Mike Watt's Midlife Journey

PORTLAND, ORE. — If life's a lesson, Mike Watt is at the top of his class. He's prevailed over life's toughest tests and, as a result, created a lot of great music over the past couple of decades.

His 46-year journey has not been an easy one. His sailor father and hero died of cancer when Watt was just 33. His best friend, Minutemen bandmate D. Boon, died in an auto accident in 1985, when Watt was 27. And Watt himself almost died twice: once of pneumonia at 22, and again from an infection exactly 20 years later.

His latest solo recording, The Secondman's Middle Stand, is an operatic piece that tells his experience of enduring and surviving the sickness in three parts, inspired by and paralleling Dante's Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise (the sickness, healing and surviving).

The album also finds Watt entering and exploring middle age, which is not at all what he expected. But that's to be expected... .

Use this link to read the entire story.