Michael V. Doane has worked on both sides of the cultural divide — an indie garage label and Shakespeare in a black box theater, Broadway and Paramount, a musical about a Brooklyn diner and a horror project in development. All under one name, all without apology for the breadth of it.

After several years of music taking a back seat, he returns with a new single, “I Know” — and you can hear that the pause was intentional. We sat down with Michael to talk about how fatherhood reshapes creativity, why a ballad is harder to mix than a rock track, and what keeps Soul Kitchen alive as a work-in-progress after all these years. The conversation that follows belongs to someone who has something to say — and who has learned not to rush it.

Michael, hey, good to see you. Your brand new single is already out — the song is called “I Know,” and there’s a key phrase in it: “Every seat has a secret. Every seat… was you.” A theatrical image — an auditorium, rows of seats, a spectator who is simultaneously everywhere. You’ve spent decades working with the space of the stage, directing plays, building mise-en-scènes. And now the stage appears inside a pop track.Where did that particular image come from — a seat holding its own secret?

I was fortunate that a dear friend of mine, who owns an event space in New Jersey near where I live, allowed me, my DP, and a helper to shoot there on an off day. The venue has several different set-ups within the space, so we really lucked out with one of the event rooms. They also have an arcade in another section, which kept my kids busy while we were filming. Once I saw the still image from the shoot, I immediately knew it had to be the cover. The empty seats somehow felt full of memory — of all the parties and events that had passed through that room. Those moments may only last a few hours, but the memories can stay with you for a lifetime.

The track opens with piano — and the first bars sound intimate, almost chamber-like, before the architecture of the song begins to climb upward, toward its climax. You directed the MV yourself, and visually it unfolds along the same principle: from a close-up at the piano out to a wide, nearly cinematic frame. Did you build that parallel — sound and image scaling up in sync — deliberately, or did the video simply surrender to the logic of the song itself?

I think it was a bit of both. As someone who has spent years directing for the stage, I’m always aware of scale, pace, and emotional framing, so the idea of beginning in a very intimate space and gradually opening outward was definitely intentional. Originally, I was going to begin and end on the piano because, in many ways, the good ones outlive us all. But ultimately, I think the ending as it stands now feels exactly right.

“I Know” is a song written by a father for his children. Yet there’s a complete absence of the sentimental tone you’d expect from a lullaby or a childhood dedication. A dramatic vocal arc, a distinctly rock-ballad dynamic running through the song. You’re addressing them more as people who will one day grow up and revisit this track with adult ears. Were you writing “I Know” for the twins you have right now, or for the grown-ups they’ll become twenty years from now?

Honestly, probably both. Of course I was writing from the perspective of the parent I am right now, living in these moments with them while they’re still young. But I’m also very aware that music has a strange way of outliving a particular moment in time. I didn’t want the song to feel overly sentimental or written down to children. I wanted it to speak to them later in life as well — maybe years from now, when they can revisit it with different experiences and hear different meanings in it. That’s part of why the song leans into a more dramatic and expansive emotional space, because life eventually becomes bigger, more complicated, and more emotional than childhood alone, and I wanted the song to leave room for that.

You came back to recording music after a hiatus tied to the birth of your children. A hiatus is a tricky thing: some artists return with ferocity, as if compensating for the silence; others come back quieter, calmer. In “I Know” there’s a very distinct confidence — and it sounds as though a long internal decision preceded it. Was there a specific moment when you realized: it’s time to record again?

It was more gradual than that. Becoming a parent changes your relationship with time, priorities, and even creativity itself. For the first three years, going from working on music almost full-time while running a club on the Upper West Side to suddenly raising twins and taking on the huge responsibility of being their primary caretaker — it was a whirlwind. Truly a blur. But eventually I started feeling that pull toward music again — not out of nostalgia, and not out of a need to prove anything, but because I felt like I finally had something meaningful to say. I think that’s where the confidence in “I Know” comes from. It wasn’t written from urgency or ambition. It came from a quieter place of clarity, and probably from understanding myself a little better than I did years ago.

When you were working on the arrangement of “I Know,” did you find yourself consciously stripping away elements that were pulling the song toward one particular genre?

For me, it wasn’t so much the arrangement that caused stress, but more the mix itself. Because “I Know” is a ballad and begins in such a quiet, intimate place, I was constantly questioning whether it was too quiet or too stripped down. Then, by contrast, the final minute felt much more like home to me musically. At that point I was thinking about completely different things — whether the guitars were loud enough, whether my background vocals were spread out enough, whether there was enough room for everything to breathe. That balance between intimacy and scale was probably the biggest challenge of the entire track.

