If you blend the melodic instincts of Neil Young, the lifted eyebrow of John Prine, the lyrical hoopla of Paul Simon, and whip in his own proprietary blend of inanity, you will hear the music of Mike Dakota. Consider yourself warned.
And people were warned early on. "Never give a poet a guitar," they were told. But, they didn't listen. While he was in college, someone hankering for a quick buzz traded their old Silvertone F-hole guitar for a six pack of beer and a bottle of cheap wine and, for better or worse, the music of Mike Dakota was born. After a few quick lessons from his younger brother, he started to pluck away, even though the rusty strings were hanging a couple of inches above the fretboard. After figuring out this may not be the easiest way to learn how to play guitar, he filed the bridge down a few notches and something resembling music started to eek out. Luckily, no one was listening.
That's the story he'd like you to hear anyway. The truth is that one summer before he turned the magical age of twenty-one, he was sitting around a campfire near Tiajuana, Mexico when a young and beautiful woman with long, flowing blond hair started playing songs in the night on her guitar. "I want to do that," he thought to himself, "I bet I can get a lot of girls that way." So, when he came back to the States, he pestered his brother to teach him guitar so he could score big time. When he learned a few songs on his six pack and wine guitar, he took it to the beach where the heavy humidity of Mayland's Eastern Shore blistered his strings with a sticky green oxidation. Even Neil Young could not have played sweet music on this beach, campfire or not. So, tail between his legs, he headed home. No girls on this trip, and not too many afterward, much to his chagrin. Nevertheless, he continue to play and write his songs. Back to our story.
He knew at an early age that his hearing was less than normal, so he found it much easier to write his own songs than struggle to listen to others. He also discovered, when he couldn't hear certain words people spoke to him, that, by sifting through the a list of probable word mutterings, he evolved an ability to rhyme. To further learn the craft of writing songs, he listened to different songwriters, read numerous books and immersed himself in the strange new world called "paying attention". He found the main ingredient in a well baked song was a seasoned topic. The subject made a sizable difference in the quality of a song.
Playing a guitar was a fabulous ride, but intermittently, like shoes and spoons, various pianos flew in and out of his life. He put his rough fingers on a number of these fine instruments, took a course in Piano Technology to explore a career option, but decided he just wanted to learn to play. He never had a real lesson, but was lucky enough to attend a community college on the West Coast that had a fabulous music program and just figured out how to get sounds resembling music out of 88 black and white keys. Moving from place to place in his life, pianos came and went, and it was only recently that he decided to keep one around, mostly because people thought he played piano better than guitar. Unfortunately for us, he listened to them and now, ever the optimist, he wants to see what can come out of a piano. We can only pray it will be musical. Maybe the saying should be, "Never give a poet a piano". Either way, nobody listens.