The Bacon Brothers - Erato (2022)

Although Michael Bacon is an esteemed film composer, and Kevin Bacon is a famed movie star, they are equally passionate about The Bacon Brothers, the band they formed nearly thirty years ago, sharing lead vocal duties and each playing various instruments along with a backing band. On July 8, they’ll release Erato, a five-song EP that displays an eclectic mix of musical styles, which is in keeping with their previous ten albums.

“As usual, we are kind of all over the place—which is at times is kind of problematic for a band, because, for some reason, people really want to feel that it’s in some kind of a safe category that they’re used to,” Michael says, during a recent conference call with Kevin for American Songwriter. “When I say we’re in a band, [people] say, ‘What kind of music is it?’ and I tell them we are ‘Forosoco,” which is the name Kevin made up for us 27 years ago: folk, rock, soul, country. But it doesn’t really categorize it because our philosophy, if we have any philosophy, is that it’s song-driven.”

The brothers agree that those songs must be allowed to emerge naturally. “We’re not people that say, ‘Every day, we’re going to sit down and spend a couple of hours trying to come up with songs,’” Kevin says. “We write when it hits us, and we have no control over when that is or when that isn’t. You just have to wait.”

He uses the new EP’s title track as an example of this: “When I wrote “Erato,” I was working on a film and I didn’t even bring a guitar down to the location where I was, which is very unusual for me. So I went to a music store in this little town in Georgia and bought a guitar for like a hundred and fifty bucks, and it just sat there for a while. Then I heard somebody talking about this mythical muse Erato, who is the goddess of love, poetry, music, and all things erotic. So I said, ‘Well, let me just write about her, and write about this idea which I don’t really believe in, which is that there’s some kind of muse or divine awakening that makes you write songs.’ Then all of a sudden, there was that song. That, for me, kicked off some more writing.”

They also found inspiration this time through writing the track “In Memory (Of When I Cared)” with Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Desmond Child (who’s written hits for, and with, a wide range of artists, including Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Kiss, Joan Jett, Alice Cooper, and Ricky Martin.) Working with Child, Kevin says, was “really fun and interesting. We learned a lot from him.”

Michael agrees that this experience taught the brothers new ways to approach their craft. “I think he’s very detail-oriented and he is not in a rush,” he says of Child. “I’m a film composer, where I’m always struggling to keep up and get it done. Desmond has the luxury of taking it pretty slow. For instance, the first day, we went over to his apartment and we didn’t even pick up a guitar or a piano, just listened to music, talked, and drank coffee. The second day, that’s when we started writing. He has very, very specific ideas of how the rhyme schemes should be, and he’s very, very careful and full of songwriting craft. Sometimes I think that songwriters don’t spend enough time really looking into that.”