What The Music Wants To Be: An Interview with Mike Doughty

Mike Doughty: Wow. . . cool. Yeah, I stole everything from Sekou.

Popshifter: So talk to me a little bit what he taught you about language and playing with grammar because you do some very exciting things with sort of, playing with words.

Mike Doughty and band, Toronto
Photo © Barry Sanders

Mike Doughty: Well, I don’t think I took anything from [Sekou] stylistically, per see. He had a band and the way they used spoken word rhythmically, something sort of between rapping and spoken word. That was something I took from pretty liberally. The main thing I learned from him was to really treat the piece like you’re working for it as opposed to it being something that you’re making, trying to sort of coax what it wants to be out of it. It really is better not to impose your will on the thing but figure out what the thing really is looking to be.

Popshifter: One of my favorite lyrics from you—and it goes back a bit—is “I’m a waiter in a furniture store.”

Mike Doughty: (laughs) I was! I was a waiter, well, I was a barrista in a furniture store. There was a fancy furniture store where I had a job and they had an espresso bar. It was like, million dollar couches. . . well, not million dollar couches, but you know, I’d just sit there making espresso for whatever billionaire hedge fund managers came through to buy furniture.

Popshifter: It seems like the perfect description of being out of place.

Mike Doughty: Oh really? (laughs) Well, they liked me over there! I didn’t feel out of place, oddly! It was the only job where the boss ever loved me! (laughs)

Popshifter: Another lyric I like is “you snooze you lose, but I have snost and lost” and that’s going back to how you play with language. So what about your personal style for playing with language?

Mike Doughty: Geez, I mean, I’ve just always been fascinated with words and the musicality of words. When I was a kid I used to repeat words over and over again to amuse myself. “Snost and lost” is like my own, fake conjugation, I guess?

Popshifter: A lot of people are talking about “Fort Hood” from the new album because it’s very timely, very political. But I want to go back a little bit to a track you did for MoveOn.org called “Move On” and you’re the son of a . . .

Mike Doughty: My dad went to Vietnam, my dad was an army officer for forty years and I grew up around army bases and grew up around veterans of the Vietnam war. There was a lot of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and just a lot of strange behavior. Of course I didn’t really understand it as a kid, but now looking back on it, a lot of the adult men around were pretty damaged guys.

When I think of the Iraq War. . . I visited Walter Reed [Army Medical Center], actually. The U.S.O. invited me down to just hang out and pass out CDs and stuff. It was tremendously affecting to meet all these guys who lost their limbs in the war. But for me, what really hits home is what it’s going to be like for all the soldiers when they come back and how they’re gonna have these images in their heads that might linger for the rest of their lives. Y’know, America’s not a country that really looks charitably on mental health—having a shrink is kind of an insult in our culture—and I just think that what I can relate to is the lingering sense of trauma that I think people are going to suffer from.

Click to read more from Mike Doughty on. . .

Song development and self-plagiarism
Words and war
Politics and parameters of the new album
Scrap, Pete, & John and “Small Rock”
Secret codes and Scott Wynn from The Panderers
The Rock Star Echelon and retirement plans

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