Mike will be performing LIVE at Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Catch him TODAY, October 14 at 1PM.

Borders
612 E Liberty Drive
Ann Arbor, MI

See you there!

FREE Studio A2 On The Road performance and CD signing.  If you can’t make it tune into 107one for a live broadcast!

 
publicity: Rob Moore, 60 Cycle Media  
office 845-358-6026  cell 646-918-4360 
moore@60cyclemedia.com

    Scrap and I toured Japan in June; we got together with a band from Tokyo (from Kasukabe, in the suburbs, actually) called Uhnellys; they drove us around the country, playing right before us every night, on bills that would include three or four other Japanese bands.  It was pretty hardscrabble; ten day tour, ten shows, no days off.  Fatiguing, but wonderful; Kim and Midi, the bass/vocal and drummer duo that make up the Uhnellys, are fantastic people, and a fantastic band, and I felt like I got a view of Japan I wouldn't have gotten if I hadn't toured with a local band.

    I don't even have a record out there--haven't been to Japan since a two-gig trip in 1997--and yet there were 30 or 50 people at each show (including three shows in Tokyo--!!), and we kept encountering those legendary Japanese fans that are so devoted, and freaked out, giving us small gifts and trembling when they met us.  Amazingly, too, outside of Tokyo, most of the audiences were made up entirely of Japanese--usually Americans come crawling out of the woodwork for American bands.

    Everywhere I looked, there was something fascinating; I have roughly a billion pictures that I hope to post eventually. Despite this, and despite the wonderfulness of the whole scene, when I got lonely, I got homesick, it was such an alienating environment, everything utterly other for a Westerner.  I don't think I've ever gotten homesick on tour.

    One of the gigs was at a store in Kumagaya called Mortar Records.  It may have been my favorite show of the tour.  There was a tiny space with a low ceiling upstairs from the store; people sat Indian-style on the floor.

    This guy above had a bookshelf on wheels outside the store; he called it his "free library." He asked me to take his picture while he drew me.  I asked Kim if he was crazy and he said, "No crazy. Just funny."

    Funny indeed.  There was a solo folky Japanese guy who played a song with English lyrics that went like this: "I make up scenarios. I make up scenarios. I make up scenarios. I make up scenarios. I make up scenarios. I make up scenarios. I make up scenarios." I fled outside. (in fact, nearly every show we played had a guy on the bill that played whispery, unintentionally creepy folk songs in English; after Kumagaya, we started calling it Scenario Rock). The free-library man was making something unidentifiable out of cardboard boxes. I came back to watch Kim, and right before he went on, free-library guy came up with his cardboard contraption, which turned out to be a lion's-head. He went around the club biting people on the noggin with it.

    I didn't get a good picture--in the pic of the girl sitting on the curb reading, you can see it  in the lower left corner.

    Kim played a solo acoustic set, because Midi had to work; he did lots of freaky loop-pedal stuff--freaky loop pedal stuff is his mainstay. He is great, great, great.

    There was this thing going on in Japan with surgical masks; everywhere you went there were people wearing them. Maybe it had something to do with Swine-Flu hysteria (are epidemics capitalized?)--when we landed in Tokyo, they sent people in scrubs and masks, with stethoscopes, on the plane seeking out sickly passengers; before we got to customs, we had to go through a station with heat-sensor monitors to detect people with fevers (it was insanely cool looking; the people coming through looked like ghosts).

    On the streets of a big city, I could understand it, but people were in the audience at the gigs with surgical masks on. Some people in the opening bands were wearing masks when they soundchecked; happily, no musician wore it during the show.  There was a surgical mask wearing woman, blase as could be, sitting in the corner.

    Anyhow, it was a fantastic gig. Another opener, whom I didn't get a picture of, played a Steinberger bass (one of those 80s-futuristic basses you'd see played by Lee Sklar in Phil Collins' band circa '85, with no headstock and a tiny rectangle for a body--where the hell does he get strings for that thing?), and while he played bass, did Mongolian throat singing.  Actually, he was the best Mongolian throat singer I've ever heard live. Between acts, they spun vinyl--a lot of old Judee Sill tunes, which made my heart sing. Really special place. If you're ever in Kumagaya, stop in--and be sure to try the curry.

