Make Music So You Don't Look At Your Phone: Mike Doughty Talks Ghost Of Vroom 2, Out Now
[Cover photo credit to Clay Patrick McBride]
Mike Doughty has announced a new musical project with Andrew "Scrap" Livingston that will delight Soul Coughing fans, titled Ghost of Vroom. The moniker is an allusion to Soul Coughing album Ruby Vroom, but it's more than just a nod to Doughty's history and the recent 25th anniversary of that album (which got its own tour), there's a connection in the musical DNA of what Ghost of Vroom are producing.
You don't have to wait to find out what Ghost of Vroom are up to, since their EP, Ghost of Vroom 2, is already available with three new songs digitally, and you can also order it on vinyl. The absolutely time-relevant "Rona Pollona" is a darkly upbeat tune with a masterful video, and 1918 takes us into promised darker thematic territory and previews the musical territory that Vroom has been scouting out.
Mike Doughty spoke with Tower's PULSE! about his life and times, including his extensive touring chops, what it was like taking Ruby Vroom on an anniversary tour, how he managed to write a memoir, and that little thing he did, a Rock Opera based on the Book of Revelation. We also break down the method and madness behind "Rona Pollona".
Hannah Means-Shannon: How much has social distancing affected your life, or do you spend a lot of time on your own anyway?
Mike Doughty: I’m an isolator, so it works great for me, actually. I’ve been working on music everyday. Hence this EP because I had the time, not only to write it, but to figure out how to get people to record and mix it at a distance in different places.
HMS: That is incredible. It’s crazy good that you started this entire project during this time and have a whole EP already. I really don’t understand how people are managing to be this productive during this time. Is it desperation and boredom or are you taking advantage of the quietness?
MD: It’s kind of what I do anyway, but it’s a relief not to have so many things happening. If I have a gig in a week, I’m thinking of the gig when I’m writing. There’s a momentum I get from having so much time spread out ahead of me. It’s also not like I have to hurry up if I went to spend a day listening to squiggly synthesizer sounds.
HMS: Do you think that freedom influenced the outcome on these EP songs?
MD: Well, this is the culmination of a lot of stuff I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, messing around with Hip-Hop beats and upright bass lines. I basically just started writing upright bass lines on my phone in Garage Band and that’s how I found a re-entry into this sound.
HMS: I have heard so many people using phones for this stuff. Voice memos are apparently the best for demos.
MD: I thought I had this hack, where I would use Garage Band, just using the mic, and I would turn on their autotune feature just a little bit. It would make the guitar sound super wobbly in a very subtle way. I thought I was so cool for having figured it out, but then I started hearing about it everywhere instantly. It’s great that people are figuring out these things. Musicians are always looking for the weirdest, most off-brand application possible and the glitches they can propagate from them.
HMS: That’s so great. I feel like our phones destroy our lives in so many ways that it’s good if they can do something interesting like that.
MD: Oh, yes, if you’re addicted to your phone and you write music, Garage Band is a life saver. Then you can get your weird, endorphin phone-time but actually be doing something somewhat meaningful.
HMS: That’s like a magic bullet! I will tell everyone.
If there was a moment when you decided to pull the trigger on a new project, did the idea precede working on any of the songs?
MD: The background is that I wrote a song and it sounded like Soul Coughing. It was the year before the 25th anniversary of the first Soul Coughing album, Ruby Vroom. So this was in 2018. I wrote the song and the 25th anniversary was coming up, so I called up everybody in the band. And I had a decent idea that this probably wouldn’t work, but I thought I should try this before I tried anything else, but naturally I got back a hot plate of crazy. So then it was, “Okay, I guess I’ll make this album on my own.” So, Ghost of Vroom is the working title to a Soul Coughing album that was a sequel to Ruby Vroom back in the day.
But it’s really a band, with me and Scrap Livingston. We made a record with Mario Caldato back in 2019, a whole full album. Then the pandemic hit, and my manager called and asked if we could please hold the album until we could actually go and play shows behind it. I thought that was fine since I want as many people to hear as possible.
Then I wrote this whole EP thing. And I called him up and said that we needed to put this thing out even if we couldn’t play shows around it. So it’s Ghost of Vroom 2. And Ghost of Vroom 1 will hopefully be out in 2021.
