Boston/Florida Singer-Songwriter Micah Sheveloff Shares New Single “Someone There For Me,” Co-Written by Gary Cherone
Micah Sheveloff has released “Someone There For Me,” the first single from his upcoming album, Don’t You Wonder, due January 15, 2027.
The song traces back to a friendship that began around 1984, when Sheveloff and Extreme frontman Gary Cherone played together in Boston. The two stayed connected over the following decades, and in the fall of 2024, Cherone called Sheveloff with an idea: an American Songbook style track that swings, one he had carried around as a demo for years and wanted to finally record. The plan was to cut it together with jazz musicians Sheveloff had worked with in the past, but touring behind Extreme’s album ‘SIX’ pushed the session back. In the meantime, Sheveloff fell in love with the song and built his own arrangement around it, one Cherone loved as much as the original.
“Someone There For Me” was co-written by Cherone and Benny Golbin, a respected jazz composer and teacher from Los Angeles who was killed in a road racing incident. Golbin’s family has since started the Benny Golbin Foundation, which raises money to provide musical instruments and instruction to children.
Sheveloff reshaped the song considerably to make it his own, altering the tempo, adjusting the vocal melody to suit his own singing style and adding a bridge built on lush harmonies. The result blends classic jazz chord progressions with the pop sensibility he has honed over decades, with jazz guitarist Nate Najar contributing further colour to the recording.
Sheveloff is careful about how the collaboration gets framed.
“I want to be mindful that we talk about my relationship with Gary for what it really is, a friendship developed across creative commonalities that led to an eventual collaboration later in life,” he says. Asked previously about that friendship, he put it this way: “I was young and had much more exposure to classical piano and choir than rock and roll at the time. But Gary has a genuine appreciation for a broad range of styles and genres, and that in itself helped bring down walls for me and turned me loose to write unabated by a false sense of lanes or boundaries.”
“Someone There For Me” sits among 12 tracks on Don’t You Wonder, a record that draws from an unusually wide range of influences. Alongside songs like “City Bus” and “Tranquility,” the album moves through touchstones as varied as Lyle Lovett, Herbie Hancock, David Baerwald, Cheap Trick and Brian Wilson.
Raised in Lexington, Massachusetts and now based in Saint Petersburg, Florida, Sheveloff is a classically trained pianist whose background spans intense classical study and studio sessions supporting country, pop, rock and metal acts. Early in his career he shared stages around Boston with The Detours, Gary Cherone, Something Outside and The Voodoo Jets. He describes his own writing in vivid terms: “My songs are a breakfast hash made from memories of Bartok and The Beatles, ’70s pop songs and a touch of Stravinsky. I write songs to be accessible but with subtle complexities and compelling dark tones.”
Sheveloff’s playing and songwriting have drawn steady praise. Guitarist Marc Shulman of New York City called him “a natural musician, with deep roots and a huge vocabulary,” while Pop Shifter’s Chelsea Speer wrote that his voice “elevates his material to something more transporting and otherworldly.” Big Takeover’s Mark Suppanz praised his “vivid lyrics” for painting “picturesque, instantly relatable narratives,” and Fair Hedon singled out his playing as “really something special.”
Hi, Micah! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Hello everyone, I am honored to answer a few questions and let me say—I have so enjoyed my visits to Montreal, Quebec City, and Sherbrooke over the years. Being from Boston, those were accessible and beautiful places to visit. My father was a professor of musicology at Boston University for 1000 years or so, and thus I grew up with ballet, chamber and choral music long before my exposure to popular genres. I was taught piano and theory through my childhood. I remember singing in a children’s choir called Youth Pro Musica and wanting to improvise my own harmonies along the way…then The Beatles and Beach Boys took over my brain, and we were off. But my inclination to write songs was gradual and didn’t really kick in until I was in bands working with other talent. Part of that was because as my voice changed, I lost confidence in my singing and so vocally, I felt paralyzed by fear. It took me decades and a few tragedies to get over it…I founded a band called The Voodoo Jets
in the early 2000s with a gifted bassist and singer Francesco Perrouna and former Steelheart drummer, John Fowler. I wanted to work with Perrouna because he could sing like a lark, and I was writing songs for his nearly limitless range. But after Fowler died tragically in 2008, I decided: FUCK-THE-FEAR…I’m gonna sing my own songs. That led to my first solo record in 2012, called Exhibitionist. The singing on that record is deeply flawed, but I enlisted a legendary vocal coach (Mark Baxter) and just did the exercises and worked on it. Since the first record, I’ve been honing my vocal abilities and evolving my songwriting and here we are!