The spectacle of the Hipster Grifter is pure candy to me, and I've sought out dozens of stories about her, even though they're all the same: Korean girl with ultra-Williamsburg-irony tattoo that says "I Love Beards," stole money in Salt Lake City, lied to series of roommates and quasi-boyfriends that she had cancer, rooked the illuminati at Vice into giving her a job.

I feel guilty about it--it's prurient, weirdly sadistic and crypto-pornographic. The actual crime, in SLC, is barely mentioned in any of these pieces--how many stories have I read and I still don't know who she stole the money from?--they're mostly about how she picked up a dude by handing him a note that said, "I want to give you a handjob with my mouth."

The NY goss blogs are capitalizing on salacious anecdotes about a sexy, tragic Asian girl, and that's it. New Yorkers vilify hipsters, despite the fact that most of us are textbook hipsters--sour-grapes-ing, due to insecurities rooted in high school cafeterias. So we're all enjoying her public humiliation as a liar, and the $60K she stole is an excuse--now, in the blog-o-lanche, little more than a footnote. However fucked up it is to tell people you have cancer so they'll be friends with you, it's sick, not criminal.

Didn't everybody know somebody like this in high school? A pathological liar.  I have to admit, I was a teenage fabulist myself, mostly because the circumstances of my life didn't reflect my interior turmoil the way my invented life did, I wanted to express it, I wanted to impress people with a made-up portrait of myself that in a way was a truer portrait.  One theory of mine is that those of us predisposed to grow up to become hipsters are also predisposed to youthful fabulism--maybe there's some self-loathing being channeled by the HipGrift's vultures.

Hipsters have a thing for Asian girls, and artsy peoples have always had a thing for little-girls-lost.  How bitter it is to read Jezebel.com's headline "Did 'Hipster Grifter' Play On Loathsome Hipster Asian Fetish?" and know that many of us clicking on it are doing so to read about a hot Asian girl.

My favorite baffling j'accuse thus far, from AnimalNewYork.com: "She claimed she was a vegetarian, but wasn't upset when one of the roommates accidentally gave her a dish with meat."

This girl might, in fact, be a sociopath.  But she's smart. She signed an email to Gawker, "Without Wax, Keri." Which I immediately took to be an obscure sexual reference. Though Gawker didn't comment on that, a commenter named Sarcastro explained:

When Roman sculptors executed their work they would occasionally crack the marble. The crack would be sealed with wax. In Latin, "sine" means "without," and "cera" means "wax." The sculptures that were made out of whole, unbroken stone were marked, "sine cera," or "without wax." The term evolved to apply to anything that was "true" or unadulterated. In English, "sine cera" is rendered, "sincerely."

I had this really mindblowing lesson in mediocrity the other night.  I went to see this show that was one of the most beautifully designed and staged things I've seen recently--and the show itself was boring.  I would see something and go, "Wow, that actress is really charismatic, what a great voice," and two minutes later be hoping that my girlfriend would let us leave at intermission.

I'm working on a record now, and it's such a vital lesson--you can come up with a hundred thrilling ornaments, but if the song's no good, it's no good.

There was this guy in Portugal, when Scrap and I were touring there two weeks ago, who was hired to drive us from city to city for the gigs.  We coudn't quite figure out how to pronounce his name in Portuguese, so we called him Bimmy.

Bimmy was this little guy, and he had almost no English, but we found weird ways of communicating. He was playing Jimi Hendrix in his car, and after a half hour of uncomfortable silence, he said, "Hendrix! The best!" and I said "Bom!" which means "good" (at least I think it does/hope it does).  Our next conversation was him saying the names of 70s rock drummers, doing a-cappella versions of their signature drum fills, and saying, "The best! John Bonham, the best!"

Bimmy had a Deicide CD, a death metal band (Speed metal? Thrash metal? I'm not up on my subgenres), and seemed shocked when I put it on.  "Deicide, the best! From Tampa, Florida!" It was so hilarious, seeing this tiny Portuguese metal guy say Tampa, Florida that we burst out laughing, and this became the basis of our bond.  Any time there was a moment of silence, he'd go, "Tampa, Florida!", assume a metal guitar stance and a-cappella chug chug chug guitar sounds.  

He also loved Elvis, and sometimes would say "Graceland museum in Memphis!"