HMS: Ah, that explains the numbering! I know you played a whole 25th anniversary tour for Ruby Vroom also. That must have been intense. Where did you go?
MD: Me and my band went almost everywhere. We didn’t go to Winnipeg, Alaska, or Hawaii. Alaska is my only state left that I have never played a show in. Most people lack Hawaii, but I only have Alaska.
HMS: I know you’ve done a crazy amount of touring, even on your own. Was it something like 3 years at one point?
MD: It was less than 4, but it was a lot of years that I spent out there by myself. For being alone in a car, it was a fair amount of years.
HMS: You must know this country in and out.
MD: I know this country pretty well. It’s weird. Especially after getting sober, when I didn’t need to be in a hotel room by myself. Once I actually wanted to walk around and see stuff, now I have a favorite restaurant in every city in America. I know the neighborhoods where all the good coffee is.
HMS: I have a huge amount of respect for the time you spent in live performance. Aside from refocusing your life and getting sober, do you think that experience changed you as a musician or as a songwriter?
MD: I’d be hard pressed to find one particular facet of it that changed, but of course you’re always been influenced by whatever is happening to you. You also sort of write for the format you’re in. There were a lot of songs that were rhythmic in a certain way for a solo set. Then, when I got a band, everything was written for that context. Then, as I spent the last year playing with Vroom, everything has been kind of turning back the Soul Coughing clock.
HMS: Were audiences on the tour more made up of people who were already familiar with the music, or were they mainly new to the music?
MD: It’s always new to me and the musicians because we are improvising on the songs. I have a system that I use, with hand signals for “Stop, Start, Get Louder, Get Quieter, Play What This Person’s Playing, Play What That Person’s Playing”. And once everyone gets the hang of it, you can make quick changes very quickly, in a short amount of time. You become a sort of organism. It was great material to swim around with as an improviser.
The hand signals are based on things that John Zorn used to do back in the 90s. I worked at The Knitting Factory, a club where he played all the time. Butch Morris, the composer, had his own improvised conducting system. But this is simpler than what those guys did.
HMS: Is it important to you that the audience doesn’t see the signals?
MD: Oh, no, it’s important that they do see it. It can be really interesting to watch once people get the hang of it. They can see that someone is changing everything while it happens. You have that tight rope without a net feeling.
HMS: That definitely would create drama. That’s so cool.
Now that I know that the music for Ghost of Vroom has a couple of years of history, what about the artwork and the logo for Ghost of Vroom? That seems really relevant to 2020.
MD: Yes, this is all stuff about where the pandemic meets the unrest in the venn diagram. And where that meets the paranoid insanity of the QAnon thing. The front image is a two-headed creature that is half riot cop and half plague doctor with the beak mask. I got together with Anthony Aguerro, and my visual arts skills are zero, so I drew a stick figure and sent it to him. He came up with this beautiful, Biblical woodcut. It is both futuristic, and very modern, and very haunting and terrifying.
HMS: It is!
MD: I’ve worked with him a bunch of times and he was the perfect guy to do it.
HMS: I love the early printed material feel.
MD: Albrecht Durer-like.
HMS: Is this style of art staying with all the Ghost of Vroom projects?
MD: Yes, he did the artwork for Ghost of Vroom 1 also.
HMS: Your single “Rona Pollona” and the video for the single is out. I have never seen a video that was an Instagram scroll like that!
MD: The guy who did it, Swivs, is incredible.
HMS: When I saw it, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t seen anyone do it before. It’s perfect.
MD: You’re exactly right: How has this not happened before?
HMS: With the hand and the glove, even better. How did you choose the feed that appears? It’s very funny.
MD: He animated all the stuff. There are so many weird easter eggs in it. I keep finding stuff that I didn’t know was there. You have to screen shot each panel. There’s always something weird looking in the background.
HMS: At the same time, watching it gave me a little bit of an overwhelmed feeling because it’s so much like my own overloaded screen time. It was too familiar! I’m sure you’ve heard of “death scrolling” or “doom scrolling”, when you can’t disengage…
MD: You just go deeper and deeper into this thing…That’s half the reason I’m working on music, so I don’t look at my phone.
HMS: [Laughs]
That is a great, but in some ways a terrifying, thing. The song itself, I presume, is about our times. How would you explain the title?
