Career
He emerged as a solo artist under the name Mike Bones. Born in 1987 and raised in Bloomfield, New Jersey, Strallow began learning to play guitar when he was six years old, though he didn"t have an instrument of his own until he was ten. In his late teens, Strallow moved to New York City and began immersing himself in the city"s music scene while honing his guitar technique.
Strallow had been playing guitar with a handful of groups before he began taking his first steps as a songwriter, influenced by American roots artists such as Skip James and Hank Williams as well as the angst-filled confessions of Leonard Cohen.
Strallow started putting his songs to tape during a stay in Memphis with friends from the band Lucero, but these early sessions went unreleased and it was only in the summer of 2006 that Strallow began serious work on his first full-length album. Rather than release the project under his own name, Strallow used the moniker Mike Bones, a nickname from his childhood.
The first Mike Bones album, The Sky Behind the Sea, was released by the independent label The Social Registry in the fall of 2007.
