The Song as a Digital Artifact: An Interview with Mike Doughty

Mike Doughty might be best known as the brains behind Soul Coughing, even if he thinks the alt rock staple never fulfilled its promise and that his ex-bandmates are jerks. He’d probably be bummed I even had to mention them in the lede. But since the demise of the band, Doughty’s career has become more dynamic and interesting. There’s the solo stuff, sure, and he commands a sizable cult following.  

But Doughty has also emerged an astute memoirist, poet, and commentator on the music industry. And most recently, he’s taken to experimenting with ways to record, engage and sell music in the age of the mp3. He just announced a plan to sell one-of-a-kind, individually recorded versions of his song, “Dogs/Demons” on digital audio recorders. It’s a novel way to approach a piece of music, and encourages discussion about the nature of the recorded song, as well as how we consume music in a moment marked by vast digital clutter. 

So discuss we did. I reached out to Doughty after hearing of the venture, and he explained the thinking behind the project, how the record industry should care more about old people, and why he’s hoping a hedge fund manager won’t force him to recite a haiku about his cat. 

Motherboard: What’s the inspiration–how did this come about?

Doughty: The basic idea is: the song, “Dogs/Demons”, will absolutely never be on an album, or a single; I’ll never play it live. The only way to get it is to buy a mini voice recorder on which I’ve recorded an individual version of the song. You can listen to it on the little speaker on the thing, or drag it onto your desktop. Nobody else on the planet will have that particular performance.

It costs $543.09, you can choose “Dogs/Demons” in one of three keys, and, if you want an optional bridge, that’s $267.18. I slate it with the date, series number, and the purchaser’s first, middle, and last name.

If you want me to say, like, “Happy Graduation, Isabel,” that’s an additional $35,335.53. This is mostly a tongue-in-cheek way to discourage people from asking for the kind of stuff they ask you to put on CDs, when you autograph them. (I definitely have no problem writing stuff when signing CDs, but I want to keep this thing kind of austere)

I’ve been looking of weird ways to get music out. I’m pretty prolific, and after your umpteenth record, people get album fatigue, like, “No thanks, I got plenty.”

A few things inspired it:

I read that Keith Richards first met Mick Jagger on a train, stopped him to talk because he was carrying around a Lightnin’ Hopkins (I think) LP. So difficult to find–a really impressive score–in the UK in the 1960s. Music was not just inseparable from the object it was on, but the object itself was so incredibly rare, it was ultra-special. I’m extremely happy to live in an age where music is so easy to get, and to carry around, but that does fascinate me.

When Daniel Johnston was first recording, pushing his cassette tapes on people in Austin, he didn’t have a cassette-dubbing hookup, so he literally re-recorded his albums for everybody. Went back to the garage, put the boombox on top of his keyboard, banged out the entire album. Every single full album was a unique performance, an hour that took place on the planet, for one single listener.

Ray Johnson used to do this thing with art-buyers where he’d send a collage and say, “I added a bird, so that’ll be an extra $5,000.” They’d balk, and send it back, and he’d resend it, altered. “I took out the bird, but I’ve added a portrait of Picasso, so, tell you what, I’ll charge you just $3,000 extra.” He entangled people in these bizarre negotiations. I’m not doing that, but it’s the inspiration for the bridge-is-$267.19-extra thing.

Does the song itself have any significance that correlates in any way to its unorthodox distribution?

No, I just think “Dogs/Demons” is a good song, well-built for this purpose. It was written, but imperfectly, a couple of years ago. I tinkered with it recently and made it what it wanted to be, but I felt like it really belonged to itself, rather than in the company of other songs.

How did you settle on a pricing model?

I’d like them to be thought of as like tiny paintings. I asked some visual artists I know, and their general answer was that you need to ask $1,500 for a small painting, to be taken seriously (which was too much–and, a price “to be taken seriously”, how odd is that?).

That it’s $567.09, etc., is just because I wanted an absurdly specific number.

Some of it seems pretty tongue-in-cheek …

It’s partially an art prank–but it’s very much a real object you can obtain.

Might it be that this serves in part as a comment on the fetishization of music products in the so-called digital age, when folks are worrying overtime about the industry, etc?

Not really. Like I said, I wanted to make something that’s like a painting. You’re spot on about fetishization, but it’s more about being weird and interesting.

I guess I see being a musician as being a working craftsperson, and “Dogs/Demons” is something that’s hand-made.

Read your post on how the industry has abandoned older listeners, and found it interesting (and refreshing) that you didn’t take the typical stance regarding piracy and p2p ruining everything.

Yeah. There are a lot of factors. I would say that the music industry cooked its own goose, partially, by putting out 16-track albums, for $14, on which the one song on the radio sounded nothing like the rest. Eliminating singles was a cash bonanza for them, but essentially they devalued their own product–devastatingly so.

Piracy and P2P have definitely made being a musician for a living harder work, running a profitable record label mostly impossible. But, the real scandalous disaster is that the record business didn’t come correct with a new system, to counter it, in 2002. Denial, and an extreme, disastrous unwillingness to leave their comfort zones.

Times are tough for young musicians–not for me. I earned an audience basically because Warner Bros. paid for a van and motel rooms for a few years, in the 90s, so the future is working out great. I have an engaged audience with whom I can try out this weird stuff. I have tremendous respect for young artists who have something going on, because they had to do a boatload more dispiriting grunt work than I did.

As for older listeners–is there another industry in which most of their paying customers vanish after age 32, and doesn’t freak out about it?

In my corner of the world, I think that if venues did sit-down shows at 7:30, without an opener–and the show actually started at 7:30–and shut up shitty drunks that annoy the other 97% of the crowd, it’d be more like going to a movie. Not a risk of an irritating night. Middle-aged people still dig music–they just don’t hear it. If they weren’t treated like shit by venues, they’d go see more shows.

As for record companies and the like–I have no expertise, but, considering older people grew up buying music, and would continue to buy it if they could be reached, it blows my mind that nobody is trying to crack this nut. Are people afraid that, if they acknowledge that audiences are getting older, they have to admit to getting older?

Seriously, nobody wants that money?

Couldn’t this kind of model be the sort of thing that appeals to older listeners, who typically have a little more cash on hand?

I’m not sure if it’s a model–though I’m not opposed to it. I put a tentative end-date for this, in case it was overwhelming, but would be excellent if, for the rest of my career, I’d get a few orders a year to record “Dogs/Demons”. The evolution of the song would be really interesting.

Yes, just because older people tend to have more money. I have a fear that a hedge-fund manager will actually pony up the $35,335.53 and ask me to read a haiku about his cat.