MD: The Polonaise is a dance, like a waltz, so the “Rona Pollona” is the dance of the Corona virus, the dance of trying not to spread or catch it. And you’ll never know if you got it right. If you didn’t get it, was it luck? Was it because you avoided it?
There’s this weird boredom associated with this terrifying illness. You don’t know who’s got it. The invisibility is exhausting.
HMS: It does feel like what it would be like to be a medieval person in London or something.
Was writing the song cathartic for you, to get some of these thoughts out?
MD: It’s interesting writing something that’s got a topic, that’s very events-based. For me, if it’s based in reality, the song happens really fast and gets released quickly. I kind of looked up and was startled to have three verses and a chorus, and a bass part in an incredibly short amount of time.
HMS: It’s like a song that just wants to be written.
MD: I think if you’re good at what you do, you’re just listening for this stuff resonating in the spheres and trying to bring it out rather than trying to dig into yourself and create something.
HMS: Well, that explains the universal feel of the song, too.
What can we expect from the other songs on the EP in terms of themes or sound?
MD: They are darker. This one is kind of a bouncy, summer jam, which is not the character of the other two songs on the EP. We’re making videos for the other two, and they are pretty scary. They are a little more complicated, a little denser with the samples and the noises.
HMS: What was it like to write a book? Writing a memoir must be intense, trying to put your life into an encapsulated form.
MD: With the memoir writing that I do, they are all little capsules of experience. I’m able to look at these individual story units as opposed to the grand sweep of years. I see things as miniatures and string them together. It’s more like very short stories. You call up all the people you have dinner with and ask them what stories of yours have amused them, and that’s what you put in the book.
HMS: That’s great advice. What on earth was it like to write a Rock Opera?
MD: It’s intense. I had to figure out how to lay the text over these cells of chord changes. I went through five or six translations of the book of Revelation, not just the King James. I was cherry picking from different translations. Then, I had a transcriptionist, Scrap, who is my bandmate. I was sending him stuff and he was transcribing it for instruments.
HMS: Of course, because you had to create the sheet music for the performers to use?
MD: Yes, you’d have to know what you were doing at all times. Looking at the big-ass binder of the score, opening it, and realizing that these were all my thoughts was trippy. I’m still tinkering with it. I’m hoping to get a different version out at some point.
HMS: Why did you take on such a mammoth task, and why Revelation?
MD: Revelation’s is like a monster movie, a psychedelic acid-trip tale that’s very scary, weird, and surreal. I’ve always been a little bit obsessed with it. It’s something I had started and stopped working on for 25 years, since the early 90s. I never got very far until I got the commission to do it at WNYC. Then I had deadlines and roles were being cast, so that got me to finish it. I performed it on stage. It was very strange, intense, and crazy. I’d never done anything like that before.
HMS: Did you have any overlap with Tower Records in New York or elsewhere?
MD: Of course, I shopped at Tower Records, the one on 4th. I remember going to the store the night that Ruby Vroom came out. The store was open at midnight because an R.E.M. record came out that night, so we didn’t have to wait for Tuesday morning. We went on Monday night. I remember that it was like a dream come true when we got a window display. It’s huge in my memory. I spent so much time and money in that Tower Records.
HMS: That’s awesome. Well, we’re back online and we’re selling vinyl, CDs, and even cassettes.
MD: Nice! I love cassettes. A friend of mine sent me his album, and I said, “This sounds better on cassette.” Something about it just sounded better.
HMS: I’m getting back to them. The collection is growing again.
You may recall that our motto is “No Music, No Life”…
MD: And then “Know Music…”
HMS: You got it! Which do you prefer and how does that apply in your life?
MD: I’ve been thinking a lot about Black music and how Black music has inspired my whole life. When I was a kid, I started with The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, so it wasn’t Black artist then, but without the genesis material of Black music, I don’t know that there’s anything worthwhile in my life. I like movies kind of, and my friends, but without that spiritually, intellectually, and professionally, I would have nothing. Everywhere in the world is touched by that contact point between Africa and America.
HMS: Are there a few musicians you’d like to give a shout-out to?
MD: Where to begin? Otis [Redding], John Coltrane, Sam Cooke, Ornette Colman, Cannonball Adderley. We haven’t even gotten into Hip-Hop yet! Bad Brains. I could open up my Spotify and read it to you. I’m kind of an intense listener rather than an ambient listener. I have the songs in rotation to listen to and have that intense experience.
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