Thanks to The Monkees‘ abundant catalog, Micky Dolenz never faces a shortage of music to perform. But he’s always happy to have new songs, too — hence the arrival of a new EP, Timeless, on Sept. 4.
Related
Micky Dolenz As the Last Monkee Standing: ‘It’s Time to Take Off the Black Armband and Just Celebrate’
Looking Ahead: A Release Calendar of Upcoming Albums in 2026
Yuridia Makes History at Estadio GNP Seguros: 'Women Sell Tickets Too'
“Well, I guess somebody just wanted to keep recording me — there’s no accounting to taste,” the 81-year-old singer, actor, writer and director quips to Billboard from a residence he keeps in eastern Pennsylvania.
But not monkeying around, Dolenz — the last living member of The Monkees — explains, “That’s how I’ve been recording as a solo artist for decades now; somebody comes to me and says, ‘Do you want to record something, some new stuff?’ I’ve always gone on gut instinct; I know I’m not going to be selling Platinum, but if the songs are there and they hit me as something that would be good to sing, then the answer is yes.”
For the six-track Timeless, the person approaching Dolenz was John Hughes, a former Rhino Records executive who had worked with The Monkees on the group’s lauded 2016 album Good Times! Now leading his own company, Near Mint Music, Hughes took a similar tract for the new EP, soliciting songs for Dolenz from formidable corps of artists — including Good Times! alumni such as XTC’s Andy Partridge and the late Adam Schlesinger, along with The Replacements Paul Westerberg (who wrote Timeless‘ first single, “Terri”), the Bangles’ Vicki Peterson, Sam Hollander, Shelby Lynn and Pete Donnelly and Jonny Polonsky.
View this post on Instagram
“It was almost like, ‘Let’s get the band back together!'” Hughes tells Billboard. “Sam Hollander just went out to all of our songwriter friends and said, ‘Who wants to write something for Micky Dolenz?’ And universally it was, ‘Oh, yeah, we love Micky!’ No one turned us down, not one person. Some said, ‘Hey, we don’t have time right now. Can we do the next one?’ But nobody said no.”
Peterson, who penned the Mersey-flavored second single, “Waiting for the Day,” which features Dolenz’s younger sister and touring band member Coco, shares that “it’s a huge joy for me” to have the song on the EP.
“[Hollander] called and said, ‘Do you have anything that’s kind of ’60s pop, and [‘Waiting for the Day’] immediately came to the front of my brain,” recalls Peterson, who had written it as a kind of takeoff on the Cowsills. (She’s married to John Cowsill.) “I said, ‘I have a song that should have come out in 1968,’ and [Hollander] said, ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’ So I sent it to him, and luckily for me, Micky liked it and they recorded it. I was a Monkees fan as a kid, and we’ve known Micky for a number of years, sort of casually, so this means a lot.”
A meaningful track for all concerned, meanwhile, is the bouncy, nostalgic pop tune “Something Happened,” which was cowritten by Hollander and Schlesinger before the latter died in 2020 early during the COVID-19 pandemic. Schlesinger was deeply involved with Good Times!, writing and producing two tracks Dolenz sang; Hughes says “Something Happened” was also submitted back then, but Schlesinger ultimately didn’t feel it was right for the album at the time.
“We thought that because Adam was such an important part of Good Times! and [2018’s] Christmas Party, we had to have him involved in [Timeless] some way,” Hughes says. “Adam liked the song; he just didn’t like it on Good Times! So when we started [Timeless], I went digging through the archives and found ‘Something Happens’ and went to Sam and said, ‘Well, he can’t object now …'”
Dolenz, according to Hughes, was happy to have the track, but felt “it was a little to on-the-nose, lyrically, about Monkees history,” and asked Hollander to tweak the lyrics to make it “more universal.” Nevertheless, lines such as “Wipe your tears/ dry your eyes/ but we’ll never ever say goodbye/ Funny how time slips by” come off as poignant in the wake of Schlesinger’s passing.
“He is so sorely missed,” Dolenz says of Schlesinger. “What a great talent, you know?”
He demurs, however, when asked to identify what specifically spoke to him about Timeless‘ six songs.
“Y’know, I can’t reduce it in any scientific sense,” he explains. “I can’t say, ‘Ooh, it’s that G6 chord in the fifth bar of the second verse’ or anything like that. If there was a formula, there’d never be flops, right? But you just look at it and go, ‘That’s good. Let’s do it.’ Bob Rafelson, who created The Monkees, called it lightning in a bottle, and to some degree that’s how I look at this business — and have, forever. I think what happens is you put together certain people — certain writers, certain musicians, certain singers — and you catch that lightning, like he says. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. I don’t dissect it any more than that.”
Timeless is Dolenz’s third release of the decade, following 2023’s Dolenz Sings R.E.M. and 2021’s Dolenz Sings Nesmith, and first solo set of original material since Remember in 2012. It comes as he’s in the midst of commemorating the 60th anniversary of The Monkees television show and of the group’s self-titled debut album, which came out a month later in October 1966, hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and spawned the hits “Last Train to Clarksville,” “(Theme From) The Monkees” and “I Wanna Be Free.”
“Timeless refers to the 60 years of The Monkees, of course, but also the idea was these songs would have that kind of timeless feel to them and hopefully not date,” Dolenz explains. “The stuff from the ’60s, that jangly guitar stuff especially, hasn’t dated that much. People are coming back around to it all the time, obviously The Beatles being the keystone to much of that. In my mind it always comes down to the material; it did with The Monkees, and that’s what I look for when I do my own things now.”
Dolenz returns to the road with his 60 Years of the Monkees show on Sept. 8-9 at the Music Instruments Museum in Phoenix, and has dates scheduled into May of 2027, followed by a Sept. 12 performance at the United Theater on Broadway in Los Angeles on the exact 60th anniversary of the first episode of The Monkees airing on NBC. Next year will commemorate the year (1967) that the group put four albums at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and won a pair of Emmys. “We have the show pretty well locked in at this point,” Dolenz says. “I talk a lot about The Monkees, the genesis of it, the origin, how it all happened. I don’t go on and on for hours, but I tell stories and we have videos. Sometimes some friends pop in for a song or two. It’s a great way to keep it out there.”
And, Dolenz adds, he’s happy to maintain the memories of his late bandmates Davy Jones, who passed away in 2012, Peter Tork in 2019 and Michael Nesmith in 2021. “It’s almost like they’ve never left ’cause I’m with them every night,” Dolenz says. “I’m seeing them on the screen. I’m hearing them. People talk about it all the time. The thing I miss the most is just not being able to call somebody and just say hi. We were really like brothers, ultimately … And, like brothers, we fought sometimes, but you can’t go through something like we did and not be that close to one another.”