Scrap's dog is named Foxdog (because after they got her out of the shelter, a kid pointed to her and said, "That's a Foxdog!"), and Foxdog does this thing where she comes up to Scrap and puts her paw on him, kinda like, Hey man, you doin' OK? Scrap calls it the Foxdog Wellness Check.  So when Bimmy assumed the rock stance and said, "Tampa, Florida!" that would be the Bimmy Wellness Check.

We got literally three hours to sleep after the gig in Guimaraes, then Bimmy drove us at 4 am to Lisbon for our flight home.  See you later, Bimmy. "Tampa, Florida!"

On the subject of death metal: I tracked down the legendary death-metal-band-logo designer Christophe Szpajdel online, and he did a Mike Doughty logo! It's very metal looking--it looks like scary trees! He also did one Art Deco style that he'll be putting in an exhibition of his.

I'll be printing up shirts of it to sell online shortly.

So I'm recording Sad Man Happy Man, and it's sounding great, but there's this one song that I kept trying to make good, but it's just not good.  What bums me out is that I love the lyrics, my faves on the album, but the song is just a non-starter.  I'll probably put it up on iTunes or something as a bonus track, along with a bunch of covers that I recorded lo-fi up at Yaddo.

I was looking through some photographs of yours today
I saw your drunken friends laughing, party favors there
Two people kissing in the corner bring their hands together,
Leads him towards the bedroom, where the coats are, hear them whispering

I sang the wrong, sang the wrong, sang the wrong song
I know this song's not the song you want
I made my plans, made my plans, made my plans
I know my plans, they are burned and gone

Ecstatic sadness is the stylish pleasure of the day
I'm in my headphones on the bridge, the cars are rushing by
The barges is spinning in the bay below me,
And your love is the snow that's falling slowly

I sang the wrong, sang the wrong, sang the wrong song
I know this song's not the song you want
I made my plans, made my plans, made my plans
I know my plans, they are burned and gone

I realized that I was flakey flakey when I initially announced I got a Twitter going, then dropped the ball, but I'm really seriously Twittering of late, I'm on somewhat of a roll:

Twitter.com/MikeDoughtyYeah

These are pix of an all-garden-gnome store Scrap and I came across while foraging for Wurst in Frankfurt.  Frankfurters, it turns out, do not have some kind of local-speciality specialness about them when you eat them in Frankfurt: they are indeed hot dogs.

    My cello player Scrap and I are barnstorming through Germany.  We've played in Berlin, Hamburg, Köln (Cologne), and a few other cities; we've got Munich and Dresden and a few others left, then we fly to Portugal for three nightcap-like summation gigs.

    It's been a hoot.  I'm more or less a total beginner here; nobody remembers Soul Coughing, it's all people who've caught a whiff of the new stuff.  (If you've been following this blog you might know how frustrating I find it as an artist to have to constantly be working under the burden of everybody's memories of whatever the first time they heard me was, unable to just present the songs without the baggage of my past)

    A compilation of my solo stuff, Introduction, came out on a Berlin-based label called Nois-O-Lution earlier this year.  We're playing tiny, tiny places to houses of twenty or thirty people--the gig in Nürnberg was a place called Mata Hari that was so small it could only fit a bar, and hence there was no stage--we played behind the bar.

    I've been studying German for a couple of years now, and it's fantastic to be speaking it all the time.  The difficulty is that nearly everybody speaks English, so when I make an error, which is constantly, the other party in a conversation will switch to English, and I'll have to stubbornly plod along speaking bad German, and usually they'll follow my lead.  Sometimes they don't, and I have weird conversations where I'm speaking bad German and the German guy is speaking bad English.

    The German language has some inherent weirdnesses.  The articles and adjective-declensions (yes, linguistically hip friends, in German you have to conjugate the fucking adjectives) I have to more or less throw out the window, or kind of use the Force and hope that I'm speaking correctly some of the time.  The real fuck-up engine is the weirdness of the syntax.  Where in English you'd say: "I must not tell you that I will go to the store," in German it goes: "I must not you tell, that I to the store go will."  Yeah.  

    Jorge Luis Borges said in a poem, "German language, you are your own masterpiece."  I agree.  English and German are pretty closely related, so there's all kinds of cognates, but trying to think in German syntax is a psychedelic experience.  I've learned a lot about what it is to speak or write, period, in any language.

