10 Minutes with The Bacon Brothers

Kevin and Michael Bacon

For three decades, Kevin and Michael Bacon have performed together as The Bacon Brothers. In a recent conversation with the prolific duo, I began with what I thought was a straightforward question: Have they started their latest tour? I should know by now that the simplest question may not have the simplest response. “We’re sort of always on tour and never on tour,” says Michael. Bingo. And he’s not kidding. He and Kevin have been jumping on and off the road ever since they started playing live, keeping in balance the other parts of their lives—like making movies, recording new songs, teaching, film scoring, spending quality time with family, even tending to the farm animals back home in the foothills of the Berkshires.

An accomplished guitarist, keyboardist, and cellist, Michael is a full-time professor of music at Lehman College. He has composed hundreds of songs for motion pictures and television shows, including Finding Your Roots, since 2012. He won an Emmy® for his original score for The Kennedys (1993) and three Academy Awards® for his scoring of The Johnstown Flood (1989); A Time for Justice: American's Civil Rights Movement (1995); and King Gimp (1999). Jerry Lee Lewis, Carlene Carter, and Peter Yarrow are just a few artists who have recorded songs written by Michael.

Kevin’s career includes acting in at least 64 movies and eight TV shows, and his career has spawned a game called ""Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,"" with the premise that any actor can be linked to Bacon through their movie roles in six steps or less. There’s no way to think of Kevin without thinking of the 1984 cult classic Footloose (1984). His filmography goes well beyond that foot-stomping film, though. The Golden Globe winner also appeared in Animal House (his first movie role at age 19); Friday the 13th; Diner; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; JFK; A Few Good Men; Apollo 13; Mystic River; and many others. More recently, he stars in the non-rated horror/comedy The Toxic Avenger, released in the U.S. on August 29, and he plays opposite his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, in this year’s romantic comedy The Best You Can. He is working with his whole family—Kyra and their kids Travis and Sosie—on another horror/comedy movie entitled Family Movie.

Kevin also has a large following on social media with videos from his farm, his family, #MovieMondays featuring classic movies, and #MondayBlues featuring songs to combat—you guessed it—the Monday blues.

Kevin is younger than Michael by nine years, and they have four sisters. They were raised in a close-knit family in downtown Philadelphia; their mother taught elementary school and their father was a well-respected urban planner. Michael lives in Pennsylvania and New York City with his wife, Betsy. Kevin has a home in Manhattan and has a 40-acre farm in northwest Connecticut. His close connection to the Berkshires is not only because of his farm’s proximity, but also his wife’s family lineage. (Kyra is a descendent of Judge Theodore Sedgwick, a lawyer, politician, and judge who played a role in helping a formerly enslaved woman named Elizabeth Freeman, also known as Mum Bett, gain her freedom.)

Kevin and family have skied plenty of times at Butternut and Catamount, and The Bacon Brothers have performed at the Mahaiwe and Barrington Stage. (We hope they will again someday soon!) You can catch them live at the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Connecticut, a favorite casino destination for Berkshirites that’s under two hours away. They will perform in the 450-seat Cabaret Theatre ("The Cab") on Saturday, September 13.

We caught up with the two brothers on an off day from touring.

Is this the first time you’ve performed at the Mohegan Sun Cabaret Theatre?

Kevin: We’ve been there are a bunch of times. It's a really good room. I have good memories playing there, and I'm sure we're gonna have a great time. It's a nice part of the world to be in. 

Michael, how about you? 

Michael: It’s a nice room, and one of the great benefits of having a busy touring schedule is that the band gets really tight, and you gain more confidence in the fact that you can remember all the words and all the chords and everything you have to do. It sort of liberates you to go to a higher plane. It's really fun to play together when we are in the thick of it.

What can we expect from your show this time around? I'd love to give our readers a taste of what to anticipate.

Kevin: It's the two of us, and then we've got a four-piece band behind us, and it's original music. As you know, we've been at it for a really long time and have a ton of records. 

Thirty years and 12 studio albums, right?

Kevin: Yeah. We have maybe one song in our set that's from the first record, but a lot of stuff is from the most recent one. We're really a songwriter’s band. We don't do a lot of covers, but we have a pretty wide range of sound—from super quiet, intimate stuff, to more rocking music. Between the six of us, there’s a lot of instruments on stage. Between Michael's playing cello, autoharp, guitar, and ukulele, we have a lot going on. 

Michael: I want to add that I play the tambourine on one song. 

Kevin: You do play tambourine. We've lost track of how many instruments he plays in the course of a show. 

[Kevin holds his own on any given performance, too, usually playing the guitar, mandolin, harmonica, percussions, and a whole lot of vocals.]

Is there a favorite type of venue?

Michael: The summer shows where you're in a shed or a covered area but still outside are a much more intimate setting. An enclosed venue has its own sonic personality, and that can really make playing kind of difficult, whereas if you're outside, it's not really bouncing off anything. So, the people who come to see us, if they're outside, they're a little looser, and it's always fun if they get up and dance by the end of our show. It’s also great when they listen to the more intimate songs and get that part of it. We've played some great venues this summer. Almost every night, it's really been a great experience.

