Mike Doughty
Mike Doughty (born June 10, 1970), is a singer and songwriter. He led the band Soul Coughing in the 1990s; in the 2000s, he forged a successful career as a solo artist.
Doughty was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky. The son of a military family, he moved around the country and Europe, and spent his teenage years living on the grounds of the United States Military Academy at West Point until he attended Simon's Rock College of Bard. He eventually moved to New York City to study poetry at the New School University, where singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco was one of his classmates in Sekou Sundiata's poetry course, "The Shape and Nature of Things to Come."
In 1992, Doughty, then a doorman at the New York avant-garde club The Knitting Factory founded Soul Coughing (billing himself then as M. Doughty), and enjoyed the minor hit singles "Super Bon Bon" and "Circles".
Wearying of the band and addicted to heroin, Doughty broke up Soul Coughing in 2000, and was promptly dropped by Warner Brothers. A few years later, he beat his addiction and started touring as a solo artist. He drove around the country in a rental car (9000 miles on his first tour), playing acoustic shows, often to crowds of Soul Coughing fans bewildered by his switch from that band's hip hop and spoken word-based sound to plaintive songwriter. After the shows, he would sit at the front of the stage and sell copies of his acoustic album Skittish — then on CD-Rs in plain white sleeves — a record that he had recorded for, and which was rejected by, Warner Brothers in 1996.
He sold 20,000 copies of Skittish over three years, and gradually developed a following independent of Soul Coughing. At the Bonnaroo music festival in 2004, Doughty and Dave Matthews — a longtime Soul Coughing supporter, who had the band open for him on two US tours, including shows at Madison Square Garden — bumped into each other. Matthews professed to be a fan of Doughty's solo record Rockity Roll, in particular the song "27 Jennifers," so Doughty gave him a CD of rough mixes of an album he had been working on in Minneapolis with former Semisonic singer Dan Wilson. This album was to become Haughty Melodic, which Matthews released on his ATO label.
Haughty Melodic's hit single, "Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well," was heavily played on the radio in 2005; Doughty made a video for the song with director/photographer Danny Clinch, opened for DMB at Madison Square Garden, and appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman. He founded Mike Doughty's Band, featuring "Handsome" Dan Chen (keyboard and synthesizer), "Knapsack" Pete McNeal "The Man of Feel" (drums), and Andrew "Scrap" Livingston (upright bass) and toured extensively that year. In the summer of 2006 "Handsome" Dan Chen left the group, and was replaced by the "Courageous Youngster", John Kirby.
Miscellany
Doughty is an active blogger (see link below), commenting on pop culture, his life as a musician and his fans, and writing about and photographing his numerous travels, to Cambodia, Laos, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Mississippi.
In 2002, Doughty recorded four songs for the film EvenHand. "Get Along" was subsequently released as a bonus track on Skittish / Rockity Roll. The other three songs, "Sweet Francis", "Love Theme From Officer Morning", and "The Devilish Verve of the Age Is Like a Man With a Staple Gun", remain unavailable.
In 2003, Doughty released a book of poetry entitled Slanky (ISBN 1887128719) which received rave reviews from peers such as Dave Matthews and Ben Folds, who contributed enthusiastic blurbs for the book's cover.
In 2004, Doughty recorded the anti-Iraq War anthem "Move On," which appeared on the compilation Future Soundtrack for America.
Doughty's publicist, Andy Adelewitz, aka "Mike Doughty HQ," sends out an annual April Fool's Day email with fake Mike Doughty news. Past jokes have said that he was changing his name to Mike "Cougar" Doughty, and had accepted an offer to become the new guitar player in Limp Bizkit. April 2006's message said that Doughty announced he was running for New York State Senate, representing the 7th District (comprising most of northern Nassau County, Long Island), in order to ease tensions between Long Island authorities and soy gluten farmers.
In 2004, Doughty's touring band included electric pianist Thomas "Doveman" Bartlett, founder of the Belle and Sebastian-esque New York City band Doveman.
Solo discography
- Skittish LP (recorded 1996; released 2000)
- Smofe + Smang: Live in Minneapolis LP (2002)
- Rockity Roll EP (2003)
- Skittish / Rockity Roll double LP (2004): A two disc re-release which includes the out-of-print Skittish, the Rockity Roll EP, and five bonus tracks.
- Haughty Melodic LP (2005): Doughty's first full-band album, released on May 3, 2005.
- The Gambler EP (2005): Six song EP exclusively on iTunes Music Store. Title track is a cover of the Kenny Rogers hit.