    I speak my fractured Deutsch to the crowd during the shows, and they tend to find it charming.  My hope is to come off something like Roberto Benigni in Down by Law.  Some of my go-to shticks don't work so well in Germany--when I tell the crowd they're sexy and look very healthy, it confuses them--not that that's any reason for me to stop telling them that.  At the end of the show, when instead of the encore we'll just turn around, pretend we've left the stage, then turn around again and pretend we're spontaneously playing another song, the word I use for "turn around" is zugabe  The crowd sometimes chants it:  "Zoo-Gah-BUH! Zoo-Gah-BUH!"

    I've been doing interviews in German, too, which is great--I kind of get a high from it, going on some big radio station in Berlin and stumbling along half-haplessly.  Everybody compliments my German effusively, which I realize actually means: You speak really great German for an American.  Actually, probably for anybody; there's not a lot of foreigners that speak the language. Those of us that find German pretty are in the minority.

    The journalists and DJs love hearing that Germanness (well, more likely Berlin-ness) has acquired hipness in New York; that my fave DJ on WFMU, Ken Freedman, has been on a months-long jag of playing old German-language New Wave tracks.  I understand where those tracks came from well--Germany is a post-industrial place, its artists are well-marinated in, and aware of, the angular modernity and the geekiness of the culture.  Theirs is a funny mindset--Germans are these hugely emotional people, but they're very into control, and rules, and regularity--it's a fascinating tension.  

    When I first started touring Europe, way back in the way back, I dug the French and not the Germans.  This has pretty much reversed itself--I find the French exasperating and the Germans lovely.  I'm very freaked out by the sublimated anger of the Dutch, which surfaced when I stopped enjoying Amsterdam for the weed and whores.

    We're traveling by train, which is romantic, deliciously lonely, and soothing all at the same time.  The German train system, naturally, is beautifully put together and hyper-efficient.  Getting up in the morning and going to the train station, usually giant, vaulted, bustling spaces, is a wonderful ritual.  I read Bild on the train, the big populist national daily paper, which is kind of akin to the New York Post.  It's appeal to me is not so much for the gossip about German soap stars but that it's exactly on my reading level.

    Scrap and I are really into the fact that when Germans say English words that have a V in it, they pronounce it as a W: wisit, wacation, wenue, wan, adwice.  Except here's the thing--there is no W sound in German whatsoever.  W is pronounced V, V is pronounced F.  Huh?!  We're going to query some Germans about it before we get out of here.

 

I'm spending February way out in the snow-covered woods, at an artists' colony in Upstate New York.  They've given me a tiny cabin with a piano in it where I've been writing songs and recording some electronic music.  I walk to dinner in a 19th century mansion, where I eat with the fifteen other artists staying at this place, in a wood paneled Victorian dining room.  The massive dining chairs have the faces of knights, and coats-of-arms,  carved into the sides.  There's an actual tiara in a glass case.  We eat breakfast there, too, and afterwards they give each of us a lunch box--a lunch box and a thermos!--with something for lunch in our studios.  The other artists are mostly writers, but there's visual artists, and a composer working on an opera, too.

The whole scene is a product of early 20th century noblesse oblige; the rich people who lived on this state started a trust so that artists could come here for free to work.  It's effective; I've finished three songs and a bunch of tracks for my Dubious Luxury electronic thing, and I've only been here eleven days.  Because there's really nothing else to do up here, no TV--which I don't really watch at home, but turn on whatever reality product is on VH1 and let it drone in the background as an electric fireplace--and, in what has been the greatest grace of this place, no internet in the studios--there's one room in the mansion with WiFi.  No killing time on Facebook, instead of finishing the ever-troublesome second verse.

I feel kind of out of place here; everyone else seems a more 'legitimate' artist than me, a lowly singer/songwriter from the grubby world of commercially viable music.  But that's just in my head; everybody's cool.  They're all fascinating, too, and, invariably, really, really talented.  Fun suppers.

The bookshelves in the houses (there are a bunch of smaller mansions surrounding the imposing main house, with multiple writers' studios) are filled with weird things.  One has a huge collection of classical 78s--I said 78s!--that must be seventy years old if they're a day.  There's no 78 player in sight.  I was looking at some books and discovered one, published 1908, called The Gay Gnani of Gingalee.  It's signed by its author, one Florence Huntley, with a personal note to the baron of industry that owned this place.

