June 11, 2025 • 28 mins
#161. Memphis singer/songwriter Mike Doughty returns to talk with Ron about his commitment to creating on Patreon, the allure of A.I., and the reasons behind the Soul Coughing reunion he said would never happen.Sponsored by DistroKid. Get 30% off your membership at distrokid.com/vip/independentmindedSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
You're the one that should be worried. You're a freak.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
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Speaker 5 (01:31):
Hello friends, oh Man Trials, play.
Speaker 6 (02:05):
Quiet try to play.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
Quista.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
I'm on a long merch line in the back corner
of Brooklyn Bowl. Normally, you'd never find me in this
spot at this or any other venue. Even when I
go see my favorite bands, I'm almost always a browser.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Oh cool shirt forty standing in a long line at
the end of a show. Unheard of.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Gotta beat the rush, gotta beat the traffic, gotta catch
the train, get home to the dog. But tonight I'm
on a merch line at eleven thirty ish on a
Friday night, Nashville. It's not that my pragmatic, curmudgeonly concerns
no longer exist. Tonight, there was no question I'd be
here to the last note. Tonight, I'm feeling more than
just a postgame adrenaline.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Of live music.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I've drawn extra energy from the sing alongs, the hipster camaraderie,
the nostalgia.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Damn it, do I feel alive?
Speaker 5 (03:22):
A live's alive?
Speaker 3 (03:29):
You see?
Speaker 4 (03:30):
Soul Coughing is one of those bands. They're one of
my bands. These cats and I have a long history.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Once upon a time, we were all younger men growing
up together in a legit scene in pockets of downtown
New York. City places like the knitting factory and the
limelight And is that dude behind the singer playing.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
At disk drive?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
What a weird show that way.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
That must have been one of your first shows.
Speaker 7 (03:53):
That was very early on, within the first two years,
certainly before we had a record out.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Tonight, hundreds of years and miles from those formative moments,
feels extra special. Tonight feels like a reunion long overdue.
Everyone looked good, the set was tight. You played a
lot of the older stuff. I'm curious when did Sebastian
adaptis Poseidon, God of the Sea. Look, that was a
pleasant surprise.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Sometime in the intervening quarter century. I can't tell you
exactly why.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
And it's not just the passage of time.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
There are personal stories, encounters and during that same line
where you go vulvu the bus you go and you're like,
I'm standing right.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
There, really really right on.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
That's nice.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Let me tell you, my doty.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's how you make a fan.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
That's how you make a fan for life.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
But the biggest reason I'm inching a little closer to
the soul coughing merch table, still pondering what I should
purchase to commemorate this full circle moment is that I've
just seen a band I never thought I would I
ever see live again. Soul Coughing appealed to the freaks
and the weirdos, the shy poets, and the introverted intellectuals.
When they were signed to a major label and put
(05:10):
three albums out on Warner Brothers, they seemingly achieved what
guys like me considered to be the dream. It turns
out a lot of it was nightmarish for Mike Dodi.
Almost all of the cautionary tales of rock star Life
Unfold and the singer's twenty twelve memoir The Book of Drugs,
plus maybe a few.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
New ones, This Soul Coming was pretty dark. It was
very dark.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
I was surprised to hear about it.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, people did not really know.
Speaker 7 (05:35):
And then for many years I rejected those songs and
those recordings, and people didn't really know why. I guess
for some reason, I didn't know why.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
They didn't know why.
Speaker 8 (05:44):
But then I wrote the book and everyone was like, oh, so,
why has.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Mike changed his tune? Why is a band that's turned
to ashes reincornating? A quarter century later, Mike returns to
the podcast to talk about the surprising Soul Coughing reunion
and the reasons behind it, this decade long commitment to
making music on Patreon and creating new art with some
help from artificial intelligence. Let's kick things off with a
(06:08):
cut from Soul Coughing's first ever live album, Live twenty
twenty four. Then my reunion with Mike Dody right here
on Independent Minded Run dasos.
Speaker 9 (06:19):
Mazy podcast, rydallos Pas Podcast, Plugging the People, Make God Using,
Plugging the Project, making the Famous, Helping the Mouth, Just
my Mason to talk about.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
All those little shit that the nerve.
Speaker 10 (06:47):
Get on the boss that's gonna in safe backus, Get
on boss that's gunning.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Mabel, Stop going roun the top. Get out to the bus.
