Every band acts like they're unique and special—and we're no exception... legends in our own minds, ha! But you can decide for yourself if our band and our music connects with you.
First off, we admit that it's weird to have a band called "Mitch the Needle" when no one in the band is named Mitch. It's just us three good friends (McD, Lou, and Jer) who have written thousands of songs together since we were teens.
It's also strange to find a band that stays together more than forty years that never got a record deal and only played one live show ever. What's up with all that? And how could we have been a "bedroom band" decades before Billie Eilish made that the cool thing to do?
Well, here's the deal. McD and Lou grew up across the street from each other in the small town of Auxvasse, Missouri, where they'd spend summer afternoons in Lou's garage jamming on guitars and trash-can drums. Soon, they were writing dozens and dozens of songs together on organ, piano, and guitar. Jer was from the metropolitan area of St. Louis, and had been writing many songs on his own since his early teens.
At college, Jer was practicing piano one day, and heard someone in the next practice room playing an awesome chord progression on piano. Jer thought, "Wow, that's cool. Sounds like something I might write." He followed the sound, and found Lou playing it. Jer said, "That really sounds great! Did you make that up?" Lou said, "Yep," and the three of us have been best friends and bandmates ever since.
You may be wondering at this point, "Why am I only hearing about this band now, if they've been around for so long?"
Good question. And probably the best answer is the quote made famous by Beatles legend John Lennon, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."
You see, the three of us wrote hundreds of songs together during and shortly after college. We made the best demo recordings we could, initially by bouncing tracks between two old cassette tape recorders (doing it all from our college dorm rooms). We chased our dreams as much as we could from the middle of the U.S., far from the music cities on the coasts. But the record companies all rejected us because our songs spanned too many genres and didn't fit neatly into one of their stylistic pigeonholes. Even made a trip to meet with record people in Nashville, when we were clearly the wrong genre for that town. And by that point, quite honestly, we had seen enough that we didn't want our creativity and our lives controlled by some stereotypical record company big wig.
So, we eventually made other things priorities in our lives: marriages, children, day jobs to pay the bills, divorces, new marriages, and grandkids. Along that journey, we got new equipment to make better demos, Jer and Lou played live music in rock bands and piano bars, and Jer moved to L.A. for a year. But we each kept writing music on our own and never lost sight of our shared dream to write music together and get it out into the world.
That brings us up to 2015, when technology finally caught up to our vision, allowing us the creative freedom we'd dreamed of, along with the ability to record and produce all our own music.
We've released more than sixty songs on Spotify, YouTube, and all the streaming services. Our sound is indie pop and modern rock with hints of 70s and 80s influences. It's a complete joy for us to have thousands of followers and fans from all over this planet, and especially to receive sincere compliments from people about how our music has been meaningful to them.
Check out the other tabs of this site for more about our music and how to get our band updates. If you want to know more about the band (including where our crazy band name came from), see our PDF press kit from the Media Info tab.