Marching On

Mike Doughty gets clean and bares his soul.

by John Vettese

rock/pop

In the mid-'90s, Mike Doughty was the bizarre lyric dude of the alt-rock boom. Remember the loopy hook to "Super Bon Bon," the big radio hit by his old neo-beatnik combo Soul Coughing? "Too fat. Fat, you must cut lean / You've got to take the elevator to the mezzanine, chump / Change, and it's on."

Given his one-time drive to perplex listeners, we have to ask if Doughty isn't being facetious by writing, "They say that God is great, they say that God is love and I believe them. / Don't fear the random fate, I trust the hand of the almighty and the infinite."

That line, from the bopping "His Truth Is Marching On" on Doughty's new solo CD Haughty Melodic, may be disconcerting. But there's no sarcasm in the delivery — he's being totally sincere. Doughty's life followed two tracks after his band split in 2000. One was that of a hard-working, hard-touring DIY singer who self-released the acoustic set Skittish and the electro noodlings of Rockity Roll, and played hundreds of shows for fans and newcomers who eventually stopped referring to him with the preface, "Y'know, the guy from Soul Coughing."

The other path was a well-documented battle with alcohol and a variety of drugs that nearly killed him.

Now clean and signed to Dave Matthews' ATO Records roster (they kindly reissued Skittish and Rockity last year), Haughty's Doughty adopts a lush pop-rock sound while he waxes philosophical about hope and redemption. Sometimes it's stark and literal, but thankfully, Doughty hasn't turned gushingly confessional. Mostly he just relates his experience through his trademark wordplay. We caught up with him by phone last week to talk about both journeys and where they ultimately led.

City Paper: Haughty Melodic is your first full-on studio album since Soul Coughing split, but the stuff you've been doing for the past five years has been more low-key: one-man shows, self-released CDs. What was that like and what brought you back?
Mike Doughty: In terms of why did I make the switch, I really wanted to do it as starkly as possible. I wanted to take an extreme left turn, do something really unexpected, and it was amazingly liberating. I just felt great. Soul Coughing broke up, I got a rental car, I put an acoustic guitar and a box of CDs in the trunk and I was off, ya know? Then after a while I started wanting to make another sharp left turn. I did Rockity Roll, which was a drum machine-synth album. Now this is a super melodic big rock album.

CP: How was recording it different from when you'd write and record with Soul Coughing?
MD: Well, I didn't have to negotiate with the band. Soul Coughing was a cooperative, so everybody had a say in how I wrote things. A lot of the songs on Skittish were songs that the guys didn't really like, but I wanted to do something with. Others were ones I wrote and felt like they had to be solo tunes. But the thrillingness of being a solo artist is following my own thing, basing everything on my judgment and not having to second guess what somebody else would think.

CP: Haughty has this underlying theme of being beaten down in the world but finding hope and redemption.
MD: I don't usually know what I'm writing about when I write. I journal, I take notes about what's going on around me, and then I pluck out phrases that I use in songs. So usually I'm attracted to things in [my] notebook that are resonant to me for some reason. And this album comes out of a dark time for me, a time in which I just sort of embraced hope and said, "I gotta live, I gotta get out of this thing."

CP: So in that sense, would you consider songs like "I Hear The Bells" spiritual?
MD: Absolutely. It's a huge, huge new facet of life for me that I sort of prudely struggled towards when I was younger. I still don't have a clue about what it actually entails. I'm just so fascinated in it, so caught up in it.

CP: Have you been reading much along those lines?
MD: Yeah, a lot of [Buddhist philosopher] Alan Watts. He was huge for me. I'm reading the Bible, reading the Upanishad, a little sufi mysticism. I read Jorge Luis Borges and its very spiritual to me. It's just like a voracious appetite.

Fri., May 6, 7:30 p.m., $18, with Susan Enan, World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St., 215-222-1400.