Speaker 10 (07:06):
Let's go and say the back so Bee out sub
Get onto the bus that's still lead you. Stop going
up the top.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Your words burned there like the names can be bother.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
You.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
Out is cold and there and all the ways around.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Your laugh laughing masks. It's a fine wine. It's some wine.
It's a blind wine. Some like wine.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
It's some wine.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
It's supplying wine, a fine wine. It's a wine. It's
supplying wine. It's some wine.
Speaker 10 (07:51):
Get onto the bus, let's go and say with the
back so bee out suppog the bus.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Soul Coughing is just wrapped their first tour in twenty
five years four dudes playing select tracks from three studio
albums that showcased the band's jazz and hip hop grooves
mixed with oddball samples and spoken word poetry. Turns out
this wasn't the first attempt to get the band back together.
Speaker 11 (08:21):
I tried in twenty nineteen, which was the twenty fifth
anniversary of the first Soul Coughing album, and.
Speaker 7 (08:31):
It was like a total shit show, and like the
emails were bananas and you know, so that that didn't happen.
And then last year was the thirtieth, and so I thought, like,
if you do something like this, there's got to be
something along.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
The lines of a story.
Speaker 7 (08:53):
That's gonna say, I'm Mike Dodie and I live in
Memphis and I am a our songwriter.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I suppose the thirtieth anniversary of your band's debut album
is as cool a reunion story as any. Something to
put in the press release and pitch to the fans
what else you got?
Speaker 7 (09:11):
And then yeah, I was actually I was in a
mental institution and I was talking to my friend Juicy,
who was another patient.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
He just had a very like cut and dried, like,
why don't you just fucking do it?
Speaker 7 (09:26):
Man? Like he never heard of us, but he's like,
why does just fucking do it? Like buget, let's just
do it. And when I got out, I started to
write in emails.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
So Juicy from the mental institution is responsible for the
Soul Coughing reunion.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yeah, yes, Mad props to Juicy, mount Rone, mount roll,
(10:02):
mount ron an ron am rone mouth Ron.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Mad props to Juicy sounds like it could be the
name of a new soul coughing song. Regardless, God bless
this man for his unlikely nudge.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
It was like kind of in my mind to try that.
He was the guy that's like time's a wasting.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Mike wastes no time reconnecting with bandmates Mark degli Antoni
Uvogabaye and Sebastian Steinberg.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
This time, the waters are calmer, and.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
The band appropriately announces a reunion tour with the words
we said it would never happen.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
We were just gonna do like the part of the
country that we knew we'd do very well in. And
then it just went so well that I wanted to
bring it.
Speaker 8 (10:51):
To Memphis, into Nashville, into New Orleans, and to Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
And to Austin.
Speaker 8 (10:56):
I mean, those are cities that are really important to me, and.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
So sold out seventeen show run has expanded to include
those cities and more. For a second round of Soul
Confering Reunion in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 8 (11:08):
We did the second part is in the first part
went well.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
The Brooklyn Bowls set consists largely of songs from the
debut album Ruby Room, and a lot of the early
material that got the band noticed first by fans like me,
then by fans at Warner Brothers.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
The casual alternative music fan probably.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Knows circles of super Bond Bond, but even the more
obscure songs from Ruby Room seemed to resonate more with
the crowd. I interviewed Mike Dody in twenty eighteen, very
(12:50):
pleased to have with me someone who I go way
back with. Maybe he doesn't know that he's about to
find out. Well, I'm sure you have many stories like this,
being who you are and that you were in before
your solo material, and you've had quite an illustrious career
you are. I am talking to Mike Dody, a singer
songwriter who's now in Memphis, Tennessee.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
You live in Memphis. Hip has a long history in
New York City.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Indeed, I was in a men called soul Coughing in
the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
We do this little Did I know that just a
few months later I'd be leaving New York too, and
leaving the fast, talking, flame throwing life of Top.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Forty radio in my wake.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Man, I've never done coke in my life, but I
sounded like I was on coke, like I'm A few
years ago, he wrote a rock opera based on the Book.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Of Revelation, cannot get a name.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Man. He's busy, he's the master of his own destiny,
and he's the founding member of a band that I
thought was super cool back in the mid nineties called
soul Coughing. Few months after I interviewed Mike in Manhattan,
I made my escape, first from New York, then from
corporate America. My life is calmer, My patter slower paced,
(13:56):
being independent mind it is paying off, seems Mike's It's
made some changes since then, too.
