untitled solo work, circa mid 2000s
For a long time I only thought of Mike Pearson as a blues/punk player because I had only seen him play with the Blacks and Ultra Maroon, but sometime in the early/mid-2000s he moved to France with his French wife, Cecil, and he started sending me CDs. They were mysterious and cryptic regarding their content. There was no letter that said something like “here is some music I recorded.” Listening to it I could immediately recognize a number of songs as his, but then there were some songs that had completely different sounds and came from such a different place that I thought they had to be performed by some local French musicians that he met. Turns out it was all Mike and his musical knowledge and talents stretch far beyond raw American blues punk (which he does best) and into French Cabaret sounds, Tom Waits style swank and film music. Jazz references (and sounds) show up with song titles like “Better Git Hit In Yer Hed” and an almost unrecognizable cover of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.” I doubt more than a dozen people have heard his solo stuff, but this stuff is so good that if the right Hollywood douche bag heard this stuff he could get every wanna-be Quentin Tarantino director lined up to suck Mike’s dick to score his next film.
