Radio Nowhere is a rock/pop band from Oakland, California, in the United States. A friend told me that we sound like Pete Townshend produced by Prince, and that sums it up pretty well.
The band was started by Mike Baker, who writes all the songs and does the singing and guitar playing, as well as anything else that needs doing (like, um, writing the band bio).
I’m supposed to tell you about all the great clubs we’ve played, the records we’ve sold, and the rock stars we’ve partied with, but I think that gets boring really fast – don’t you? Here’s what you should know about Radio Nowhere:
1) When I was growing up, my family would drive from the Bay Area to Idaho every summer, and the only radio we could get was a classical AM station out of Salt Lake City. In order to keep the kids from beating each other to death, my mom would make up stories to go along with the sonatas and fugues we were hearing. There was one I especially liked about the Mouse King and his sworn enemy, the Baron d-Con. So I got imprinted with the whole combination of music, empty roads and stories early on - hopefully it shows up in our songs.
2) When I was six, my dad borrowed my record player to listen to one of the 78s (!) that his band had cut back when he was in high school. When he was done, I trawled through his record collection looking for the shiniest, most colorful album cover and played the lp inside, which turned out to be Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Psychedelicized at six--it's hard to recover.
3) I write most of my songs while I'm driving, on an ancient Casio keyboard bungee-corded to the passenger seat. This is not safe. Last summer, I got pulled over doing 80 in a 45 because I was so fired up about this chorus I was writing. Then I almost drove off a mountain.
4) I have rocked crowds of several hundred people with nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a well-timed Britney Spears cover (were they sober? No).
