Indie rock singer Mike Mains to perform in UC
It wasn’t long ago that singer and songwriter Mike Mains was sleeping on the floor of his friend’s dorm room at Central Michigan University.
Now with the musician's music career in full swing, his band, Mike Mains and the Branches, are making the rounds back to where the journey began.
Mains will perform at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Bovee University Center Rotunda as part of Program Board’s Coffee House Music.
“There are a lot of people who looked after me there when I was 18 years old and it was a very dark time in my life,” Mains said. “It’s exciting to go back with fresh eyes and it’s something I can give back to college students during their early college years. I hope that my band and my music can be a way to wake people up to show them what matters most in their lives.”
This will be their third time performing at CMU. The band will perform original songs off of their first two albums and some from their current album.
Mains said he’s excited to return to the place he once called home and enrich students with the messages he tries to convey in his songs.
After being unable to find a degree that was the right fit, Mains said he decided to leave CMU to make a career out of music. He moved to Texas and created his band in 2009.
Mains said his love for music was solidified when his parents would drop him off at his grandmother’s house as a kid.
“I would just stand outside of the kitchen listening to sausage sizzle and smell the crushed black pepper and salt,” Mains said. “I would just listen to her hum these sweet old country melodies and I loved that those songs showed me some kind of invisible world. I never listened to them assuming that one day I would be a guy who wrote them.”
Mains has been focusing on his new album. The band has yet to find a fitting name for the album, but Mains said it’s focused on millennials and how to cope with changing beliefs.
“(Our inspiration for this album comes from) the idea of a renegade,” he said. “We were sort of raised to believe that once we are our parents age the lights will flick on and we will have answers and as a person who grew up under that banner of ideas, only to realize (it’s) not.”
