a brief history of mike doughty
by Rory Jansen
When Mike Doughty released his second official solo album, 2008’s Golden Delicious, the reaction from fans was intense.
“Oh, people hated it,” Doughty says. “They called it "too pop," "garbage," "fluff." The guy from The Onion said something about how it was like watching Allen Ginsberg toss aside his poetic genius to write scripts for The King of Queens.’” (The Onion guy also admitted: “Okay, maybe not that bad.”)
Born into a military family in Fort Knox, KY, Doughty started out playing bass in a high-school band in Highland Falls, NY, and writing songs as soon as he picked up the bass. "When I could play two notes, I'd yell something over it and call it a song," he says. He credits the late poet and performer Sekou Sundiata’s poetry class at New York City’s New School with sparking his interest in the craft of songwriting. “He taught me that I’m working for the poem, song, or lyric, it’s not working for me. That I have to listen to it to get it to be what it wants to be, rather than trying to impose my will on it.” After eight years fronting Soul Coughing, Doughty launched his solo career with Skittish, selling over 20,000 copies on the strength of constant grass-roots touring.
Being on the road sent Doughty's creativity into overdrive. He released the live album Smofe + Smang in 2002, followed by the Rockity Roll EP in 2003. In 2005, Doughty signed with ATO Records, an independent label founded by Dave Matthews, a huge Soul Coughing fan. ATO released Doughty’s first full-band album Haughty Melodic, which went Top 5 at Triple A radio thanks to its hit single "Looking at the World from the Bottom of A Well," a song that was featured on Grey’s Anatomy, Bones, and What About Brian.
“Oh, people hated it,” Doughty says. “They called it "too pop," "garbage," "fluff." The guy from The Onion said something about how it was like watching Allen Ginsberg toss aside his poetic genius to write scripts for The King of Queens.’” (The Onion guy also admitted: “Okay, maybe not that bad.”)
Born into a military family in Fort Knox, KY, Doughty started out playing bass in a high-school band in Highland Falls, NY, and writing songs as soon as he picked up the bass. "When I could play two notes, I'd yell something over it and call it a song," he says. He credits the late poet and performer Sekou Sundiata’s poetry class at New York City’s New School with sparking his interest in the craft of songwriting. “He taught me that I’m working for the poem, song, or lyric, it’s not working for me. That I have to listen to it to get it to be what it wants to be, rather than trying to impose my will on it.” After eight years fronting Soul Coughing, Doughty launched his solo career with Skittish, selling over 20,000 copies on the strength of constant grass-roots touring.
Being on the road sent Doughty's creativity into overdrive. He released the live album Smofe + Smang in 2002, followed by the Rockity Roll EP in 2003. In 2005, Doughty signed with ATO Records, an independent label founded by Dave Matthews, a huge Soul Coughing fan. ATO released Doughty’s first full-band album Haughty Melodic, which went Top 5 at Triple A radio thanks to its hit single "Looking at the World from the Bottom of A Well," a song that was featured on Grey’s Anatomy, Bones, and What About Brian.
Through it all, Doughty has maintained his popular blog chronicling his unique shows, international travels, and creative endeavors. He’s currently writing a memoir, recording an electronic album entitled Dubious Luxury, and working on a photo book about Eritrea’s capital city of Asmara for Yeti Books. He also recently published a play, Ray Slape is Dead in 24 by 24: The 24 Hour Plays Anthology, alongside Terrence McNally and Theresa Rebeck.
Doughty continues to tour in support of his 2009 release, Sad Man Happy Man. “Basically I'm trying to make stuff I want to listen to,” he says of the album. “And I mean that in a literal sense, not like, “Were I a listener, I would like this,” but rather something I can listen to on the subway on headphones and really dig. This is my life, this is what I do. That sounds matter-of-fact, but I really do look at it as a sort of calling — and being an artist at its best is selfless. I'm working for the language, I'm working for the music, I'm working for the songs. I'm a happier guy when I'm conscious of that.”
