Mike Doughty

“Can we not talk about Soul Coughing anymore?” asks the mercurial band’s former frontman. While Mike Doughty, 35, is understandably more interested in touting the virtues of his brand-new CD Haughty Melodic, he will always be inextricably linked to the quartet with which he made of some of the ’90s’most unique pop.

Combining such diffuse elements as old movie samples, hip-hop and beat poetry into an amalgam Doughty once described as “slacker jazz,” the band released three critically revered albums, Ruby Vroom, Irresistible Bliss and El Oso, before breaking up in 2000.

After overcoming a heroin addiction five years ago, Doughty reinvented himself as an acoustic troubadour. Following a season of hitting the road solo while toting a pair of DIY releases, Skittish and Rockity Roll, Doughty is playing the record-label game again, recently signing to Dave Matthews’ ATO.

PASTE: It’s interesting that you chose Dan Wilson (of Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic) to produce—were you looking to bring out the “pop” element in what you do?

DOUGHTY: No, not really … Dan’s idea of a song usually incorporates more chord changes, a bridge, that kind of thing. His style is of a Beatles lineage, and mine’s of a more hip-hop or Velvet Underground line of thinking—hanging onto a repetitive groove for a long time. The fun of the collaboration was finding our middle ground.

P: How did Dave Matthews end up singing on “Tremendous Brunettes?” Of course, you’re on his label now, but it seems like an odd, and surprisingly conventional, pairing for a guy who used to work the door at the Knitting Factory.

D: I just think he’s awesome; his phrasing is exquisite. I opened for him on some big stadium dates, and was overwhelmed with the power his voice had, filling up that huge space. Anybody that finds him too conventional might want to check out one of those massive shows; it’s inspiring. He does “Big Rock” better than anybody I’ve ever encountered.

… The idea on the backing vocal was to do the hip-hop guest vocal thing; hand a verse to another artist, the way Busta Rhymes would guest on a Li’l Kim track. I detest it when the song says, “featuring so-and-so!” and it’s a backing vocal so buried in the mix it’s barely audible. I wrote the verse that Dave sang, but that was the notion.

P: You have a huge vocabulary and a lot of verbal dexterity, and your songs reflect this. Do you ever worry that your writing style is too much of a niche taste?

D: I can’t worry about it; what I can do is make the thing that moves me best. I think anything that breaks through to the larger audience has an exciting element of strangeness and newness to it. Look, I’m just not gonna break through by watering my lyrics down—it’ll sound half-assed. The only way I can be successful is by being the best version of myself I can possibly be. That’s what fascinates an audience. Soul, I think, is the purest, most uncut version of who you are.

P: Tell me about “Busting Up A Starbucks.” Is this—along with its shout-outs to metro NYC ’burbs—a statement about suburban homogenization?

D: Yeah, it is, kind of—though those suburb names, “Nyack!” and “East Orange!”… are more for fun than some kind of sociopolitical statement. It’s not an anti-Starbucks screed, but about youthful aggression, the darkness in revolutionary destruction—the Oedipal thing behind it. I love Starbucks, and were I to be separated from my daily iced triple grande soy latte, it would be a personal tragedy.

P: A few things haven’t changed from the Soul Coughing days—you’re still using the guitar as a percussion instrument, for example. What have been the biggest changes since then in how you write and perform?

D: Yeah, the guitar as percussion thing is huge in my aesthetic, and very conscious. The biggest thing in the new stuff is the way the lyrics are—more narrative, more stories. The word I use to myself, continually, is yearning. That’s the sense I’m looking for. I’ve also learned a lot more about who I am and what my motivations are, and that’s pretty fascinating for me. Overall, I’ve just become a confident, happy, optimistic guy, which I wasn’t for years—I was a depressed, cynical, desperate man.

I still write from pain. That’s still my source of material, though that pain is largely in the past now. But I feel these songs embrace the life that I have. I can’t regret those old, dark days—if I wasn’t there then, I wouldn’t be here now.