Speaker 8 (14:02):
I don't relay any part of the experience to the past.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
When I first interviewed Mike, soul coughing was over toast,
and this was some moldy bread a near two decades
of inertia. The toast was burnt, charred, inedible. I didn't
really know how bad things had gone until I read
Mike's memoir, The Book of Drugs. There's a lot of
drugs in this book, and Mike's taking most of them,
(14:29):
but a large part of the book is dedicated to
not so fond recollections of Mike's soul coughing experience.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Well that that stuff is all still real.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
But within those same pages, Mike also takes accountability candid
confessions of being ego driven, sex driven, apathetic, difficult, and
certainly narcotic compared shit, He practically takes blame for his
own behavior in the book's preface.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
So what's changed?
Speaker 7 (14:54):
It was just that it was very of the moment,
and I guess as a person, I am hesitate to
say blessed to be someone who lives in the moment.
The only time I actually thought about the past was
a bunch of people used to work at Warner Brothers came.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
To the LA Show.
Speaker 7 (15:10):
They like they had their own little reunion, because you know,
they were the people that worked Soul Coughing and the
Flaming Lips.
Speaker 8 (15:16):
And the Boredoms and like the weird bands on Warner Brothers,
and so that was kind of interesting and fun and unusual.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Interesting, fun and unusual. That's a great way to describe
the Soul Coughing experience. And in the early nineties I
was already a fan, having seen them at now defunct
watering holes like Cbe's Gallery and Wetlands Preserve. It was
exciting to see such an odd band packing houses, getting notice,
building a buzz for a guy in his own odd
(15:45):
band trying to do same. This was cause for celebration.
And it was during this time that Mike Dodie and
I first met, and I hugged you and told you
how much I loved the band. And you were out
there on the floor at Wetlands just kind of greeting
the public of being the rock star behind stage, meditating
or eat a banana or doing whatever. And you were
(16:07):
so cool to me, even though you could have easily
not been, you know, and then singling me out during
bust to Beelzebub while I was standing like psyched at
the side of the stage. That was it from that
moment on like excellent.
Speaker 7 (16:22):
Well, I'm sure they had much to do with your
personality because I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
There are plenty of people.
Speaker 7 (16:29):
I wouldn't say I was not nice to them, but
that I sort of bifurcated my life from theirs very quickly.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah, Mike takes words like liminal and bifurcated, changes up
the rhythm, turns them into music. His catchy wordplay and
his beat poetry the most delicious ingredients in his band's recipe.
Speaker 7 (16:51):
There were two songs, Paco Nation and City of Motors
that I was really afraid I was going to forget
the words, so I had manager print out the words
and duct tape them to the stage in case I
needed a guide. But I remembered everything. I mean everything
just kind of kind of was right there waiting to
(17:12):
be accessed.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Well, one other thing that I noticed that I appreciated,
and I was one of those people for the most part,
was you had the crowd singing along, especially to the
older songs.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Was that a surprise, No, not.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
A surprise at all.
Speaker 7 (17:25):
I mean, I am well aware of the dedication of
the fan base been here for a very long time,
and I have been here with that.
Speaker 5 (17:37):
Than you, good friend on a keyboards settler.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Tonight, please meet Mark Kelly.
Speaker 8 (17:44):
And from.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Halfway through the show, I scanned the room, catching glimpses
of joy from the crowd. We're all watching this cat
up there, strumming his guitar, spitting his beat poet word jump,
and his slightly nasal passages, backed by a bunch of
guys he once wanted nothing more to do with.
Speaker 7 (18:06):
Exits to freeway is twisted like knots on the fingers,
jewels cleaving skin between.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Breast.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
I wonder if a lot of the folks here know
or care about the backstory. Maybe they just like soft
serve or have enjoyed Mike's prolific post soul coughing solo career.
But maybe some of these folks have read Mike's book two.
Maybe they've heard about his pandemic experience mostly spent relapsing
and losing his marbles until he checked himself into a
(18:39):
mental hospital to get better and play Jenga.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
With Juicy Mad props to Juicy.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Maybe some of us can relate to Mike's pain even
more than we can to his music. We appreciate him
for his candor as much as we do for his songs.
And so we're not just here to bop up and
down to the beat. We're here to root for our champion.