Doughty continues to tour in support of his 2009 release, Sad Man Happy Man. “Basically I'm trying to make stuff I want to listen to,” he says of the album. “And I mean that in a literal sense, not like, “Were I a listener, I would like this,” but rather something I can listen to on the subway on headphones and really dig. This is my life, this is what I do. That sounds matter-of-fact, but I really do look at it as a sort of calling — and being an artist at its best is selfless. I'm working for the language, I'm working for the music, I'm working for the songs. I'm a happier guy when I'm conscious of that.”
an interview with mike doughty
How do you think your mentor and professor, Seku Sundiata influenced your creativity?
In a million different ways, he really GALVANIZED me, both in terms of how I thought of song writing and how I saw language in general. I wouldn’t at the end of the day consider myself a poet (actually I just wrote a poem for a magazine called Flyway). But being a poet is a very specific kind of life path more than anything else, the poets that I really admire are all in their 70’s. They’ve been doing it so long, they’re like jewelers, making something really exquisite and constantly honing their craft. That was a tangent, lets talk about Sekou. From Sekou, he had a band called Dah Dah Doo Dah Dah, his phrasing was a HUGE influence in me. In terms of my early records, if you heard his band it would be considered a direct rip. Sekou also has a line which is ‘Everything in the dream is the dreamer’ – I just think that’s so beautiful. Any funny stories about Ani Difranco? Not really. She made fun of my shoes once and I was really mad. I figured out like 20 years later that she was flirting with me. You recently visited an artists retreat, Yaddo, in upstate New York. 20 years ago when you started this process and your career could you have seen your self going to art artist retreat? I could not have seen myself going there five years ago! Actually Maggie Estep, who is a performance poet and a novelist talked me into going, she said’ you should go--they put you up, feed you and you work with other artists.’ I was also dating a playwright and we were working on a piece together and we went up there as collaborators. She got a commission for a screenplay right before went up there, so we didn’t end up working on it – then we broke up. So the piece we were going to do together is totally not going happen. The second time I went up there I went to write lyrics, and I am SUCH a believer in artists’ colonies now. I wrote 21 songs in a little more than a month up there and would recommend it to anyone. I honestly felt like I was slacking off most of the time, but then I looked up and realized I had written 21 songs and was like, holy shit. What is the weirdest thing that has ever inspired a song? I don’t know, really the songs come from words, they start as very disembodied words. Phrases that I hear, phrases I’ll think up. By the time I get to the notebooks and I’m trying to turn them into songs, I barely remember the context. I’ve written a couple of political songs, one for the 2004 elections and then one about the war for Golden Delicious called Ft. Hood. Yeah, now the shootings happened after you wrote that song. Have you gotten a weird reaction for that? I’ve gotten a couple e-mails from people that we were really spooked by it. I called it Ft. Hood because the people who wrote ‘Let the Sunshine In’ would not let me call it that. Ft. Hood is also the base that has lost the most people in the last two wars. I certainly was not expecting a massacre. A lot of military people contact me about that song, it is entirely positive; I’ve never gotten a negative reaction from a service man or woman. I have gotten called out in the past, however, for my political songs. I have a song called ‘How to Fuck a Republican’ and a couple of republicans wrote to me and called me a bigot and said they no longer liked my work. I wrote them back and told them it is not a euphemism, it is genuinely a song about fucking. It is genuinely a song that is being across a cultural divide and having sex with that, not euphemistically fucking republicans. What made you switch from the lone guitarist to full band CD’s? Well my new CD, Sad Man/Happy Man is a small contained, acoustic-y kind of a joint. Golden Delicious was all about my collaboration with Dan Wilson, when I’m working with a collaborator I always want to engage them in what they are best at and utilize their artistic accomplishments and he was very much about arrangements. I guess to a certain extent I was writing a lot of stuff from Rockity Roll on a rinky dink sequencer and I was more interested in writing supporting parts (keyboard parts, basslines) it probably just would have happened anyway that I would end up working with an ensemble again just because as an artist I’m prone to make changes. You haven’t toured with an ensemble in forever, though, besides Scrap Livingston (cello). That has more to do with just digging Scrap than anything and liking life on the road with him. I’ve always been more of a solo acoustic oriented person, I think songs have a specialness when they’re stripped downed and the