New Music Tuesday - Mike Doughty

Mike Doughty - Golden Delicious

Mike Doughty is one of my favorite wordsmiths of all time. How can you beat a refrain of "is Chicago/ is not Chicago?" Or how about "the best I ever did with my love/ said just three honest words to you/ three droplets in a pail of lies/ three gems among the alibis." The guy can make things sound right that just shouldn't sound right. When he was the frontman for Soul Coughing his lyrics hardly mattered because of the craziness going on around them, but when he went solo his lyrics were right there front and center. And luckily so was the guitar- his "gangadank" guitar style is buried in those old SC songs, but in his solo stuff you really start to hear the personality and skill involved with his guitar playing. That's why this CD is so hard to swallow. On his first major label solo album, Haughty Melodic, he sounded a lot more adult contemporary than most Doughty fans were expecting. If you didn't like that direction, this album is not gonna help. Not that Golden Delicious isn't a good album, it's just not as good an album as Mike could make.

The album starts off with two songs very much in the style of the single from his last album, "Looking at the World From the Bottom of a Well." Plenty of layers and keyboards and guitars and pianos, that really hide the essence of his music in Q104 goodness. "Fort Hood" and "I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress to Keep on Dancing" are catchy and all, but the third track, "Put It Down," starts to appeal a little more to the old school fans. Still plenty of production, but the word playing in the refrain and the "na na na's" done in a way you haven't heard before spice it up. This is followed by the biggest misstep in M. Doughty's backlog; "More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle," a song that attempts to recall the Soul Coughing days and fails painfully. He follows this up with "27 Jennifers," which is another catchy song, but was better when he did a simpler version with a guitar and a drum machine on his Rockity Roll EP.

The first of a string of great songs hits after that. "I Wrote a Song About Your Car" works because the simplicity of the production allows the songwriting to shine through. Then the truly stripped down song, "I Got the Drop on You," grabs you. Dark and heavy, just Mike, a guitar, and a little piano trickling in. The emotion bleeds from this song that seems to be about Doughty's drug addiction days (many of his songs in the past can be read in the same way, including "Looking at the World"). Another beautiful song follows, the partially bi-lingual "Wednesday (Contra la Puerta)," and Doughty paints a somber, pretty scene without really telling much of a coherent story. The end of Golden Delicious heads back towards mid-tempo rock with catchy songs like "Luminous Girl," "Nectarine (Part 1)," and "Navigating By the Stars at Night." The CD ends on a particularly weak note with the syrupy "Book of Love," which dies, despite the simple accompaniment, due to the weakness of the lyrics.

Overall, if you are a Doughty fan, you should definitely check this out, because there's enough of the stuff you love about his music trying to dig its way out of this album. If you are just an alt music fan, I would still recommend this CD, but it's not the strongest stuff in his catalog (check out Skittish/Rockity Roll or any of the Soul Coughing albums for one of the most underrated bands of the '90s). Hopefully we will see more from Mike Doughty soon, and if you have a chance to see him live, DO IT! His shows strip his stuff down to just the good stuff, and plus he keeps them good fun with excellent banter, ad libbed songs, and guitar playing you will be trying to learn for weeks afterwards (until you pretty much give up).

Mike Doughty Website (on tour now with The Panderers, who sound pretty good too)

Mike Doughty MySpace