Michael Penn
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Michael Penn (born August 1, 1958) is an American singer and songwriter.
Michael Penn was born on August 1, 1958, in New York City's Greenwich Village area. He is the oldest of three brothers, but while his siblings Sean and Chris focused on acting, he turned to music.
He is best known for the single "No Myth" from the album March, which was his solo debut in 1989. Two years before March, he performed "This & That" with his band The Pull on Saturday Night Live. The follow-ups Free-for-All (1992), Resigned (1997) and MP4: Days Since a Lost Time Accident (2000) weren't able to match the success of March, although critics praised his songcraft.
Penn married Aimee Mann in 1997. Together with manager Michael Hausman they formed United Musicians, which "is founded on the principle that every artist should be able to retain copyright ownership of the work he or she has created and that this ownership is the basis for artistic strength and true independence".
Penn moved into film scoring after director Paul Thomas Anderson asked him to write music for his first feature, Hard Eight. He also scored Anderson's follow-up, Boogie Nights (in which he appeared briefly as a recording engineer), The Anniversary Party, Melvin Goes to Dinner and the documentary The Comedians of Comedy.
His fifth album, Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947, is scheduled for release August 2, 2005, on Mimeograph Records/SpinART Records. Penn has said that the album, which may be the first of two parts, is set after World War II and involves "the trauma that a war brings to a person's psychology." (source (http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000829375))
Discography
- March (1989)
- Free-for-All (1992)
- Resigned (1997)
- MP4: Days Since a Lost Time Accident (2000)
- Mr. Hollywood Jr., 1947 (2005)
External links
- Michael Penn (http://www.michaelpenn.com) (official site)
- Pennlist (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/michaelpennlist/) e-mail discussion group
- Bunker Hill (http://people.cornell.edu/pages/tfl1/index.html) fan site
- United Musicians (http://www.unitedmusicians.com/)
- MySpace page (http://www.myspace.com/michaelpenn)
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