All About Kevin Bacon’s Brother Michael Bacon

Kevin Bacon and his brother Michael are in a band together called The Bacon Brothers

The bond between brothers can often be quite special, as is the case for Kevin Bacon and his older brother Michael.

The two are the only boys out of six kids born to Ruth and Edmon Bacon in Philadelphia. While the siblings are all quite close, the brothers have a deep connection thanks to their band, The Bacon Brothers. They know how lucky they are to get along so well, given the fraught history of brothers working in bands together.

“That’s more the norm than the exception,” Michael told The Aquarian in 2023 about brothers not getting along in bands. “We’ve been doing this for 27 years — playing in little clubs, traveling around the country in tour buses, staying in cheap motels and that kind of thing. I think we just get stronger when we know each other so well … We just kind of do what we want to do.”

For Kevin, playing with his older brother is what could be called his childhood dream. As he told The Baltimore Sun, Michael was his hero as a child, and he grew up hoping one day he’d be able to catch up to his big brother, who taught him how to play guitar.

“I knew that I’d never be a great guitar player or great singer, my dream was to wake up one day and be able to play like him,” Kevin said of Michael.

Here's everything to know about Kevin Bacon's brother — Michael — and their sibling relationship.

He’s one of six kids

Michael, born in 1949, and Kevin, born in 1958, are the only sons of Ruth and Edmon Bacon, who also had four other children: daughters Kira, Elinor, Karin and Hilda — “generally referred to as the blonds,” as Michael once wrote on his website.

The boys and their sisters grew up in downtown Philadelphia “in a skinny little townhouse,” as Michael recalled to The Aquarian. Their mom Ruth, who died in 1991, was an elementary school teacher while their dad Edmon, who died in 2005, was an urban planner and former executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission.

“I think that the way we were brought up in that house with our parents, they really let us make our own way in terms of our interpersonal relationships,” Michael added. “What’s really cool about that is now we haven’t been altogether for many, many, many, many, many years, but we’re still all close. We’re good friends.”

He’s a husband and a father

On his website, Michael wrote about how he and wife Betsy married in 1972 “and left the next day in a U-Haul truck for Nashville.” The two are still married and have a son, Neil, who sometimes joins his dad and his uncle Kevin in their band.

According to Michael, Betsy and he also worked well together, so much so that she eventually quit her job as a teacher to join him in the music business. “And yes, it is possible to work harmoniously with one's wife,” he said jokingly on his website.

He’s an Emmy-winning TV and film composer

After playing in bands for a few years — including Good News, which was signed to Columbia Records for a time — Michael turned his attention to becoming a composer. He now has a prolific career in scoring both movies and TV shows. He won an Emmy in 1992 for his score for The Kennedys.

Among many other projects, Michael has been composing for the PBS show Finding Your Roots since 2012, scoring 44 episodes of the series. He also teaches film scoring at Lehman College, where he previously studied composition and orchestration with John Corigliano and got a degree in music.

He’s in a band with Kevin named The Bacon Brothers

In 1995, a friend invited Kevin and Michael to perform at a charity function. They agreed and appeared under the name The Bacon Brothers – and it stuck. The two have been making music together since and have released 11 albums, with their latest record released on April 19, 2024. Their music is a blend of rock, folk, country and soul.

They’ve also toured all over the country and internationally and continue to write songs together mostly thanks to each of their own musical abilities: Kevin sings and plays guitar, percussion and harmonica, while Michael plays several instruments, including guitar and cello.

“The fact that we sort of started very low key just by writing songs together, I realized at a very early age the talent he had for music — even though he’s completely untrained,” Michael told Riff Magazine in 2022. “I’ve been in a lot of different bands, and if I didn’t really respect my brother as a musician, I wouldn’t do it.”

Part of their success in working together comes from their large age gap, as Michael is nine years older than Kevin. It helped them avoid brotherly rivalry, and it also helped Kevin get into music at a younger age than most with his big brother helping out.

“I used to write songs when I was a boy, but didn't play any instruments. So I would sing them to Michael and he'd put them to different guitar chords and harmonies,” Kevin recalled in a 2023 interview with Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

They were inducted into the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame

Kevin and Michael are both proud of their Philly roots – they even have an album titled Philly Things – and the city showed its appreciation for the brothers when they were inducted into the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame in April 2023. Their plaque in downtown Philadelphia is just a few blocks from where the brothers grew up and first learned about music.

“When I left Philadelphia, I just assumed that every town had the kind of musical diversity that this one does,” Kevin said, according to local PBS station WHYY. “That every town was pumping with the same kind of sounds and beat and feel. But that’s just not the case. Philadelphia is singularly a music mecca. To be a part of it and be here on Broad Street, Avenue of the Arts: super cool.”

They once did an episode of Carpool Karaoke together

Michael and Kevin appeared on an episode of the Apple TV+ show Carpool Karaoke in 2022, and one segment from the show was so funny that the brothers shared it on the band’s Instagram page.

In the video, Michael is driving as Kevin introduces an interesting concept. “We got the four sisters, we call them the four blonds. Who do you think is closer, me or you?” Kevin asks Michael.

“Oh, I’m definitely closer. They always want to hear from me,” Michael responds.

By the sounds of it, he seemed to be right. As the video goes on, all four sisters answer calls from Michael — but all of them send Kevin’s call to voicemail. Worst of all, they all seem to say they never hear from the famous movie star as much as they hear from Michael – though Kevin doesn’t entirely agree with that.

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