Kevin: It's funny. If I'm going to be completely honest with my answer to that question, the best kind of gigs are the ones that have the most people. I’ve heard people say, “Well, I really like to be in an intimate space,” but that’s kind of a luxurious statement to say that intimacy is something that you’re reaching for. I think the most fun is the place that has the most people.

Michael: In April, we played at the Stagecoach Festival [in Indio, California], and I think there were 10,000 people there. Also, we did the Bourbon Festival in Kentucky last year, and again, tons of people. The only trouble with the festival is you have a very short window. Normally, our set is an hour and a half, so it's a real different kind of a show. But, as Kevin said, it’s a lot of fun.

When you're playing at the Mohegan Sun on September 13, will it be towards the middle of your tour?

Michael: No, we’re sort of always on tour and never on tour.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s kind of vague. [Laughs]

Where are you going tomorrow?

Kevin: Down in Dewey Beach, Delaware, at a bar where we’ve played many, many times. It's got a roof, but it doesn't have walls. Dewey Beach is a Northeast beachside party town.

That sounds like fun.

Michael: The set doesn't start till 11. For us old guys, that’s pretty late, but it will be fun. We have our violin player with us [Brian Fitzgerald], who makes the set really fun because he jumps around, he makes great faces and plays amazing electric violin.

Who are the other band members you’re touring with?

Kevin: Paul Guzzone is our bass player. Frank Vilardi is our drummer. Both of them have been with us pretty much since the first record. We have an amazing guitar player named Tim Quick. He's from Pennsylvania, but he's been living in Nashville for the last few years. A young woman named Mare [Robinson], who sings backup vocals, plays keys, and is a really great recent addition to the band. She really builds out the sound.

Michael: One of the things I love about her style is that she kind of stays out, keyboard-wise, at the right moment. So, with the keys, we can get bigger, but we also can be smaller. She has an alto voice, which is really good because I’m the baritone, Kevin's halfway in-between, our bass player is a low tenor, and the other guitar player is a high tenor. Mare kind of solidifies the blend.

What is it about playing live that thrills you?

Michael: One of the differences in terms of my brother and I is that my brother tends to be a very, very natural performer. For me, it's something I had to learn how to do. The fact that I am doing it puts a challenge on me that I like to meet. There’s a lot of technical guitar stuff that I have to do, and cello, and a bunch of other instruments, and if I'm able to do those successfully, I feel a lot of pride in my musicianship. But I'm not really eating up the limelight. The reason I'm there is to sort of stay in my lane as a musician.

Kevin, how about you?

Kevin: I’m the opposite. I just stand there and wait for adulation. [Laughs] No, really, I agree that it is a challenge to get through a show, to remember all the lyrics, to remember the changes, to play our songs—they’re not simple songs. They may not sound like jazz, but they're not like all three-chord tunes. They’re pretty complex. They have a lot of lyrics. I started out as a stage actor, and the thing that's so great about doing live theater or playing live in front of people is that it's never the same. That’s one special experience that you're sharing with that group of people, just for that night. There's a lot that comes with that, including a responsibility to deliver. You can be in a bad mood or have the flu, or whatever it is, but you gotta deliver for that audience. That's the night that they came. That's the night they bought a ticket. There's been plenty of Wednesday matinees of a show that just got trashed by The New York Times. I'm talking about the theater side of things. I’ve gone, “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?

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, 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 like to talk about but don't get the chance. So, there's a lot of pluses that outweighs the traveling, the hotels, the food, that kind of stuff.

Even when you're not traveling, your spouses and also your children are in that music environment, too?

Kevin: Definitely. My family, my kids love music. My son is a lifelong musician. He’s a writer who has played in a band since he was probably a pre-teen. He’s an engineer and producer, he composes and has done a lot of work with me and Kyra and with a whole bunch of other people, too. Our daughter is a good singer, and she loves writing. She had piano lessons when she was a kid. She loved her piano teacher because she was a super lovely, safe space, like an old lady with a box of cookies. That was the extent for her piano education, not being much of a taskmaster when it comes to practicing. And then all of a sudden, she sends me this video of her playing a Joni Mitchell song on the piano. I was like, “Wow, where did that come from?” It kind of blew my mind. We definitely play and do stuff together.

I so enjoy following her and following you on Instagram. That is a great platform for you because you're inviting the public into your home, and it feels somewhat intimate, although I'm sure you're careful about what you show. That’s been a gift to us.

