Mike Doughty

Artist's Website

Mike Doughty’s father was in the U.S. Army and Doughty was schooled on Army bases in the United States and Europe. “The army in the ’70s was a f-ed up place,” Doughty recalls. “I had an ordinary public high school experience, but the army seeped into everything, very regimented, strict and masculine. I was a fish out of water in the extreme; I was too sensitive, too questioning. When I found music, it changed everything. I didn’t know anything about music or how to play it, but put up posters of Iggy and the Stones and the shit hit the fan.”

Doughty played bass in a high school band and started 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.” By the time he entered the New School in New York City to study poetry, he’d developed his syncopated guitar style. “I listened to Public Enemy and tried to play their rhythms on guitar; with a combination of ineptitude and persistence, I started playing the rhythms within the melodies.”

Doughty credits Sekou Sundiata’s poetry class and the work of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks with sparking his interest in the craft of songwriting. “Sundiata told me to let the poem, or the song, do what it wanted to do,” Doughty explains. “He spoke about how to be musical, how words exist within time and transcend time. I’m rhythmically driven; it’s my blessing and my curse. The rhythms of my guitar, the nature of my voice and the strange cadence of the lyrics aren’t funky enough to be funk, but they’re too funky to be rock.” This dilemma is at the heart of Doughty’s art — an inability to compromise his desire for honest communication for the sake of the marketplace. “I’m an adult, trying to be an adult. It’s not the most commercial move to make at 37, but you have to let the music take you where it wants to go.”

Doughty’s solo career started with Skittish, a solo acoustic album Doughty made in 1996. His band, Soul Coughing, was signed to Warnes Bros. Records at the time; the label rejected Skittish, but it leaked and became a hit on Napster. After the band split in 2000, Doughty rented a car and started playing acoustic shows. “People who knew the songs from the Internet lip-synched every word,” Doughty recalls. In four years, Doughty sold 20,000 copies of Skittish at gigs and through his website, with virtually no promotion. He was actually making a living playing music. “Even when I was in Soul Coughing with hits on alternative radio and a video on MTV, I was writing CD reviews under a pseudonym to make ends meet.”