Since he was very young, Mike Daly has sung whenever the opportunity presented itself. As a child, he sat in with various lounge bands at Catskills resorts and New Jersey-based Elks lodges, possessing a mature repertoire that proved he listened to too many of his mother's records.
As he grew from child progeny to teen idle, he stopped badgering said lounge bands and began to teach himself to play the bass and six-string guitar. He enjoyed modest success with several high school-based bands, and harbored dreams of rock stardom, until ...
...one day, Mike found himself thrust unwittingly into adulthood. Soon his musical pursuits took a back seat to the "American dream" of working dead-end jobs, paying rent, and going to bed early. In his spare time, however, he honed his guitar prowess just enough to be able to play his growing list of original songs at parties.
By his mid-twenties, Mike was confident enough in his abilities to try to earn some extra scratch doing solo/acoustic cover gigs at local bars. Soon he was joined by a friend, in an act called The Thing With Two Heads. Subsequently, another friend came on board, and then another, to create a four-piece cover band called The Daly Planets (later shortened to The Planets). The music was louder, and much, much better. The bar tab increased exponentially.
It was also around this time that he began recording demos of some of his own songs, which he would then play for anyone who offered the slightest encouragement. These demos eventually begat Every Damn Day, an original band that achieved popularity in at least two good-sized New Jersey cities. The band released several CDs over the course of a decade, and continues to record and perform sporadically to this day.
Which brings us to the present. The events of September 2001 prompted Mike to pursue the real "American dream": a job he could really love. He has spent the years since then devoting more time to being a working musician. Up until recently, the main motivation has been to land gigs that would help pay the bills.
But now, armed with a batch of unreleased material and a new resolve, Mike has set his sights on another creative project that will enable him to record and perform his own music again on a regular basis.
That project is "The Cosmic Adventures of ManBoy," Mike's first solo CD, to be released in early 2009.