Reading the book, I felt more of an appreciation for
seeing you enjoying yourself. Did you feel that experience as
(19:05):
an older gentleman, like, how's your body doing? Obviously you're
not up there doing splits, but it's still in an
endurance test.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
Wouldn't you say, body's doing great, voice is in good shape.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
It was very smooth.
Speaker 8 (19:18):
Our crew were like super great, super good people.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
It was pretty much entirely good.
Speaker 12 (19:28):
To Los Angeles. It is fat Los Angeles.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
Our conversation includes no promises of future soul coughing shows.
After a successful reunion tour, two separate jaunts on the
bus to reconnect with American fans, one might enjoy a
siesta instead.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Mike Dody does a very Mike Doughty thing.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I have a couple of friends in Rome. I went.
Speaker 7 (20:00):
I went to Rome right after well, as soon as
you could buy plane tickets after in the mid the
liminal area of before and after the pandemic, as soon
as you could buy a plane ticket I was.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
I was like, where am I going?
Speaker 4 (20:14):
Rome?
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Go to Rome? Rome by all means Rome.
Speaker 7 (20:19):
And I met a couple of people there who when
I came back, they set up a show for me,
and that went really well. It was just a little solo,
acoustic kind of nothing. They set up a bit of
a more formal show in like kind of a venue.
The other one was just kind of like I set
up in the corner. I don't do particularly well in Italy,
(20:40):
never have, and because that went so well, we're just
doing five shows over there.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
I will cherish my visit here in memory as long
as I live.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
Living in the moment is likely a little more fun
when the moment includes.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
A few under the radar shows in Italia. Mike's still
eager to get home to Memphis, a place to unwind
from the whirlwind with his dog's Lunchy and Eustace and
the best backdrop from Mike's commitment to his songwriting craft,
something he continues to work at in a very specific
corner of the Internet.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Next year is gonna be ten years I've been on Patreon.
Speaker 7 (21:17):
It's been at least a song a week, and then
lately I've been putting out five songs a week, so
twenty songs plus a month.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You know, it's just sort of like an open notebooks
kind of a thing.
Speaker 7 (21:48):
My practice daily as an artist is to get up
and get a beat off the internet and then play
bass to it, and play guitartood and play piano to it,
and then add a vocal, play some sound effects. And
that is my practice. That is my discipline. You know,
(22:14):
it's cool playing old songs and leave me. I'm happy
if people engage in that.
Speaker 8 (22:19):
But in terms of like what I consider my life
to be about, it's definitely the Patreon.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Stuff, illustrated covers Mike's generating for these new Patreon singles,
or just another way for him to make art for
art's sake.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
He'd been handling that project on his own.
Speaker 7 (22:39):
And then I found that I could go to an
ai a couple of ais I use, actually, and so
I would go.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Okay, describe the image that I.
Speaker 7 (22:49):
Just uploaded, and it would go it's a man holding
a Chihuahuan in front of orange door with an a
new film boaster, and he's got molt colored scribbled lines
covering states, and I would.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Go, okay.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
Generat an illustration based on that, and what it does
is so strange, so uncanny. I just find it so interesting,
and it always does it wrong, but it's the wrongness
of it is sort of the best part.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
When I first met Mike Doty, I was still a teenager.
The music he and I played and the music we
loved was strange and uncanny, and that's why we found
it interesting. Back then, it was abundant, even popular. It
was a brief era and major labels could afford to
dedicate money and manpower to quote unquote the weird bands,
(23:46):
a time where weird bands like Soul Coughing still felt
different in the post Cobaine Meltdown, providing an alternative to alternative.
In today's era of milk toast music, unlimited plays and
instant acts, guys like Mike and I remain archaeologists of
the weird and the wonderful.
Speaker 7 (24:05):
This is great band on Spotify called Penis Angel. I
actually found the guy on Instagram and I've been communicating
with him. Lives in Kansas City, actually in his own right.
His name is ten ten Benja, a great singer songwriter,
and some of what they do is like them and
(24:25):
others is then using an AI and giving it prompts,
and it is just insane and weird and creepy and
hilarious and like so many artists are just like enjoying
the hell out of this moment.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
I think AI is gonna get.
Speaker 7 (24:42):
Boring in you know, two years or five years, or
however long it takes to just become your average mid
illustrator or mid musician.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Or whatever, just mid mid mid.
Speaker 7 (24:56):
For now, it is so fucked up and so fascinating.
