A Note from Swim Skinny
I was recently asked to be interviewed for a book being written about Trop Rock singer/songwriters and their music…I was asked to talk about my background and where some of my songs originated…this is what I had to say!!
Click to Order The New CD “Naked & Wet”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My life as a nationally recognized “Trop Rocker” began with a simple song….
“Hippy Farm” – This is the song that penned the name “Swim Skinny” and tagged me with it for life. Hippy Farm is a song about the transition from my childhood living “hippie” in rural Midwest communities to my suburbanite life as an adult in Indiana. It talks about how we “used to swim skinny in the hippy pond on the hippy farm”. After singing the song for crowds at shows throughout the Midwest, people would yell out to me on stage upon my return…”play that ‘swim skinny’ song”… Eventually it grew into a trademark song and the name alone has made me famous…Swim Skinny. The song remains the pivotal point of my music career, taking me from local singer/songwriter to national performer. The song is plainly about missing the simplicity of my youth as a hippie kid.
“Drunken Parrothead Blues” – Upon gaining regional notoriety under the name “Swim Skinny” as an acoustic performer and singer/songwriter, crowds began to grow as did my reputation for having FUN on stage (and selling lots of booze). Requests for me to play were pouring in from lakeside bars and island party events around the lakes of Indiana where I grew up. So, on the weekends I’d pack up the kids for the weekend, go to our tiny cabin on Lake Freeman, and I’d make some extra cash playing music in the evenings. One particular party I was invited to play was this annual Jimmy Buffett gathering at a bar near my hometown the week after Jimmy played in Indianapolis. Having been a fan for years, but never having seen a live Buffett show, I decided to get tickets and take my oldest son…he was 16. The week prior to the concert I was putting together my stuff for the parrothead party back home – people often brought gifts and I would display them on stage with me – and one of the items was this parrot I was trying to mount on my mic-stand. The problem was, everytime I’d move, the parrot would fall upside down hanging from the stand…staring right back at me. After a few times trying to fix the problem, the parrot fell upside down AGAIN and found it’s final resting place. My guitar was sitting there and with a big grin on my face I strummed a chord and said “like a drunken parrot hanging upside down, I’ve got my tail in the air and my beak on the ground”. By the time I made it to the Buffett concert and party on Lake Shafer, I had written the song “Drunken Parrothead Blues”. I played it at the party 3 times by request over the course of the 7 hour show. The song was video taped and released on YouTube and I quickly became a part of the Parrothead nation. A video with pictures portraying the lyrics was later released, solidifying “Swim Skinny” as a household name in the minds of parrotheads worldwide. The song talks about the debaucheries of a day following a Buffett concert and depicts the likes of my own brother crawling from my hammock by the lake after a much-too-wild night with friends.
“My Banana” – After being recognized as a ‘Trop Rocker’ by my fans, a term I didn’t know at the time, many of my other water-based party tunes began to be noticed…at which time the making of a CD arose. In collecting my original songs that fit the genre bill, I found myself writing more along those lines and people started labeling me as “tropical” and other similar terms. One night while answering my then hundreds of weekly emails, I was surprised by a chat box opening a conversation with an old high school girl friend…we were talking of meeting some day on a boat in the islands where we’d co-habitate, her braiding hair and me playing guitar. At the same time my youngest son, who was 14 at the time, was laying next to me in bed playing his new ukulele. Noticing the email that was on the screen at the time, and partially blocked by the chat box, my son looked at me and said out loud….”Dad look, she likes your banana”. Behind the chat box was an email where the sender had written…”Dear Swim Skinny, I like your Banana Republic style of music…”. As my son read the message to me, the chat box covered the words “Republic style of music…” leaving only the words “Dear Swim Skinny, I like your Banana” to be seen by my son. Needless to say we laid there with his uke and wrote my most popular and most requested song to date….”My Banana”.
“I’m Alive” – Over the course of my adult life, I have had great success and great challenges. I’ve been married twice, I have three children, and I am now single raising my two younger children at our very small lake cabin. I have accumulated great wealth, for a ‘hippie kid’, and have walked away from it all to gain inner peace. The choices and decisions have been hard at times, sometimes even putting me through what many would call a ‘living hell’. However, I have always remained positive and have tried not to count my loss…which has been tough…at least it was until just a year or so ago. In the midst of some of my hardest times, reminders of how fragile life is have crossed my path helping keep my mind clear and focused on living life free of false truths and drama. A couple years ago a close friend’s son was diagnosed with cancer at age 17 and pulled through after huge fights with the disease. At the same time another friend, acquaintance, and fellow trop rocker Troy Allan faught cancer eventually losing his battle at the end of last year…BUT, not before inspiring me and SO many others to live life to it’s fullest and to be thankful we are alive. With Troy on my mind and hope for my new freedom, I wrote “I’m Alive” as an anthem for my life. In the first verse I reference my relationship with someone very close to me when saying “you put your hands upon my chest and rescued me from cardiac arrest”….it describes also my relationship with God and the impact Troy has had on me. In the second verse I am talking to the many fans who have written me saying they wish they could be ‘more like me’ when I say…”sometimes you gotta close your eyes to see, reach down pull something out and show the world what you’re all about, raise your hands, raise ‘em high, touch the clouds and feel the sky…say I’m alive and I’m free, there ain’t no place I’d rather be…’cause I’m alive”. If only my fans knew for themselves what it is that has brought me to this point in my life, maybe then they too would feel more ALIVE!! This song says it all for me….where I’ve been, where I am, and where I want to be.
