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Mike Doughty has launched a crowdfunding campaign via PledgeMusic to raise funds for an album that’ll find him reinventing select songs originally performed by his former band, Soul Coughing. Doughty had famously eschewed the band’s repertoire as he built a solo career in the years after their 2000 split. But now he’s revisiting 12 of those songs, including "Circles," "Super Bon Bon," "True Dreams of Wichita" and "Unmarked Helicopters," in an effort to explore his original vision when he wrote them, and before they entered the dysfunctional fray of the band.
Mini-documentaries of the recording process, and 30-second trailers free to non-pledgers, will be posted weekly. As incentives for pledgers, Doughty is offering credits in the CD package, private shows, "monthly tweets praising you lavishly," the very guitar the album is recorded with, and the chance to be video-recorded smashing the guitar he toured with for three years (which was damaged beyond repair by steam).
Doughty is working with producer Good Goose (Menya, Ninjasonik, Mac Lethal, Homeboy Sandman) and aiming for a fall release.Doughty says the motivation to re-explore his old songs grew from writing his memoir, "The Book of Drugs," which was published by Da Capo last year.
"After my memoir, which was full of pain, I picked up an guitar and, by myself, went through the songs I wrote in the ’90s — between the ages of 20 and 29 — to figure out who I was, where I was, and what I was trying to say," he recalls. "There’ll be more of the music I stumbled into, and fell in love with, when I came to New York as an 18-year-old — an explosion of amazing hip-hop and house music. I can use the weirdness I absorbed as a doorman at an avant-garde jazz club, when I was 21, more artfullly. I think the songs can be better than they were. I can make the actual songs more hearable. I think I can make them more like what I intended them to be."