In my tiny cabin, I have a couple of mics and a bit of ultra-simple recording software, which is fine for laying down simple versions of things.  I've been recording some covers as b-sides, to use as bonus tracks on the 'real' Mike Doughty album that I've been working on.  (I'm using my name in the third person to describe my work, is that troubling?)  The relative paucity of cover songs in the world has something to do with the way musicians get paid--most of us depend on 'publishing' income, which means songwriting income, to make a big chunk of our living.  If you're a genius interpreter of other peoples' material, you're shit out of luck in this music industry.  I always think of my old running buddy in early 90s New York, Jeff Buckley.   God bless him--and us, for having briefly shared the world with him--but his songwriting, in general (to me) just wasn't as strong as his ability to get inside somebody else's songs.  But however transcendent his version of "Hallelujah" might be, there was no way he was going to put out an album full of 'em--there's no dough in it, and even geniuses have landlords.

I take pride in my left-field choices of cover songs, and I'll have a handful of good ones, which I'll spread across a couple versions of the album--the iTunes version, the physical retail version.  I've gotten a couple of reviews where the critic has called me kitsch-monger for doing "The Gambler" and "Hungry Like the Wolf," and I guess it would look like that if you don't know me, but I really do find something wonderful and purely musical in all the covers I do--when I remake some 80s warhorse standard, I'm looking to reveal something weird or beautiful hidden under the surface of these things, to put a new light on it. 

I did my first interview, for the upcoming tour of Europe, in German, ever.  It was an email interview, which makes it easier to put together sentences, but I swear to you I did not touch a dictionary.  Of course, I sound weird and half-cocked in German--I'm turning into kind of a Deutsch version of Roberto Benigni in Down by Law.  But the introduction to the interview said it was 'charming' and 'soppingly authentic.'  NICE.

Here's a link:  http://www.echoes-online.de/blog/index.php?/archives/676-Interview-mit-Mike-Doughty-zu-Introduction.html

Doing electronic dance music makes your ears incredibly tired.  You listen to the same beat for hours at a time--boom bap, boom boom bap, it loops and loops all day long, as you make tiny adjustments and additions and subtractions.  I find making this kind of stuff incredibly rewarding, but being in the face of all that repetition takes a toll. I have my speakers and laptop set up at a desk by a window where I look at trees, and fat woodchucks running around hilariously, and watch owls turn their heads in that weird way that owls turn their heads.  When the boom-boom-boom stops, that slight, tiny note of ringing in my head is incredibly, incredibly loud.

Working on Ableton Live (it's music software) you cut and paste and manipulate things in a way analogous to using a word processor--it's really that easy.  So the process itself is so simple that you end up rethinking and adjusting everything just because the motion of changing it is so simple.  Cut that break after that one part, put it at the end; take out the drums here; put some more drums in there; take everything out where that big blast of weird synthy horn is, to make it more prominent; cut up the vocal into slices to make it sound weirder.  The simplicity makes it ever harder to walk away from the computer, and so you sit there longer, and the repetition keeps repeating, and your ears get more and more exhausted.  Sometimes I work for hours and realize that I've taken something, changed it, changed it again, changed it for umpteen times, and then finally, when I'm satisfied with it, I've turned it back into exactly what it was in the first place.

I'm digging that I'm in this cabin, with a piano, clearly put together with a 'legitimate' composer in mind, and I'm making all this quasi-freaky, quasi-dance-floor-y groovy music.

One of the odder pleasures of being up here is that I can walk around without keys--my whole world is the walk past the other houses to the mansion, to pick up my lunchbox (and to post this blog in the WiFi parlor).  I leave the house everyday without my wallet.  But there's something about the pull of consumerism that's made me go slightly insane--I went into a nearby town to pick up some stuff, and ended up spending 60 bucks at CVS--spending money is a primal need, and I was starved.

Wow, I'm looking over what I've been blogging here, and it looks like I'm taking what I'm doing really, really seriously.  I don't take myself that seriously, really, but I guess being in this environment where you're encouraged to feel like you're doing something important--the dinners, the lunchboxes, the fact that the people who work here are under strict orders not to disturb you--it's easy to take your work seriously.  I have a little disdain for myself, believing this, but it does feel nice.

Please help!  My collaborator Young Jean Lee is staging her play CHURCH at the Walker this week--she needs people to be in a choir.  You don't have to be a great singer! It's a short commitment.

More info:

http://blogs.walkerart.org/performingarts/2009/01/16/volunteers-needed-to-sing-in-young-jean-lees-play-church/