Who is Mike Vitale?

Photo Courtesy of Monika Lightstone Photography

Mike Vitale is a singer/songwriter based out of Los Angeles, CA. He has been touring the United States in support of two full length albums in the past 4 years, playing house concerts, intimate listening room spaces, venues, wine bars, and anywhere he might have a fighting chance of people listening to a few stories.

As he has toured, he has been invited to play multiple festivals around the United States including the Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville Texas for the New Folk Songwriter Competition. He has been a finalist on two occasions, both in 2024 and in 2025. In both cases he was one of twenty four finalists out of pool of one thousand one hundred and eighteen people.

In 2023, he was invited to perform at the Pensacola Beach Songwriters Festival.

The most recent of his albums is called DESERT DOGS. It is a collection of 13 songs written, recorded, and self-produced during the pandemic. As a storyteller, his focus was to create music that encapsulated the feel and circumstance of the story being presented: a movie in music.

Whether it traveling on a Steamboat down the Mississippi River in 1847 or being in a relationship with a person in the thralls of darkness: each piece is a sound and image of human’s doing what they do best: living their lives.

There’s no filler or fluff between a handful of cuts that have merit. Each of these songs were treated as a work of art, released as singles over the course of 2023, 2024, and 2025.

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.

Mike’s previous 2021 album is called φ: 12 songs reflecting on his life, written by Vitale over the course of the past several years, while living in Long Beach, California.

Both DESERT DOGS and φ are available immediately as a BANDCAMP downloads as well as on all major streaming platforms.

Mike maintains a popular blog about his life and travels as a human on Earth at his website: https://www.mikevitalemusic.com.

If you are interested in directly supporting Mike’s music in 2025, you can donate to his GoFundMe campaign: https://gofund.me/1a609963

LESS SERIOUS?

Imaginary astronaut 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, 2024 and 2025, 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?

Yes. that is correct: he is a songwriter/singer/producer/forward-slash enthusiast, based out of Los Angeles, CA. Eagle Rock to be precise (come by for a cup of coffee with him). When not preoccupied with speaking in third-person about music related stuff, he enjoys short walks on long beaches with his two border collies, Border and Collie. He is certain that this sentence is useless, but also doesn’t believe in absolutes. The dogs may or may not be fictional. All the other stuff is probably true, especially if it involves putting one word in front of another while simultaneously singing those words over-predetermined blocks of music. Totally his idea (don’t steal it).

LATEST SINGLE

DESERT DOGS is immediately available as a BANDCAMP download and on all streamlining platforms May 9th 2025.

PERFORMANCE VIDEOS

TIME MACHINE

Mike Vitale (solo acoustic)

Graceland (Paul Simon Cover)

Mike Vitale (solo acoustic)

Fool For You

Mike Vitale (full band)

RARE BIRD

Mike Vitale (acoustic)

If I Only Had a Brain (Harry Connick Jr.)

Mike Vitale (solo electric)

The Nerve

Mike Vitale (duo with Pedal Steel)

SOCIAL LINKS

Mike Vitale (Hey, that’s me!) Sitting on a couch in a weird uncomfortable way—because art.

Mike Vitale is a singer/songwriter based out of Los Angeles, CA, who began his career playing a weekly residency at the Fullerton venue, Plush Cafe, while he was attending the local Cal State University, as a student. He built a grass roots audience playing a weekly show there every Wednesday night to an ever-growing audience of college and high school students, local residents, with people driving from as far as San Diego, just to see him perform. His voice and music are often compared to Paul Simon, John Mayer, Sting, Dave Matthews, and Peter Gabriel. In 2019, he released several full band singles including NEEDLE OF THE HUMAN RACE and THE JUNGLE, as well as two new live music videos of his crowd favorites FOOL FOR YOU and LATCHKEY KID, captured with an incredible band behind him, and no overdubs, at Studio 333 in Cerritos, CA; these videos saw a fair amount of popularity on Youtube and Facebook. Vitale also released a collection of new acoustic songs in 2018 as a full length album entitled EMPTY CIRCLE which is solely available for purchase on his BANDCAMP page found through his website. He is currently in the process of touring the summer and fall of 2021 in support of his brand new album entitled ϕ, a collection of Americana inspired songs, made exclusively using the crowd sourcing platform Patreon, to help fund his artistic endeavors. He is also very active on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and formerly the live streaming service Periscope, the last of which he has had upwards of 60,000 people watching in a 3 hour span of time, before it went out of service in 2020. Vitale is making a consolidated effort to bring his new songwriting efforts to the forefront of people’s minds with a 2021 independent album release that speaks the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of his life over the past several years. He also maintains a busy schedule of playing shows, both solo acoustic and with a band behind him, to support this new original music.