Mike Mains to perform on Feb. 10
It doesn’t seem long ago that singer and songwriter Mike Mains was sleeping on his friend’s dorm room floor at Central Michigan University.
Now with the musician's career in full swing, Mike Mains and his band are making rounds back to where the journey began.
The band recently ended a nine-week tour, and their next stop is CMU. They will be performing at 7 p.m. on Feb. 10 in the Bovee University Center Rotunda.
“(Going back to Mount Pleasant is) fun and nostalgic. 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 be performing original songs off of their first two albums and some off of 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.
"(I want the students to realize) that they should go to school for what they want to do," Mains said. "Not for what their parents want them to do or what culture pressures them to do."
After graduating high school in 2005, Mains didn’t know what he wanted to study. Although he was accepted into CMU, he declined the offer because he failed to find a degree that was the right fit. However, he stayed here and crashed with his friends who were students at the time while he tried to figure himself out. After realizing his true passion was music, he decided to leave CMU to make a career out of it.
Moving to Gainsville, Texas, Mains created his band in 2009. However, Mains said his love for music solidified when he was a kid and his parents would drop him off at his grandmother’s house.
“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.”
Until his CMU performance, Mains will be focusing on his new album. The band has yet to find a suiting name for the album, but he 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,” said Mains. “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 that that’s not."
