Mack Hooligan

Mack Hooligan (aka, Michael Magoolaghan) spent his formative years in Arizona and New Mexico, where he grew up listening to a mix of classic singer-songwriters (Dylan, Neil Young), New Wave upstarts (Elvis Costello, The Pretenders), blues greats (Muddy Waters, Bonnie Raitt) and folk/country artists (John Prine and Townes van Zandt). Mixing those influences together, Magoolaghan started writing his own songs and playing at Phoenix, AZ area bars with three of his high school teachers, who played in a folky cover band.

Joining an open mic songwriting competition at his teachers' urging, Magoolaghan won the contest, only to have his award rescinded when the bar owners figured out how old he really was (16). On another occasion Magoolaghan stepped in to break up a fight his social studies teacher inadvertently picked with a football lineman. It was rough entry into show business.

After performing on and off at bars and coffee houses in Flagstaff and Tucson, Magoolaghan spent most of the next two decades bouncing around the country, moving from Bisbee, AZ to Washington, DC, to Seattle, WA and Atlanta, GA. More than 25 years later, after he'd settled in the Philadelphia suburbs, Magoolaghan was enticed into playing publicly again. Two years later he was headlining shows and festivals with a full band, Mack & the Hooligans.

Mack's brand of musical hooliganism is a mix of rough-and-tumble roots rock, New Mex/Tex alt country (think Ray Wylie Hubbard meets Uncle Tupelo), and more traditional singer-songwriter balladry. Songs like "Moyamensing Avenue" and "The Wrecking Life" mate his native Southwestern sensibilities with his adopted home's blunt talk and gritty attitude. The comical "Yard Work" takes that unwieldy combo a step further by adding the blurting death-cough of an old lawnmower (courtesy of producer Cliff Hillis), along with a bombastic outro monologue aimed at the protagonist's lazy-ass son.

Hooligan enlisted John Faye -- former frontman for The Caulfields, IKE, and John & Brittany, among others -- to produce his next set of originals. Faye teases out a melancholy, emotive side of Hooligan on the 5-song EP "Your Goddamn Walls," released in June, 2019. Songs like the title track, along with "My Haunted Mind" and "My Mind's Not Right," layer atmospheric guitar effects, lap steel guitar licks and pillowy backing vocals atop Mack's yearning vocals and acoustic guitars. Delco-based songwriter Tom Curtis Jr. (of Curtis Jr.) provides backing vocals on the tender ballad "Choose Love."

Mack is currently gigging solo in support of the new EP.