It reminds me a lot of when the synthesizer was invented,
and you know, it was invented to like sound like
a violin, sound like a trombone, but in actual fact,
what artists were doing were like trying to fuck it up,
trying to confuse it, trying to like find something new.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
So I'm I love it. I'm all about it.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Mike Dody embraces the role of mad scientists, always trying
to find something new, but US fans are grateful that
he returned to something classic.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Punched it.
Speaker 5 (25:35):
I gotta I got so much thing soon, and I
got a phone up.
Speaker 13 (25:40):
I got a phone now if towne up town, I
gotta say, I've got a little bit of Bush Gotta
stand it on the corner Bush shuck a bomb, got
a baby, gotta stand on the corner.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
I gotta thing, I gotta thing, see, I gotta it's.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Such dream shoe, dream.
Speaker 5 (26:12):
Shoe, dream zone, of which it's all.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
When I exit the venue holding my vinyl copy of
Ruby Room, I spot a handful of folks standing by
the tour bus. Maybe Mike can hug them at a
show when they were nineteen two. For whatever reason they're there,
I'm sure they all have their soul coughing story, willing
to stick around to tell it to a band that
means a lot to them. This one's mine, Mike, Dodie
(26:45):
and I have met three times now. It's not just
journalism or fandom.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
It's fuel.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Fuel to do the podcast, fuel to spend more time
with the thing I love the most, music, to go
to the show, to be around people, to exist in
the world. And it's a fine example to live in
the moment, commit to my craft and always try to
find something new. Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta
(27:12):
go listen to Penis Angel.
Speaker 7 (27:18):
Will Lagunslip Only Striver and Crash under Queens.
Speaker 5 (27:28):
I've seen though cops Robos the damn it's the same.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Find out more about Soul Coughing at soul coughingband dot
com and follow Mike on Patreon at Patreon dot com.
Slash Dodie big thanks to Mike for another great candid conversation,
and got to give a special thanks to Nate me
S at seven S Management for coordinating another reunion. And
oh look, I've still got a great big gob of
(27:56):
gratitude left in my thank you bag for you loyal
podcast listener.
Speaker 4 (28:01):
Here you go, it's a little sticky.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
Thanks for spending this gob of your time with me
in the podcast since twenty twelve. If you're still here,
how about leaving a kind review for Independent Minded on
Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Smash the five star button, share
the links, tell your friends if you have any, and
as always, the most appreciated way to support what I
do here is to purchase of music at Baldfreak dot com.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
Independent Minded It's.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
A bald Freak music production and me I'm still Ron Scalzo.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
You're a nice You're a freak.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Fifi. Thank you very much.
You're the one that should be worried. You're a freak.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You're heading for big trouble.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Independent mind that is made possible by distro Kid.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Somebody call me for help?
Speaker 4 (00:18):
Whoa who pray teller you I'm distro Kid.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
When an Indian artist needs help getting their new pop
on the web, I swoop in to save the day.
I get your unlimited uploads and make sure you get
one hundred percent of your hnings. And if you want
to get creative with your promo, I got all these
sweet pools in my utility belt to mix. Spread in
the words simple and fun. Just send me your files,
(00:44):
sign up for the basic plan and watch.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
Me do the rest. Distro Kid, that's incredible. Where do
I sign up?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Don't be coy ron. You know where you've been using
me for years.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Well, don't give people the wrong impression.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
Go to DistroKid dot com slash vip slash independent minded
and get saved by distro kid at thirty percent off
the regular price. You'll find out what I already know.
Distro kid is the best place for independent minded artists
and indie labels to take care of their digital distro.
Speaker 5 (01:31):
Hello friends, oh Man Trials, play.
Speaker 6 (02:05):
Quiet try to play.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
Quista.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
I'm on a long merch line in the back corner
of Brooklyn Bowl. Normally, you'd never find me in this
spot at this or any other venue. Even when I
go see my favorite bands, I'm almost always a browser.
Speaker 4 (02:41):
Oh cool shirt forty standing in a long line at
the end of a show. Unheard of.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Gotta beat the rush, gotta beat the traffic, gotta catch
the train, get home to the dog. But tonight I'm
on a merch line at eleven thirty ish on a
Friday night, Nashville. It's not that my pragmatic, curmudgeonly concerns
no longer exist. Tonight, there was no question I'd be
here to the last note. Tonight, I'm feeling more than
just a postgame adrenaline.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Of live music.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I've drawn extra energy from the sing alongs, the hipster camaraderie,
the nostalgia.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Damn it, do I feel alive?
