Two years have passed since the demise of Soul Coughing, and Mike (formerly M.) Doughty has already released Skittish (a solo project he recorded before the break-up), regularly toured, recorded a live album, found a distributor for a book of his poetry, recorded a soundtrack and wrote an armful of songs for his next album -- or albums.
Two of those projects will be made available next week. Doughty's live record, Smofe + Smang: Live in Minneapolis was recorded in February, and is due July 8th through www.mikedoughty.com, coinciding with the release of his volume of poetry, Slanky, which is being distributed by Soft Skull Press, following years of being sold just at shows. "I had thought about putting out a live one for a long time," Doughty says of the album. "There's kind of a vibe to the shows. The pattern as it were, or the shtick, I wanted to get that on tape before I moved on." Additionally, a collection of "rudimentary" demos Doughty recorded have also been used by director Joseph Pierson as the soundtrack to his upcoming film, Evenhand. Because the film has not yet hit festival screens, a release will hinge upon finding a distributor.
Doughty says that after the several unhappy years in Soul Coughing, he enjoyed trading the tour bus for a rental car. "You get unlimited miles, but you tend to get the shittier car if you're a one-way rental," he says. "But living on a tour bus was like living in a submarine [laughs]. This is definitely a much more human way of being on the road. You get to listen to music and there's some good miles out there. I just burned a bunch of CDs, some mixes, just a bunch of old shit that I loved, it was like hanging out with old friends. I'm a convert, man. I don't know if I'm ever gonna tour with a band again. It's definitely a more happening way to live."
And he also found a community of Soul Coughing fans still in place. In addition to a string of successful shows, he noticed that Skittish had been a popular download on Napster, which prompted its official release. He's since given the Internet a tentative embrace, placing two popular tracks on MP3.com ("Busting Up a Starbux" and "Looking at the World From the Bottom of a Well"), and vigilantly maintained his site. "There's definitely an audience, I'm wondering if that's good enough," he says, laughing. "It is bad out there. I'm pretty psyched just to be making a living."
Which isn't to say that he has fully embraced Napster or its ilk, despite any possible windfall it might have initiated in pushing Skittish. "I was so angry at them for putting up that little kid, Shawn Fanning, and saying, 'Oh look, we're just this little guy that thinks it's so groovy to trade with his friends,'" he says. "Their board of directors is a bunch of copyright lawyers. That said, record companies are so ass-backwards and have made astonishingly little progress in the two years since the shit hit the fan with Napster, basically when a file swapping service that is untouchable by the law comes along, they're toast. They're all gone. Not one of these companies is gonna be around in fifty years. I don't wanna be working for Napster, they look like a really bad, bad scene to me. But I'm not exactly rooting for AOL Time Warner either."
With the industry in such a state of disarray, Doughty has talked to labels but has yet to rush into signing with one. But that hasn't stopped him from working on his first proper post-Soul Coughing solo album, which Doughty hopes to have released by early-2003. "I had kind of a dry spell in the first maybe six or eight months out of the band, I was just so wiped out from the experience," he says. "As time went on, I started writing and I've really been in a fertile period. I feel like it's pretty much written. I'm wondering whether or not I should separate these songs from what I'm writing now. Like this is a record, and I'm working on another record. Or whether I should just take the best of what I've got. I never really can tell my ass from my elbows until I have a few months perspective on the material."
But he still smarts at the last days of Soul Coughing and seems leery of jumping into a new ensemble. "There are gonna be other instruments in the arrangements on the next record," he says. "I've been working with a few people, just testing the waters with them. The brilliant thing is, the kind of record I wanna make, you can make in somebody's house. I want to explore some collaborative energies. I might put a little trio together. I have an inkling about who I'd want to play with for some shows. But the jury is very much out."
ANDREW DANSBY
(July 2, 2002)