Let The Sunshine In

I was listening to NPR on Saturday morning when I heard the bluesy sound of an acoustic guitar and a voice that reminded me of a cross between Tom Waits and Elvis Costello (more in mood than in actual vocal comparison.). The voice was that of Mike Doughty and the song was the provocative “Fort Hood” from his brand new album Golden Delicious. Doughty does not so much sound like Costello as he evokes him. Costello’s “Shipbuilding” partakes of the same kind of plaintive melancholy as “Fort Hood.” Both songs are oblique references to war that sacrifices the young to economic or political agendas.

Costello has said in various interviews that “Shipbuilding” was written from the perspective of workers in British shipbuilding seaports during the buildup to England's war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982, an event that prime minister Margaret Thatcher seized upon in order to use the cacophony of nationalistic fervor to drown out the groaning sounds of a crumbling economy. The song is set in a region that's economically depressed, one where essentials like "a new winter coat for the wife" is hard to come by. But there's a "rumor" that the local shipyard will soon have work, building ships for a war. The townspeople want to be happy that they will soon have jobs, but it is at the expense of their own boys who must go fight the war.

“Fort Hood,” the title of the number one track on Doughty’s new album, is the name of the Texas Army base that has lost the most troops in the Iraq War. When Andrea Seabrook introduced Doughty on All Things Considered she said “ A couple of years ago, musician Mike Doughty was invited to take a tour of Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., and meet some of the soldiers just home from the warfront. Doughty, who used to be part of the group, Soul Coughing, was best known for his experimental music and his introspective lyrics. But he (Doughty) was so struck by how young the wounded were, he was moved to write a song about them, and what he thought those kids ought to be doing.”

Doughty has this to say about the genesis of the lyrics. “I visited some of the wounded troops at Walter Reed Hospital in D.C. and wondered what was going through their minds. When I first thought about using 'Let the sunshine in...' as the chorus, I thought it would be funny, but when I sang it, I felt myself tearing up. ['Let the Sunshine In'] draws an obvious parallel to past quagmires, and all the vets who are suffering from PTSD. Once again the damage being done will not only be in lives lost, but in how those losses affect family, friends and society as a whole. The bridge laments the fact that instead of going to the prom, they've been given a burden they're going to have to live with forever."

The first stanza of “Fort Hood” expresses what Doughty imagines to be the “druthers” of those who have spent their young adult lives waging war: “I’d rather watch movie stars get fat/ I’d rather hang up the flag and be done with it/ I’d rather keep the frenzy and the fire out of my mind/ I’d rather take sides in an argument/ I’d rather crank up the base in a dark basement/ I’d rather leave the mobs and murder in a distant land.”

HGMB says that “Fort Hood" is one of Doughty's few directly topical tunes, but “he handles it as only he could, even injecting some wistful humor into the serious subject, basically telling the young people that they should be ‘blasting Young Jeezy in a parking lot’ instead of dying in a mindless war. Sounds like the new album is going to be tasty indeed.”

Doughty has just completed a southern tour of Florida and Georgia. Here are a few paragraphs from his blog about his recent roadtrip.

“I'm driving South on this tour--my first all-alone, fully-solo tour in a few years--listening to the grandiose sounds of modern black gospel music on the radio, a burned copy of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony (daydreaming of a trip on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Beijing, maybe next Winter?), and the Monks' Black Monk Time. I'm in Jacksonville today, for the first of four Florida shows. People up North snob on Florida, but I dig it. I like the wetness of the air, and the way it smells. I like feeling like I've accidentally wandered into an episode of COPS. I'm at a motel off 95; walking distance from both a Waffle House and a Chick-Fil-A. Those redoubts of Southern cuisine.”

“I was stopped for speeding on a local highway in Georgia. The cop was missing half his teeth, which conjured up some spooky prejudices about Southerners. But he was cool--I was cheerful, so he let me off with a written ‘courtesy warning’. He searched my trunk and guitar case, and went through my pills, having to call each of them in to the station house (“How many anti-depressants do they have you on? Have you thought about just changing your diet?’). I hung out behind my car--Dollar rented me a Mustang! No wonder I was doing 73 on a country road--talking to his partner, a guy a few years older than me, with a grey mustache. He said he used to be a bouncer, twenty years ago, and doesn't drink now. ‘I had two libations the day before I put on this badge,’ he said. ‘When they legalize marijuana, I'll start smoking it,’ he said. When, not if? ‘They'll legalize it as soon as they figure out how to tax it.’ He said it's not addictive, and I said I disagreed. I know lots of people completely crippled by it, they wake and bake, can't get their lives together, suffer creative death. ‘Marijuana is not addictive,’ he said, definitively. He told me he had a '68 Fender Stratocaster once owned by Minnie Pearl.”

Mike Doughty, born in Fort Knox, KY, in 1970, was the former frontman of world-renowned musical mish-mashers Soul Coughing. After the band’s breakup in 2000, Doughty went on to release six solo albums. His seventh album, Golden Delicious, is now available. Don’t miss it. 

--Penne J. Laubenthal

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