arrangements are really sparse. Honestly part of it is also that its hard to pay a band and I don’t want to go to great artists and only be able to pay them half of what they should really be getting. That being said, if I really had a burning desire to work with a band, I’d find a way to do it. How do you choose your covers? They’re just songs that I like and I look up the tab on the internet. It’s important to me to figure out other peoples' songs as source of increasing my knowledge base about song writing. So basically I look stuff up that I like the ones that sound better, I record. How do you think your creative process has changed throughout your career as a musician? It’s pretty much the same, I mean, I had collaborators when I was in Soul Coughing, and there’s a whole different head you have to get into to take a song and bring it into a band, or take a jam session and turn it into a song. In terms of lyrics and melodies, the process I was just talking about, it’s almost exactly the same, just more finely honed. In terms of your other projects, electronic music (Dubious Luxury) and memoir writing, how is the process different, if at all? It’s very different, each kind of music is different, the electronic music is based around beats, or vocal samples. I got friends of mine with interesting voices to read things into a mic and then I chopped them up and cut and pasted them into a different order. It comes from a different notebook. And certainly writing prose is its own animal, it’s a much more linear process. And I’m writing a memoir, which means your imagination is not engaged with creating a plot – it’s already there! Do you think creativity is innate or can that be worked-on and developed? Wow… I really don’t know. What about for you personally? For me personally, I sort of feel more like I had a drive to be creative. Being a kid and wanting to write the really cool short story in the third grade, so I remember the drive and ambition to be creative, but whether or nor it is innate, -- By this point it feels innate, but I’ve been doing it my whole life. Best Question from a Question Jar show? Man, there were really some unique ones, like 7 or 8 of them. Like, who would win in a fight Batman or the Internet? There were a bunch that I tried to remember but that is the only one that pops into my mind right now. Speaking of random questions, have you written any songs in German yet? Yeah, but its about a total of 20 words, its called ‘Makelloosser mann’ it means Immaculate Man, but I don’t think it counts. What's next for you? Well I am working on a memoir, I was really kind of jazzed by writing this poem that ‘Flyway’ commissioned from me, I really got into it, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I was doing more of that stuff. Mostly I’ve also been doing kind of an iteration with the roll-in stuff I was doing on Rockity Roll, I actually just put up a bunch of instrumental pieces on Dubiousluxury.net. like 30 seconds – 1 minute electronic or instrumentals. I’d love to do a residency in a club or two on the east coast, even if its just one week. You’ve spent a lot of time traveling, whats your favorite place in the world? Good Lord, I don’t know. I’m really into in to Berlin lately, I love Berlin, Love London, love Portland Oregon, I love the Southeast US and Southeast Asia. Shanghai is really amazing. I had a great time in Japan last year. I was touring with a local band from Toyko, and it was fun. Promoters in Japan tend to be super organized. They book you into the hotel, they take you on a train, etc, its just their version of being polite and professional. They just feel like they should always be behind you. But this one was so haphazard and they had no idea what they were doing, we were driving and staying at truck stops and it ended up being a much more comprehensive and inside view of Japan! Any words of encouragement for people just starting out and trying to get established? In terms of making a living at it, you just have to persist. I feel to a certain extent that I just stumbled into the right path, so I don’t think I have anything cogent to say about doing that, but just in terms of doing work, persist and don’t worry about the quality of what you are doing. There is a great book by Linda Barry called ‘What it Is.’ That I would recommend to artists. First of all, its just a great book, a gas to read. It’s a really interesting book about why you go about trying to make art in the first place. It makes the link between being a kid, and of course kids have no compunction about being as weirdly creative as they can all the time without worrying about who likes it, and then being a grown-up and constantly having anxiety about who likes your work. I caught that anxiety super early in my life, so I’m not one to talk. Rory Jansen is a correspondent for Ad Hominem who, in her free time, exercises her impeccable musical taste by going to shows and explaining to friends what's wrong with their choice of music. If you are interested in being interviewed, or know a brilliant artist in need of attention, be sure to send word to [email protected] Enjoy learning more about Mike Doughty? Check out our interview with Paul Curreri. |
|