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The first time singer/songwriter Mikey James performed in public was when his father took him to a bar at the ripe old age of six and had James sit behind the drum kit for a spirited rendition of ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’. The place went bananas. 

Meanwhile, one street over from where James lived, another six-year old named Anthony Kuhn was learning how to play Hurts So Good on guitar as MTV began to grip the culture and change life forever. 

The year was 1983. 

Since then, James and Kuhn have approached musical styles like two hungry, unsupervised kids left to run amok at an Old Country Buffet. And, as each blossomed into their musicianship, walking numerous creative paths both together and separately, the pair sowed the seeds for the multi-genre fluency that oozes from their new project Singing River. 

Singing River’s debut single Difference oozes with the calm, cool reserve of peak-era Tom Petty, with Kuhn playing Mike Campbell to James’ Petty—except that the pair has gotten so natural and effortless at channeling their influences that you might not even notice the resemblance right off the bat. 

Where so many other artists would try to take us back to 1989 by zeroing-in on the tone and vibe of Petty’s Full Moon Fever, Singing River have no interest in being that literal. For every influence that you can directly point to on a given song, there are touches of rock, power pop, soul, roots and even Vaudeville that collectively inform every note. 

As much as James enjoyed the crowd response from that night at the bar, his fantasies weren’t filled with screaming fans but with scenes of sitting at the recording consoles of iconic studios he imagined in his head, sitting next to famous producers. A lifelong music-production addict, James’ appetite for assimilating production techniques is bottomless. 

James’ musical career, in fact, began with making 4-track cassette recordings in the early ‘90s. He wasn’t trying to mimic a lo-fi aesthetic, mind you—he was trying to capture the spirit of George Martin, Phil Ramone, Jerry Wexler, and Eddie Kramer. It just so happened that he was doing so in his bedroom. 

Just after high school, as grunge was hitting peak popularity, as Kuhn and James remember it, everyone wanted to have a Neil Young/Pearl Jam band, James started one named Native Kin with future Longwave founder Steve Schiltz, who recruited Kuhn, who then joined the Air Force to serve in the Middle East. 

Meanwhile, Schiltz and James would have a brush with the millennial rock zeitgeist when they moved to NYC, toured with The Strokes just prior to that band’s ascent into the history books, signed with a major and toured with the likes of  The Vines, The Raveonettes, The Donnas, The Mooney Suzuki, and OK Go. 

During the making of Longwave’s second album There’s a Fire, James got tired of being confined behind the drumset and moved back home to Western New York to resume what he had always seen as his mission. A restless multi-instrumentalist, James has performed under a slew of guises including Mikey Jukebox, Hawker M. James, and the cleverly-named solo vehicle Admirers (to name just a few). 

Along the way, James has landed songs on KCRW, the CMJ chart, and numerous television shows including New Girl, Gossip Girl, Community and, most recently, This Is Us—often, it should be noted, with minimal (sometimes zero) budget and promotion. 

He has also worked with a slew of producers, mixers, and mastering engineers (people with names a young James would read in album credits and essentially cold-call), following his muse in pursuit of whatever offbeat musical hybrid it compelled him to try. With legendary Ardent Studios producer John Hampton at the helm, for example, James’s Admirers project landed in a retro-futuristic realm somewhere between Roxy Music, Nile Rodgers, and M83.

In the last half-decade or so, however, James has harnessed his tendency to dart from one genre to the next, all of his influences coalescing into a rich soup where the ingredient that stands out first and foremost is James’ own singular songwriting style. At this point, he doesn’t even care all that much if he appears on the recordings of the songs, increasingly viewing his body of work as a kind of modern-day songbook to share with other musicians. 

Enter Kuhn again, after a mutual friend reconnected him with James, and Singing River was born. With Kuhn’s one-of-a-kind slide work, James has rediscovered the joy of making music for music’s sake. Recording and producing the music themselves in their collective home studios, the result is what James likes to call “northern folk,” referencing his admiration for the likes of Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Robbie Robertson, and Bob Dylan. 


“It’s funny,” James enthuses, “my love of production has taken me down all these rabbit holes that ultimately led me back to the most organic music that’s ever been made. If you listen to these old 78 rpm records of country, blues, and jazz from the ‘20s and ‘30s, there’s no ‘production’ to speak of, but there’s obviously something there. And it hits me in the same place—maybe even a little closer to my heart, in a way.” 

“I’m still crazy about production,” he continues. “That’ll always be there, but the longer I do this, the more I keep coming back to that bare essence. What is it that’s coming across on these really early recordings? We can’t find the words to describe it, but we can all hear that it’s there. With Singing River, Anthony and I are trying to find our way to that.” - Saby Reyes-Kulkarni