Mike has been working painstakingly on a project over the last few months, and I am proud to watch it unfold and take form, physically and spiritually. He has collected all of his music as “Haybale Mike” and decided to release it digitally as it has hit the 20 year anniversary mark. Combing over these old recordings and carefully preserving them to share with all of you has been an emotional process; each tune is a step back in time and transports a person to the moment that it captures. These moments have strings attached to them, bonds of emotions and honesty all woven together into a memory, positive or negative, funny or sad, longing or satisfied. Some songs are reminders of people who are no longer with us, or struggles that are no longer fought, or the small wins that made life bearable at the time. 

We spent an evening just listening to each of these recordings in succession, and I marveled at the fact that we still even had this music after so long; it's a miracle these tapes and CD's survived the many moves, thrown around in backpacks, subjected to mold, or lost in the chaos someplace. I am thankful for the friends who still had some of these recordings in digital format and were able to send them along. I had a distinct memory of listening to one of the albums before I met Mike in 2007; a CD written on in sharpie inside of a paper bag. Back then, these albums were of limited supply and shared around within niche communities, today the music has evolved to be digital and available to anyone, a small miracle.

As we sat and listened, emotions surfaced for all of us. I realized that music for Mike is a journal; and no different than a person finding an old diary or a home video, the subject matter charged with nostalgia and a certain sadness. We thought about how much life has changed, and the fact that he “made it”; we are listening to the struggles of 20 years ago while sitting in our own house with our five children boisterously running in and out of the room, requiring us to constantly turn up the volume on the stereo to be able to hear the words of their father as a young man. The juxtaposition of these worlds is not lost on me, and I am thankful we made it this far, and that Mike is processing the past, and that he is ready to re-share it with all of you. 

With that, here is the project. It is a 3 album set; available on Spotify, Bandcamp, and most online streaming places, as well as our website www.thegridpickers.com. On Bandcamp specifically, Mike has written down the recovery process and preserved the liner notes/photos from the original recordings of 20 years ago; I encourage you to check that out. There is no set price for access to these recordings on Bandcamp, but donations are welcome.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2GVH64pDSKTxYqESbk7yog?si=0cgg1BZRReGwmn7wJgqvRg

Https://thegridpickers.bandcamp.com

The discography section, under "Haybale Mike"

https://www.thegridpickers.com/listen