About the Artist

Join us for Todd Kessler Presents: Songwriters in the Round at Hey Nonny! This time we have Kevin Andrew Prchal hosting. This monthly event features a different group of singer-songwriters for each performance. Join the circle and get an up close and personal musical experience.

October will feature Mike Maimone, The Long Lost, and Paul Moody.

Mutts frontman Mike Maimone “goes from zero to a hundred quicker than most,” according to Daytrotter. Choose Chicago says, “He plays the piano with his feet. He swills whiskey between songs. He shouts and howls. He is an unstoppable music force.” Vern Hester of the Windy City Times adds, “The man has the keyboard style of Fats Waller and Jerry Lee Lewis combined, and a vocal style that clearly recalls Tom Waits and Warren Zevon.”

Maimone has averaged over 100 tour dates each year since 2007, primarily with his band Mutts and as a solo artist, as well as on keyboards for Company of Thieves and Los Colognes. He has toured in support of Murder By Death, The Hold Steady, OK Go, and Blues Traveler among others, played Lollapalooza, Sasquatch, Riot Fest, and at notable venues across the country, from The Fillmore in San Francisco to the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York.

Fiercely spirited and relentlessly authentic, The Long Lost write songs laced with both bleeding heart optimism and bitter cynicism. The Chicago Americana/Alt-country group blurs the line between happy and sad, creating misleadingly upbeat songs about the dark and disheartening times in life. Above all else, the music of The Long Lost centers around the intuitive harmonies of front-women Avalos and Burke. This distinct vocal pairing is shaped by influences across the decades – the glamour of early rock and roll, the theatrics of mid century country, as well welcoming the guidance of the modern folk-rock genre. The band succeeds in capturing a singular, unique sound.

Continually honing their sound, The Long Lost has grown into a five piece outfit playing off their vintage-tinged Americana sound. Although their music has evolved, Avalos and Burke offer variety in their performance, often returning to their roots as a duo and playing their songs in the natural, raw style they were created.

In early 2017, after years of playing mostly solo shows, Paul Moody reached out to the most talented Chicago musicians he knew to form Paul Moody and the Revelators. The band’s Debut EP titled, The Island, was released on September 13th. As usual with Moody – heavy themes and unflinching self-reflection are in abundance, but there is a level of playfulness and humor not found in his previous releases. With lines like, “Education’s a black hole, takes my cash like a pimp, the future’s looking dim, I’ll go get drunk again, I wish I was still a kid”, Moody is able to capture a sense of restlessness and dissatisfaction that is very real in his generation, and yet, he does it with a lighthearted, humble, and goofy manner – a manner which longs to offer solace and understanding to anyone struggling with similar feelings.

At first blush, Love & Summer, the third full-length album from Chicago-based singer/songwriter, Kevin Andrew Prchal, is a rollicking celebration of its two titular themes. Radiating romance and whimsy, the album revels in the never-ending present of love; its songs ecstatic and tender, playful and impassioned. Early on, Love & Summer stakes out its territory—a green and blossoming world which Prchal explores with breathless wonder and delight. Musically and lyrically, its mood is pastoral: fiddles and pedal steel mingle with the recurring voices of cicadas, and Prchal draws on a register of natural images to populate its landscape. Yet even while Love & Summer presents an homage to this idealized world, the album is also—perhaps more so—a paean to an evanescent present, where, as Prchal sings, “time will fade like sugar on your tongue.” In this sense, the insistent optimism of Love & Summer is motivated less by the dizzy raptures of love than by a hard-won awareness of the fleetingness of things and a determination to remain focused on the here-and-now of real human connection.