Biography

-2007-

Monster Mike Welch is one of the East Coast’s best-loved blues guitarists, and at 28 years old, already a fifteen year veteran of the international blues scene. Mike’s varied career has seen him lauded as a teen virtuoso, valued as a supportive sideman, and respected as a maturing blues artist. Recent years have found Mike dividing his time between guests stints (on CDs by Sugar Ray & the Bluetones, Nick Moss, Johnny Winter, and more) and his own work in the European blues scene. Just Like It Is: Monster Mike Welch Plays The Blues finds Mike returning to the North American blues market stronger than ever with his powerful guitar and clear, soulful voice delivering eleven new originals and two covers.

Mike burst onto the blues scene at the age of thirteen, when he was publicly given the nickname “Monster Mike” by Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd at the opening of the first House Of Blues club. By the time he released his first CD three years later, he had already played with blues legends like Junior Wells, James Cotton, and Johnny Copeland, and won the 1995 Boston Music Award for Best Blues Act. The rest of the 90s found Mike touring North America and Europe, and featured in USA Today, People, Entertainment Tonight, CNN and NPR.

After 1998’s Catch Me, which added a Beatlesque rock influences to his blues roots, Mike took a break from touring, expanding his musical horizons with two semesters at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and increasing sideman work. In 2001, Mike returned to the blues circuit as a member of New England blues heroes Sugar Ray & the Bluetones, who rekindled Mike’s love of deep, traditional blues, a genre he celebrated on his 2005 European release Cryin’ Hey.

Just Like It Is finds an adult Monster Mike Welch exploring his blues influences with his trademark biting guitar and his increasingly impressive vocals leading a tight band of seasoned veterans. The CD features eleven strong new originals and impassioned readings of Fleetwood Mac’s “Love That Burns” (from the blues-soaked Peter Green era) and Buddy Guy’s searing “I Got A Strange Feeling” (from the pen of the mighty Willie Dixon.)