You have a kind of experience that’s genuinely rare: you co-founded Bullet Records and released garage singles with DJs and producers, while simultaneously staging Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Two worlds that typically exist on entirely different floors of the cultural building. How were those two experiences — the dance underground and dramatic theater — talking to each other inside your head during that period?

Yes, those were some wild times. Simultaneously directing and playing Angelo in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in a tiny black box theater in Midtown, while also doing background vocals on my own label’s debut single with the late great BJ Crosby — who could absolutely sing her face off — feels kind of surreal looking back now. But I was so much younger then, and at the time it didn’t really phase me. You’re right though — they’re both incredibly theatrical worlds. Whether it’s a stage production or a dance floor at 2am, both are built around energy, tension, release, and performance. And honestly, the pompadour-ish hairdo I had back then somehow worked perfectly for both projects. And ps, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remains one of the proudest moments of my artistic life. We had a cast of sixteen performing in a tiny theater that only seated fifty people!

Soul Kitchen is a musical you’ve been working on for a long time now. The concert version played to a standing-room-only crowd at Joe’s Pub. Billy Porter and Jerry Mitchell both praised it publicly and enthusiastically. And yet the show is still in development. What exactly keeps Soul Kitchen in work-in-progress status — the scale of the ambition, or something in the material itself that keeps shifting?

I could probably write an entire book about Soul Kitchen. Seriously — a whole book filled with stories and names from that period of my life. It was an experience that I genuinely hope is still continuing in some form because the songs and the story connected with people in a very real way. We ended up doing several showcase productions built around a one-hour libretto that I wrote myself to serve the songs I had written. What’s interesting to me now is that the material still feels incredibly fresh. Listening back to those songs years later, they don’t feel trapped in that era at all. Because of that, I’ve been seriously considering revisiting the original masters and putting together a proper concept album for the show as a way of formally relaunching it. But those early years were kind of wild. Looking back now, I sometimes can’t believe the people I was meeting, the rooms I was suddenly in, and honestly how close the show came at certain moments.

You’ve composed music for a documentary, for a game show, for television title credits, for a Ben Stiller film at Paramount. And alongside all of that — screenplays: a Page Awards finalist with a romantic thriller, an adaptation of Euripides co-written with a Tony Award nominee. Any one of these projects could have been someone’s entire career. Among all these formats, is there one you keep returning to with the feeling of “this is where I’m home”?

Well, I’ve been a ham since I was a little kid, and honestly that hasn’t changed one bit. So being a performer and a musician is probably the deepest part of who I am creatively. No matter how far I drift into other mediums that I genuinely love, I always seem to return to performance and music because that’s where my instincts live most naturally. There’s something immediate and deeply emotional about music and performing that still feels like it’s deep in my bones. That being said, if I still have the energy once my kids are a little older, I would absolutely love to direct a film someday. Shooting and editing my own videos over the years has definitely given me the confidence to believe I could do it. 

Your discography crosses genre lines openly and without fuss. But — have you ever felt pressure to stay inside one sonic lane, and how did you deal with it?

My influences were always all over the place — theater, rock, dance music, film scores, singer-songwriters, dramatic ballads — and eventually I stopped trying to separate those inspirations from each other. A perfect example was a period where I was dancing on Broadway mostly naked at night, while during the day I was in a boy band trying to become the next New Kids on the Block. Looking back now, it sounds completely insane, but at the time it somehow made perfect sense to me. At a certain point, you realize you just have to follow your instincts creatively and hope you’re lucky enough to keep doing what you love as you grow older.

You’ve got a new single out right now, but there’s also Mrs. Foster — a horror project in development. Before that, there was the romantic thriller Wide Awake in Dreamland. A musical about a Brooklyn diner. A pop single about parental love. The range of subjects and emotional registers is striking. And all of it comes out under one name, with no pseudonyms and no splitting things into separate “projects.” When you think about your next move — what’s pulling harder right now: the stage, the screen, or the recording studio?

If you go on my website, a couple of long-gestating projects are still front and center — Soul Kitchen, like we talked about, Mrs. Foster (which may ultimately become my first feature), and others — because art is always changing and evolving, just like the artists creating it. To me, those projects are still very much alive and waiting for the right moment. But music is different. Music feels more like a daily necessity for me — like coffee or red wine. I have to have it in my life. There’s no real artistic joy for me without it. So even while these larger projects continue to evolve in the background, music will always remain on the front burner. 

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