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“ I really don ' t want to go out on that stage right now. This is the last place that I want to be.” But, you know, somebody worked all day and took their money and paid for a ticket and dragged their ass down to the theater. It ' s the same thing with a live music show. You know you gotta step up.
And you ' re right there, in the moment, right?
Kevin: Yeah, it’ s the danger. It ' s the butterflies. We ' ve been doing this for a really long time, and we know our show, but when you’ re backstage, and someone says,“ Okay, go ahead, walk out there,” a little bit of it’ s like, okay, it can happen. This could go south. For a creative person, it ' s good to be out there, outside of your comfort zone.
When you grew up in Philadelphia, your house was filled with music. You have carried that forward into both your homes?
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Michael: Yeah, the more I am asked about our childhood, the more amazed I am of what our parents were able to do. There were six of us, and the house that we all grew up in, I ' m not sure we ever all six of us lived at the same time because the stretch between Kevin, who ' s youngest, and our oldest sisters were a lot of years. Our father was trained as an architect, with a kind of a mid-century sensibility, and he took this skinny little townhouse in Center City, Philadelphia, and he made the entire first floor a complete open space where, in the kitchen, there was a soffit with a gigantic woofer speaker and an Altec Lansing horn, which was state of the art in those days. And then Macintosh amps and turntables and radios, and then the controls for all the stereo stuff were in the front of the house. So, pretty much what I ' m saying is the whole ground floor was one gigantic speaker. My room was on the second floor, my parents would always be listening |
to FM radio or playing records of world music and Broadway shows, and that ' s what I fell asleep with every night. As a film composer, one of the things you have to be able to do is write on cue, and I give my parents all the credit for creating a source within me that I can draw on at any time in terms of instrumental.
Kevin, anything else to add to that?
Kevin: It’ s interesting. Because of the age difference between us, we had very different experiences. My musical influences were less, in some ways, from my parents. By the time I came along, maybe I wasn ' t that interested in the music that they liked. But it was more from my older brother and sisters— hearing the girls listening to 45 records down the hall and Michael bringing home rock records like Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Mothers of Invention, The Stones, and The Beatles. Also,
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hearing him writing. My brother and my sister used to play in what was called a” jug band” when I was a kid. They would practice down in the basement. So, my musical influences had less to do with what was being spun on my parents’ stereo and more about the music that my brothers and sisters were playing or writing.
Does that also speak to the eclectic selection of music that you perform?
Michael: We ' re very much the same and very different at the same time. When you have a duet situation where we ' re both writing songs and singing the songs we write, there ' s bound to a pretty big difference. When I see a sibling group, there ' s sort of an“ other level” of interest, because they grew up together and here they are. That adds to it as well. Plus, we get a chance to spend time with each other in green rooms and tour buses and talk about stuff we probably would
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10 // BERKSHIRE BERKSHIRE
MAGAZINE
MAGAZINE August Fall 2025 2025
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