I would have never tried to write and record my own songs without the guidance of Jamie Hoover of the Spongetones, a band I have held in very high regard since I first heard Don’t You Know from their debut album, Beat Music in 1982. Jamie moved to Southport about a year before I did, and once he settled in, he decided to impart his hard-earned knowledge and experience with recording and production techniques to students at Brunswick Community College. After a chance run-in at the Oak Island Dairy Queen, I signed up for his class. This was in February of 2018. I have been taking his class ever since, and have learned a lot about Cubase, the digital audio workstation with which he has been working for years. We’ll let Jamie pick up the story from here:

“At some point in the class I decided to share with them how some of my song writing process goes. Some of that has to do with waking up in the middle of the night and singing something into your phone so you don’t forget it. To make an example I brought one of my ‘song frags’ from my iPhone and put it into the recording software. I told the class if anybody wanted to finish that song they were welcome to. In jumped Mike! All of the sudden it became a real thing to him: The fact that he could easily write a song. A testament to this is one of the tracks included on his record, in fact. Now Mike is on fire- and I’m so proud of him! Mike is a natural at this… Yay!”

The resulting song was I Didn’t Realize I Was Lost, the first song I ever had a hand in writing, which is included on my debut EP, Never Too Late. I got on a bit of a roll after that and wrote the other songs that made it onto the EP fairly quickly, to my own great surprise. With a bit of work and some good fortune, more will be on the way.

We are all a product of our influences. I’ve listened to mostly rock ‘n’ roll, rhythm and blues, and country music virtually all of my life, going back to when I was very small. My early influences included my Aunt Tiny in Alton, IL, who allowed me to play records on her phonograph when I was just two years old. While I was not yet able to read, I usually looked for the classic RCA Victor label with Nipper on top, or the golden Sun Records label. I figured that those would give me the best chance of playing Hound Dog by Elvis Presley or Blue Suede Shoes by Carl Perkins. But my biggest influence was my dad, Tommy Browning. He was a wonderful singer, as were each of his four brothers and three sisters. He and my mom always made sure there were plenty of records available to play in the house, and while Country music was their favorite, they loved all genres. In fact, my folks saw Elvis Presley at the Louisiana Hayride in 1955, before he signed his contract with RCA. Later in 1955, my mom (pregnant with me) saw Elvis again in Norfolk, VA while she was waiting for my dad’s ship to come into port. Elvis even offered to buy Mom a Coke! So a tip of the cap to my parents and my Aunt Tiny for sowing the seeds that I would reap so many years later.