Music

Kate Micucci has a 13-song collection of silly and sentimental songs that you might not have heard yet.
“The day the album came out was the day I got a phone call saying that I most likely had lung cancer,” Micucci tells Billboard Family over Zoom, just a few days shy of the one-year anniversary of that album, 2023’s My Hat. “It was a strange combo of things to happen in one day.”

On separate coasts, we’re having a conversation on Halloween. We realize that we’ve worked out a meeting time around both of our 4-year-olds’ Halloween parades. Mine is Luigi. Hers is Spider-Man by day, Ninja Turtle by night.

A few days ago, Micucci, an artist and actor with a flair for quirky comedy, uploaded a video of herself playing a new song about a lonely pumpkin she saw at an exit off the 101 in Van Nuys.

“It’s so lonely, it’s no fun/ Being a pumpkin on the 101/ I’m the weirdest surprise at the exit in Van Nuys/ I’ve heard of pumpkin patches/ A place where there are many of me/ Instead I’m here with only a tree/ It’s exhausting, with all the exhaustion that spews into my face/ Could I ever get out of it this place?” she sings.

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Writing whimsical songs like this is a regular thing for Micucci, who’s now cancer-free. She had surgery in December 2023 that removed 20% of her right lung, and says she felt like she really recovered by May or so. She’s now “100% healthy”: That’s something to smile about, and it brings a light to our discussion about the curveball thrown at her this time last year.“I really didn’t get to celebrate the album like I wanted to,” Micucci says of My Hat, which she started writing years ago and completed some time after becoming a parent in 2020. “I kind of immediately went into lots of testing and figuring it out … The album definitely just immediately took a back burner.”

My Hat, available to stream on Spotify and on Apple Music, is carried by Micucci’s bright, playful voice that settles right into the children’s music space, with lyrics that lean on humor and sincerity. It’s for the kids and it’s for their grownups, or anyone who can appreciate the comedy in the everyday.

Recorded live on tape, the album’s backed by musician friends Brendon Urie on drums and Sean Watkins on guitar, and produced by Micucci’s husband, Jake Sinclair — who’s worked with bands including Urie’s Panic! at the Disco and Weezer, receiving Grammy nominations with both in the best rock album category in 2017. Micucci is a Primetime Emmy-nominated musician herself, as one half of comedy-folk duo Garfunkel and Oates (with Riki Lindhome), who were up for outstanding original music and lyrics in 2016 for comedy special Garfunkel and Oates: Trying to Be Special.

Micucci is an interdisciplinary artist: There’s this solo children’s album and there’s her work as Garfunkel and Oates, plus an incredible amount of credits as a film and TV actor — from recurring spots on The Big Bang Theory, Scrubs and Raising Hope to voicing dozens of characters you’ve heard across animated series and features. Personally she thinks it’s wild she was cast to voice Velma in the Scooby Doo franchise, a show she grew up watching and loving. (With glasses on and her hair cut in a bob, she was once called Velma by a group of teens. “I wanted to be like, well, actually…,” she jokes.)

She’s also got a lifelong passion for visual art. In September she gave herself a 30-day challenge to create a painting or drawing daily. That work was recently presented in a sold-out art show, with all proceeds going to GO2 for Lung Cancer.

Kate Micucci poses in front of her art.

Brian Gove

Fortunately, Micucci’s creative pursuits got put on hold only briefly. I ask her if she’d like to reflect on what happened a year ago, to share her story with others.

After receiving some abnormal bloodwork results last year, she says, she went to a doctor to figure out what might be going on, and that doctor had her get a heart scan. “It was the technician at that place that said, ‘You know, your heart is fine, but there’s something on your lung,’” she recalls.

Micucci’s never smoked. Seemingly healthy and in her early 40s, she didn’t have a reason to think it’d be anything serious. She eventually went in for further testing, but she didn’t rush to get it done.

She’d learn that “lung cancer is an interesting one.” As she explains, “Someone like me wouldn’t normally get tested for something like this just because of my age and the fact that I’m a non-smoker. But the truth is more and more young people are getting it.”

“I guess my only big lesson, I’d say, is listen to your body, and listen to your doctors,” says Micucci. It’s an important reminder to hear in November, Lung Cancer Awareness Month. “I should have gone to get that lung test right away.”

