Mike Mineo's music is best described as Avant-Garde Pop Music. It is a familiar approach to an old sentiment. Brent WIlliams producer of Eccentricity and manager of the label NeverNothing Records, LLC which he started explicitly for Mineo after being told by a major label that Mike Mineo would be too much competition for one of their own top billing artists. Williams is in deep with the artist he's fostered since they met a few years ago during an open-mic night at Koffeeoke, a coffee shop in Delray Beach. "I was drawn to his raw talent. I felt the same thing that a lot of people feel when they see him, like 'What the fuck are you doing here?' "
Williams rents a five-bedroom house in Delray Beach, and two bedrooms are set aside for his studio. Mineo also sleeps in one of the rooms, an arrangement that has afforded them the opportunity to take their time.
"We got to work on each song over the last year and a half," Williams says. "We just let things grow and took our time so that we could do it exactly the way that we wanted to."
Their process certainly was meticulous. Three songs feature string arrangements written by cellist Oksana Pankiv. "Doing the string quartet on the album took a few months," Williams says. "We went to Stetson University in Deland to record strings. We had free rein of the place. They had a piano and a harpsichord, and Mike jumped on the harpsichord and played it like he'd been playing it his entire life."
"The track 'Eccentricity' wasn't working for us either," Williams adds. "We decided that we needed a pedal steel guitar. I had to farm it out to a guy in Iowa, but that sound brings it all together."
"Eccentricity," the title track, addresses people who rub Mineo the wrong way with the sort of eccentric antics that he can't buy into. It also poses a question about its subjects that people might wonder about him as well: "Is this deep or just eccentric?"
The track also references Shakespeare's character Hamlet, one of the most impenetrable madmen in Western literature. As is the case with Hamlet, it's uncertain how much of Mineo's curious behavior is evidence of keen perception and how much is just plain oddness. His recordings, for the most part, are less peculiar than his person. But for occasional maniacal laughter on a few songs, the album mostly presents profound awareness and a positive message.
"Ain't no problems right here, my dear," is howEccentricity's big, brassy opening track, "Believe," begins lyrically. Mineo goes on to encourage people to worry less about their problems and "just believe." "Where Did You Go?" plods along like a playful elephant, with Bill Muter's tuba setting a New Orleans-style tone. Instead of whining about a departed lover, the song confronts her with an appeal to be reasonable: "Where did you go?/Why won't you just acknowledge one thing that I did/Before you go and blow it all up in your head?"
Eccentricity's tracks cover a range of genres: jazzy lounge song "Lucky Coin," the soulful "Easy Livin'," country-influenced "Eccentricity," the Broadway-caliber drama in "Old Shoes," and the folk-flavored polka of "Movin' to France."
The album has 18 hit worthy tracks and is a steal for $9.99. So don't hesitate to buy this album. Mr. Mineo is about to show the world what he is made of!!!