“I’m Alive” is one of my favorite tunes from the new Swim Skinny double disc CD that is to be released July 7, 2012 titled “Naked & Wet”. The “Naked” CD has a very acoustic feel with very little production work…the CD is a look deeper into the person I really am and not just the SWIM SKINNY image…it is soft, soulful, ornery, and real…it’s “Naked”!! The “Wet” CD is a continuation of my first CD titled “At Your Own Risk”…the CD is filled with tropical sound, feel, and trademark Swim Skinny innuendo…”Booyah”, “Walking to New Orleans”, and “Too Drunk to See Jimmy” are sure to be hits in their perspective crowds…the soulful jazz sound of “The Roosters Call” and “Mallory Square” make you long for sultry nights in Key West… And “Back to Belize” just feels SOOO damn good….You’re gonna love this project!!
People often ask me what it is like to be a “Trop Rock Star”….and I never really know what to say….what I can say is this: You know, I am really just another guy who happens to play guitar…I’m a dad, a brother, and a son…I’m a friend to many and am lucky to have some great friends…right here at home and around the world…if there is one thing about me that makes me special, it’s that I follow my heart and keep trying where others might stop…I love my life and I wouldn’t trade it for any life around…my wish for you is the same!!
Peace and Love,
Swimmy
Until Next Time… Trop On!
Most people try to break out of prison but this crazy not so demure Southerner actually broke into one! Sammie Mays earned rank as a gonzo reporter when commissioned by the notorious editors at the National Enquirer to snag a picture of baseball’s fallen bad boy, Pete Rose, while incarcerated in the infamous Marion, Illinois SuperMax Penitentiary. The lure of $100,000 proved too much for her to resist. The plan was only concocted after some dirty low-life broke into Sammie Mays’s saloon in the Navy shipbuilding town of Pascagoula, Mississippi and stole her blind. “The thieves didn’t only steal the money, liquor, and beer…they stole the pool table, barstools, cash register and even the air conditioning unit!” Mays then joked, “I’ve always heard a bad artist borrows and a good artist steals. I wonder what they named the new bar???” Sammie’s Key West Bar n’ Grill was the only bar in town deemed “resort” status which meant she had the only bar licensed to remain open after the 2am curfew for all other bars. A twenty-four hour hell raising honky tonk, it was the location where Jimmy Buffett played to his first audience (refer to his song Pascagoula Run). A regular at the bar was Jimmy’s one-legged Uncle Billy Buffett who struck a deal for his underage nephew to sweep and mop spilled swill from the floor in exchange for stage time. “Clever Uncle Bill drank for free!” The burglary devasted the saloon-keeper. Left flat busted and desperate for a quick fix, Mays weighed her options and briefly considered posing nude for Hustler but instead decided to take the lower road. A weekend entertainer in her own bar, Mays posed as a musician, hiding two identical 35 millimeter cameras inside an old worn-out speaker cabinet and sweet talked the warden and herself right into, at the time, the nation’s toughest penitentiary. It was literally through hook n’ crook that she managed to score the coveted $100,000 photograph of baseball great Pete Rose in the Pokey!
Meanwhile back at corporate headquarters in Lantana, Florida, National Enquirer marketing gurus aggresively worked through the night leaking word to the Associated Press of the beer-slinging reporter’s espionage operation. The media was primed and Hollywood’s curiosity peeked! Back in Marion, Illinois, the humiliated warden was being dismissed of his duties but didn’t step down until he issued this final statement to the press, “Where Sammie Mays is going she’s not going to be able to spend a dime of that money!”Trouble was beginning to mount for Mays. The morning after scoring the infamous prison shot she pulled into Denny’s for a quick bite of breakfast and from a row of newspaper vending machines bold black headlines screamed, “Pete Rose In Prison / National Enquirer World Exclusive!” Sammie’s immediate response was that she had been hung-out to dry and left to her on demise. Her personal photo and private information were being used by the tabloid to sell papers. Suddenly she began to fear for her own freedom and soon went underground. Long story short, when the smoke started to clear Sammie’s “Pete in the Pokey” photo had been named as Best of Year by Sports Illustrated. And when she finally thought it was safe to come out of hiding, British tabloid peers had begun referring to their new hotshot celebrity reporter as The Gonz. When the Coconut Telegraph first read the story I Shot Pete Rose and watched the remake on the t.v. series Tabloid, rumors of a big screen movie by the writers Of Mice and Men began to surface with Ellen Barkin playing Mays’s character. The Gonz homeport is Key West, Florida, USA where she hails as the Honorary Mayor Gonzo Mays and is celebrated by both locals and tourist for overtly giving as many free political favors as humanly possible and accepting all bribes, no matter how insignificant. And, yes, even the Keys county Sheriff carries one in his wallet. The Gonz eventually tired of the yellow journalism gig and of the tabloid prankishness and crazy Hollywood celebrities who “believed their own press” but, still, you can sometimes see the adventures of Mayor Gonzo Mays on Comcast Tourist Television, in the local newspapers and travel magazines.Note: At sunset you can usually catch the honorary mayor bellied-up and holding court with the locals at the tiki bars. Just look for the cigar, straw hat and sunglasses – even at night! Mayor Gonzo tells us that living in the islands and writing sordid adventures and drunken tales of characters she encounters along the way sure beats the hell out of working for Southern Bride Magazine. Says the famous writer and photojournalist, “Nothing, but nothing, is as bad or as painful as that gig with the bridal magazine. To this day I hate pink chiffon!”
Schooner – the colorful frontman of top-rated trop rockers Conch Republic – went solo in 2012 after following his heart to the beach. Happily calling Sarasota his new home port, Schooner brings his own unique style of trop rock to beach bars and crab shacks all along the Gulf Coast.
After relocation from San Diego to Nashville, TN , Mike has pursued songwriting and a solo entertainer career, netting nominations from The 