Priorities shifted when Micucci first got the call about cancer. The way things happened sound ill-timed, but she’s doing really well and sounds geniunely grateful for how it played out.

“It was not great news to hear that you have cancer. But overall, every step of the way, it just looked very promising, and like I had caught it very early, and I just honestly never felt really too sad about it. I just felt really, really lucky, like I just won a lottery or something,” she says.

Plus, she points out, “It really does put everything in perspective. It makes me go, ‘OK, I get to be here today. What do I want to make? And what do I wanna bring?’ I just wanna make people happy.”

Micucci’s optimistic about families finding and connecting with her music, whenever the timing might be: “I didn’t get to promote this album like I wanted to, but I’m really proud of it,” she says of My Hat.

“It felt very alive when it was happening,” she shares, looking back at what it was like to record the album post-pandemic, and while she was a new mom. “To just sit in a room and I have the microphone, while Jake’s on bass, and my friend Sean’s on guitar, and my friend Brendon’s on drums, and we’re just all there and it felt so great … There was just something nice about all of us being in a room and and singing these ridiculous songs.”

Before My Hat‘s release last year, Micucci was in tears — the good kind — over how absurdly funny it was to film a music video for lead track “Grocery Store,” which has her musing about the wide variety of things one can find while out shopping for food: not only cantaloupe, steak and 30 kinds of Jell-O, but starter logs and a navy blue snowsuits, too (that one’s based on a real story from when she was a kid).

“We didn’t get permission,” she recalls of making the video, which was filmed on an iPhone by friend and director Caitlin Gerard, who was sitting in an actual grocery cart to get the shot. “We just were secretly filming in grocery stores. We got kicked out of two. It took three grocery stores to get that video.”

“I’m pushing the cart, and there were so many laughs, because so many funny things would happen because they’d be like, ‘What are you doing?’ or ‘Why is this person in the cart?’” Micucci says. “I remember having one laugh that day that I was like just crying and couldn’t stop. It was a good time.”

Micucci always knew she loved to perform, but remembers being “a really shy kid, and I think I was also kind of embarrassed to say that I wanted to be a performer.”

“My brother and I were always doing shows, and we were always making movies in the backyard,” she says of her childhood. She was also exploring art then, and her mom was a piano teacher. “We were definitely a creative household.”

Art by Kate Micucci.

Courtesy Photo

“I feel like in some way I’m doing exactly the same thing I was doing when I was a little kid, which is that I’m doing art, doing music and getting to perform. It hasn’t really changed for me, which I think is very lucky,” says Micucci. It’s her “natural place.”

Interestingly, many songs that eventually became My Hat came to her far before she had a kid. Some she developed and performed in her live show Playing With Micucci, she says — “They were just written because they came out [of me]” — and it wasn’t until after her son arrived that those songs found a home among the new music he was inspiring her to write.

“I would say half the songs are from when I was in my early 20s, and then half the songs are from me writing for for an actual child. But then also, one of the songs is half and half: the song ‘King of the World,’ which is the last track on the album. I started writing it — I remember exactly where I was. I was 27 years old … I was like, ‘Wait a second. This song is for my son. I’m writing a song for my little boy.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, I’m going to stop writing this song because I need to finish the song when I actually have a son … So, you know, it took me 13 years.”

Micucci now brings her son on stage at her fun Los Angeles shows held at the historic Bob Baker Marionette Theater, where they’re also joined by puppets and marionettes. “He plays the guitar for the whole 45 minutes,” she jokes, “which is really, I mean, he’s strumming along.” She hopes to start up a show in New York City in the summer, and “would love to take it to other places, as well.”

If you’re interested in a recommendation from a 4-year-old on what to play from My Hat with your own little ones, Micucci’s kid’s got opinions.

Kate Micucci and her son perform at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater in Los Angeles.

Courtesy Photo

“He has a least favorite,” Micucci quips when asked which song is her son’s favorite. “Yeah. The song ‘Brandy, Lost Dog in the City.’ He won’t let me play it because he says it makes him too sad.”

The real answer: “I think ‘Bucket of Beans’ is probably Mikey’s favorite.”

The album is streaming on Spotify and on Apple Music, and you can follow Micucci on Instagram.