Kevin: I kind of went into it kicking and screaming, and I definitely have moments where I think, this is not what I want to do. It's very hard with social media to make a direct connection to any kind of financial reward or windfall. I’m not going out and selling products. The time that I spend, or the money that I spend or advice and stuff like that, is it worth it? It's tough to know. On the other hand, at one point I was kind of halfway in, halfway out, and I said, you know, I don't like not doing something well. It's kind of shifted for me because if I'm not making a movie or play or a show, I do need to have some kind of thing to think about as a creative outlet. It's almost like a disease; I have to be doing it. Even if it’s a two-minute song parody or cover or silly thing with the family, with Kyra, it is its own form of creation. It’s a little bit depressing, having done so many movies in the course of my life and worked so hard at it, that people will come up to me and say, “My favorite thing you ever did is ….” and then they'll think of some stupid Instagram thing. It’s kind of heartbreaking in a way, because you go, “Wow, that's it. This is what it's come to.” But on the other hand, as you said, a lot of people get a lot of pleasure from it, and it brings them a feeling which I don't always really 100 percent understand, but I think that our bread and butter is to make people feel something, and so for the time being, at least, I'm still in it.

Everytime I see something posted, it just makes me smile. So you're doing something right.

Kevin: Cool, cool. Thank you.

I'm a big fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and you’re the composer for Finding Your Roots, Michael. Gates was in the Berkshires a couple years ago for the Authors Guild Foundation's WIT festival. You and Kevin have your own careers, and then you come together for the music. Is that a challenge, or do those different aspects of your creativity support each other in their development?

Michael: I've been doing Finding Your Roots for 15 years and have an enormous library with them. At the same time, I like to give them new, fresh stuff. Right around the start of spring, I'll get a shopping list of some cues that they want, and I'll spend any spare time I have working on that …. A long time ago, when Apple calendar came out, that sort of saved people like me, because I'm also a full-time college professor from late August to May, along with doing film and television music. I also have a very supportive family. When I'm on the road, I usually have about two days off a week, and I have to put a lot of stuff in those two days to keep up with my academic career as well as my scoring career. I couldn't do it by myself, absolutely not a chance. Our son, Neal, works with the band. He does a whole bunch of stuff. If all of a sudden one of our crews can't come, he'll just jump in the truck and come out and do that. That makes my life even easier. I do complain, but I shouldn't, because I have freedom, and my wife and my son have total freedom to do whatever they want, whenever they want to. So, in three words, it's all good.

At this point, the closest you’ll be to the Berkshires when you tour is the Mohegan Sun, where many of our readership go to take a little break, for the casino as well as the live entertainment. Kevin, are you pretty connected to the Berkshires?

Kevin: We played in Great Barrington tons of times and at Barrington Stage. One hundred percent, I know the Berkshires. I've skied many, many times at Catamount and Butternut, taking my kids there. My wife is a Sedgwick, so that’s also a connection to Stockbridge.

Yes, and there are reunions over at the Sedgwick home that your family attends.

Kevin: Yep.

Michael, how does your experience in film scoring influence your songwriting with The Bacon Brothers. Are they connected?

Michael: No, it really doesn't. The only way it ever connects is if I'm writing a string chart for our band, which I do very, very occasionally. It’s just a whole different thing. And as Kevin said, we're a songwriting-based band, and writing a song is a hundred times more difficult than writing a film score. Film scoring is a craft that there are certain things that always work. Songwriting is an art, and my brother is much more prolific at songwriting. Sometimes he gets in a bloom, and they just come one after the next. For me, if I write a song once a year, that's good for me.

I see that you perform “Footloose” in your stage performances, Kevin. Is that something you always do as part of your lineup?

Kevin: Yeah, pretty much.

Why is it that? Is it because people are anticipating it or hoping that it will be performed?

Michael: I don't think so. It's got to be thousands of times that we’ve played that song. We are entertainers, and as an entertainer, you don't want to hold back anything from the audience and say, “Well, you know, that’s not our song, and that was 40 years ago.” And, as Kevin says, “Have you been to the theater lately?” When you see the smiles on people's faces and dancing and just having a great time. That's our job. We appreciate the amount of money and time they give. It's shocking how much it costs to go to any show now. That’s my reason we do it.

You latest album, Ballad of the Brothers, was released in 2024. How does creating an album and coming up with the songs evolve? Is it a group effort?

Michael: Well, I would love to tell you that we had some grand plan. It just isn’t. If you're in a songwriter’s band, you're always trying to think of new songs, but the mood that you get into to access what creates a song is extremely elusive. We have a place up in the Adirondacks where it is completely disconnected from the real world. That's a place that once I start to relax, I tend to write up there.

Who writes most of the songs? 

Michael: I would say Kevin writes more than I do. It’s probably split 66/34.

And how do you balance acting with music, Kevin? Does one art form influence the other?

Kevin: Yeah, I think so. If I connect to what the song is about, I can perform it better. That's really true in acting, too. 

—Anastasia Stanmeyer

Kevin and Michael Bacon perform at The Cabaret Theatre ("The Cab") at Mohegan Sun on Saturday, September 13, at 7 p.m. For more information on this 21+ show, go to mohegansun.com. Check out The Bacon Brothers’ full tour schedule at baconbros.com.