mike_duke
Mike Duke lives on the Rancho Nicasio grounds, where he has lead the house band and managed the general store for the past 20 years. He released his first album last week.   Braden Cartwright

Mike Duke, a hit songwriter and the head of Rancho Nicasio’s house band, has finally released an album, reflecting a life filled with music. Last Friday, Mr. Duke—who wrote a couple of Huey Lewis’s biggest hits and has played alongside some of music’s biggest stars—began selling “The Mike Duke Project …took a while,” whose 15 original songs cover a span of 50 years. The blues album is mostly about loving a woman—falling in love, being in love and plenty of heartbreak. “You don’t have to tie me up to tie me down/ You don’t have to cling to keep me around/ You don’t have to pull to take me along/ Baby the answer’s in this song,” he sings on “Honey I Love You.” Mr. Duke was born in Mobile, Ala. in 1948 and learned to play music by ear on his mother’s piano. He was a member of several bands in high school, and he sang and wrote for a black church in the area; the album’s earliest track, “Torn and Scarred,” was written during that time. He had found his calling in music. After writing for Wet Willie, a popular southern rock band, he eventually joined the group, touring nationally through the 1970s. In the 1980s, Mr. Duke was discovered by Bob Brown, who was managing Huey Lewis when a music publisher sent him Mr. Duke’s song “Hope You Love Me Like You Say You Do.” He was blown away, and the song was re-recorded by Mr. Lewis, peaking at number 36 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in 1982. Mr. Brown reached out to Mr. Duke for more music, eventually convincing him to move to Novato to write for Mr. Lewis, a Marin native. “Doing It All for My Baby,” written by Mr. Duke and performed by Huey Lewis and the News, reached number six on the charts in 1986. The original demos of those tracks can be heard on “…took a while.” And although most songwriters record their demos unfinished with muted lyrics, Mr. Duke took a different approach. “I recorded them as good as I could,” he said. “Not for a record per se, but to get the song where you could hear it.” Once Mr. Duke moved to Novato, he joined the Bay Area music scene as the lead singer and keyboardist for the house band at Slim’s in San Francisco. He left California for a few years to join a Nashville-based band, but in 1998 he returned. When Mr. Brown purchased Rancho Nicasio, he asked Mr. Duke to once again move West, this time to be the resident music expert for his venue. Mr. Duke has been living at Rancho Nicasio and leading The Rancho All-Stars ever since. He also manages the general store. After 20 years in town, his Alabaman accent persists. On “That’s What’s so Good About the South,” he sings over keys and guitar: “We take it easy, we take it slow/ It’s soft and breezy when the music is low/ No complication is what fun’s all about/ That’s what’s so good about the South.” Some of his songs are written from personal experience, but many are also born from a premise that occurs to him. He likens his songwriting process to fishing: some days the fish are biting, other days they’re not. It took this long to release an album because he was writing and playing for other people, he said. The album ends with a live recording of the song “Nicasio.” Absent lyrics, the track lets Mr. Duke flex his piano skills during a hometown show in which he imitates stride piano, a style of jazz piano playing where the right hand plays the melody and the left hand plays the rhythm. “I call it punishing the piano, when I go there and just bang around,” Mr. Duke said. “It’s like a little puzzle, like a musical puzzle.”