMPTY CIRCLE, released on May 12th 2018, can be found exclusively on bandcamp, AND you can directly support Mike by purchasing his other albums and singles here or by supporting the release of new material using the crowdsourcing platform, Patreon.

Speaking of Patreon, you can join his new record label in order to become a part of the music he makes on a monthly basis! Watch him write, record, and produce all of his upcoming material by supporting him on this platform! As of 2020, he has two brand new full length albums that are being released thanks in part to the lovely people on Patreon and their support. You can learn more by clicking the image below or here: https://www.patreon.com/mikevitalemusic