St. Louis native Mike Zito is a blues guitarist, record producer, songwriter, and considered one of the most exciting artists working in the genre today. He has been nominated numerous times for a Blues Music Award in various categories, winning six times. His most recent win was in 2025 in the Blues Rock Album category for “Life Is Hard.” How does that make him feel?
“To me, winning awards means a lot to the family,” Mike says. “To my wife. The kids. I’m out here working. The fans are doing the voting. They see he’s not just doing his job, paying the bills. They see there is a little more to it. So I think that is cool but I don’t have anything more to prove.”
He is not in the business to win awards, however. “I certainly don’t make music to win awards. I just want to make a record I want to make. And I hope the fans will like it.”
The record he hopes fans connect with this time is Outside Or The Eastside. His previous album, the aforementioned Life Is Hard, was a pretty heavy record and a deeply personal one. It was dedicated to his wife, Laura, who passed away from pancreatic cancer on July 31, 2023. She was very much a part of the process, helping him with the album before she passed.
“We rolled the red carpet out for it,” Mike said of the recording session for Life Is Hard. “It needed to be unforgettable.” And it is.
Mike wanted his next album to be “nothing too serious.”
“I wanted to do something lighthearted and fun,” Mike said. Having recently moved back home to St. Louis, he decided to record it there because “that would be fun.” Fun permeates throughout Outside Or The Eastside starting with the title track.
The phrase “outside or the eastside” has always been in my head as a funny thing from the past,” Mike said. It originates from the nightclubs in Laclede’s Landing along the riverfront in St. Louis. The clubs and street corners were alive with music until 2:30 in the morning.
According to Mike, “The bars would all close at 3 o’clock. They would start yelling ‘Get out! Get the hell out! Outside or the eastside, let’s go!’ So you would go across the river to East St. Louis and it was open twenty-four hours.”
“Outside Or The Eastside” is a lively track to start out the album, memorializing the St. Louis equivalent of “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here!”
Mike wanted the album to be a blues record but he didn’t want to write all the songs. He picked covers that were fun to hear and play, not just for him but also for his fans. There is a bit of nostalgia here too as some of the songs harken back to his early days of playing in the 1990s.
Among the covers is the Lonnie Brooks song “Don’t Take Advantage Of Me.” The first version Mike heard of that song was by Johnny Winters from the Guitar Slinger album. He later learned the original was by Lonnie. “I just love that song,” Mike says. “It’s so fun and I don’t think it is a song people play a lot. But I had to do it.”
Mike also covers Buddy Guy’s “Too Broke To Spend The Night” from The Damn Right I Got The Blues album. “I remember I bought that record the first time I went to Buddy Guy’s Legends in the early 90s just to go there,” he said. “I bought the album as a souvenir.”
Another cover song that fits the fun criterion is “Kiss You All Over” by the Exiles. “Not much to it,” says Mike. “Very familiar sounding guitar riffs. It’s a fun, tongue-in-cheek kind of thing. People love it.”
So what makes a good song, one that people might love?
“Well, I’ve written a lot of songs and I have a lot of albums. They’re not all great songs,” Mike laughed. “What defines a good song to me is can I go on stage and sing it with conviction. Can I mean it? Can I get behind it?”
He took a lesson from Delbert McClinton. “If I can get behind it and be in character for the song – great!”
Mike notes it is hard to write a good blues song. It is easy to write a terrible blues song “and there are a million of them.” He wrote some himself, recorded them, and sent them off to Alligator Records. Bruce Iglauer would reply in a neatly typed letter, telling Mike everything that was wrong with his songs with the admonition “don’t send me any more of your songs.” But Mike would send more and Bruce would always respond with valuable – if negative – feedback. It was the only input Mike would get from the outside world.
“I would wait for that letter of rejection to show up because I knew he would tell me what I should be working on.”
Mike Zito keeps a busy schedule with recording his own music, producing others, going on tour, and finding time to write. What does he like to do to relax?
“You know, I have five kids of my own,” he told me. “And my (second) wife, Jackie, has four kids of her own. So nine kids. So we are in this really fun life together. And I really do enjoy being home and hanging out with all these kids. Swimming. Barbequing. Playing games. I love all that stuff. Because we travel so much, being home is a real joy.”
Mike added with a laugh, “How about this? Every now and then, I go downstairs and play guitar. For fun!”