You’ve known Gary Cherone for more than 40 years. What is it about that friendship that made this the right song—and the right moment—for your first collaboration together?
I played in The Dream (became Extreme) around late 1983/1984-ish with Gary and have such treasured memories of my time in the Boston clubs, also with a band called The Detours
Even as a 19/20-year-old, I could see that Gary was an awesome talent both as a creative songsmith and as a performer. We bonded a bit over writing and stayed in touch over the years. My writing and piano style is so influenced by my classical background, and one day he reached out (it was actually after 10PM) and asked me about a jazzy track demo he’d been hanging on to for years. The song, called Someone There For Me, was an up-pace swing track in American Songbook style that he co-wrote with a jazz musician from LA named Benny Golbin. I know a few exceptional jazz players from New Haven, Connecticut, and the plan was to meet there and record the song. But Gary got busy touring, and in the meantime, I was messing around with a slower arrangement of the song, including some fat harmonies in a bridge I stitched together and …I asked Gary if I could record my version….he loved it and so I decided to release the song. And here we are!
You took a demo that Gary had lived with for years and completely reimagined it. How did you balance staying true to the heart of the song while making it unmistakably your own?
Well, making it my own was easy—I couldn’t sing like Cherone if you aimed a canon at my head. And Gary’s lyrics always have a glow, and I was having the best time representing that energy. It’s a lyrical style very different from my own, and yet I felt very at home with this song. So, I changed the melody to suit my voice, worked out a slower groove and the little bridge moment with huge harmonies, all welded together by genius engineer Jason Pennock (a born Canadian by the way) here in Saint Pete where I live now. But as a lifetime pianist who’s been around great classical players, I wisely decided to give my jazz vocabulary a tune-up before embarking on this project. I hired a wonderful jazz piano composer/performer/instructor named Simon Lasky to chart the song for me and show me the mindset behind playing these chord changes. Simon’s guidance was monumentally helpful as I forged ahead. Then I enlisted a marvelous jazz guitarist to play with me—his name is Nate Najar, and he appears in the video for Someone There For Me. He played all rhythm and lead guitars beautifully on the session and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Gary commented a few times about the tasty guitar work—and we all know his point of reference on guitar players is pretty stratospheric.
You describe your music as a blend of Bartók, The Beatles, ’70s pop, and Stravinsky. How do all those influences come together naturally when you’re writing, rather than sounding like separate musical worlds?
Actually, that’s a great question! I think the answer there is that my love for pop music was truly rooted in rebellion—so I live for simple but powerful hooks matched to thoughtful lyrics. I’m not a prog-rock guy by any stretch, but you’ll find “unconventional” chord voicings tucked in places that reside there because of the many years I was exposed to Bartok and Stravinsky. Just a sprinkle here and there, and it derives from such a deep place, it’s never a conscious thing like “I need a bent chord here” but more naturally slows from whatever lobe of my brain does the writing. In the end, the compositions are for me—I never write to please any other palette than my own creative sensibilities. And working on Someone There For Me was such a wonderful way to “shake the Etch-A-Sketch” …playing and singing someone else’s composition. It was a wow moment for me, and I am grateful for that! I decided to share some of the backstory and colorful nature of my journey on a Substack, so a behind the scenes peek inside the mind with references to people, places, my love for HiFi, and favorite foods…stuff like that.
The new album is called Don’t You Wonder. After decades of writing, performing, and collaborating, what are you still most curious about as a songwriter and musician?
Another great question, and how deep do we go here? Firstly, the new record drops 1/15/2027 and if there’s any one aspect of it that excites me most—it’s the diversity across all 12 songs. One aspect regarding the debate over AI-generated music I don’t understand: I could live ten lifetimes, and I’d never unearth all I have to say as a writer. My curiosity never ebbs in that regard. The LAST thing I want or need is a machine making music for me—just the concept is tragic and highlights the steep decline in the awareness and cultural devaluation of the humanities. There’s a guitar player I’ve worked with at length from New York City—one of my all-time faves—Marc Shulman. He’s a master; you may know his work from the big Suzanne Vega records…anyway, here’s a guy who’s toured the world and played on Letterman… people would ask Marc a similar question, and he would always respond with something like “I’ve been playing for decades and I am just starting to get the hang of it…” My response is that the beauty of musical composition is the infinite nature of it. As we live life and witness beauty, horror, triumph, and profound loss, I seem to find my voice by writing songs. And each time I sit at the piano, there’s a wonder to it, a magical ride that is such a gift…how could someone not be curious about that level of spirituality spilling out all over those glorious 88 keys!?