Speaker 5 (03:22):
A live's alive?
Speaker 3 (03:29):
You see?
Speaker 4 (03:30):
Soul Coughing is one of those bands. They're one of
my bands. These cats and I have a long history.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Once upon a time, we were all younger men growing
up together in a legit scene in pockets of downtown
New York. City places like the knitting factory and the
limelight And is that dude behind the singer playing.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
At disk drive?
Speaker 1 (03:50):
What a weird show that way.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
That must have been one of your first shows.
Speaker 7 (03:53):
That was very early on, within the first two years,
certainly before we had a record out.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Tonight, hundreds of years and miles from those formative moments,
feels extra special. Tonight feels like a reunion long overdue.
Everyone looked good, the set was tight. You played a
lot of the older stuff. I'm curious when did Sebastian
adaptis Poseidon, God of the Sea. Look, that was a
pleasant surprise.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Sometime in the intervening quarter century. I can't tell you
exactly why.
Speaker 4 (04:30):
And it's not just the passage of time.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
There are personal stories, encounters and during that same line
where you go vulvu the bus you go and you're like,
I'm standing right.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
There, really really right on.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
That's nice.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
Let me tell you, my doty.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
That's how you make a fan.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
That's how you make a fan for life.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
But the biggest reason I'm inching a little closer to
the soul coughing merch table, still pondering what I should
purchase to commemorate this full circle moment is that I've
just seen a band I never thought I would I
ever see live again. Soul Coughing appealed to the freaks
and the weirdos, the shy poets, and the introverted intellectuals.
When they were signed to a major label and put
(05:10):
three albums out on Warner Brothers, they seemingly achieved what
guys like me considered to be the dream. It turns
out a lot of it was nightmarish for Mike Dodi.
Almost all of the cautionary tales of rock star Life
Unfold and the singer's twenty twelve memoir The Book of Drugs,
plus maybe a few.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
New ones, This Soul Coming was pretty dark. It was
very dark.
Speaker 4 (05:32):
I was surprised to hear about it.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, people did not really know.
Speaker 7 (05:35):
And then for many years I rejected those songs and
those recordings, and people didn't really know why. I guess
for some reason, I didn't know why.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
They didn't know why.
Speaker 8 (05:44):
But then I wrote the book and everyone was like, oh, so,
why has.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Mike changed his tune? Why is a band that's turned
to ashes reincornating? A quarter century later, Mike returns to
the podcast to talk about the surprising Soul Coughing reunion
and the reasons behind it, this decade long commitment to
making music on Patreon and creating new art with some
help from artificial intelligence. Let's kick things off with a
(06:08):
cut from Soul Coughing's first ever live album, Live twenty
twenty four. Then my reunion with Mike Dody right here
on Independent Minded Run dasos.
Speaker 9 (06:19):
Mazy podcast, rydallos Pas Podcast, Plugging the People, Make God Using,
Plugging the Project, making the Famous, Helping the Mouth, Just
my Mason to talk about.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
All those little shit that the nerve.
Speaker 10 (06:47):
Get on the boss that's gonna in safe backus, Get
on boss that's gunning.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Mabel, Stop going roun the top. Get out to the bus.
Speaker 10 (07:06):
Let's go and say the back so Bee out sub
Get onto the bus that's still lead you. Stop going
up the top.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
Your words burned there like the names can be bother.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
You.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
Out is cold and there and all the ways around.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Your laugh laughing masks. It's a fine wine. It's some wine.
It's a blind wine. Some like wine.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
It's some wine.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
It's supplying wine, a fine wine. It's a wine. It's
supplying wine. It's some wine.
Speaker 10 (07:51):
Get onto the bus, let's go and say with the
back so bee out suppog the bus.
Speaker 3 (08:03):
Soul Coughing is just wrapped their first tour in twenty
five years four dudes playing select tracks from three studio
albums that showcased the band's jazz and hip hop grooves
mixed with oddball samples and spoken word poetry. Turns out
this wasn't the first attempt to get the band back together.
Speaker 11 (08:21):
I tried in twenty nineteen, which was the twenty fifth
anniversary of the first Soul Coughing album, and.
Speaker 7 (08:31):
It was like a total shit show, and like the
emails were bananas and you know, so that that didn't happen.
And then last year was the thirtieth, and so I thought, like,
if you do something like this, there's got to be
something along.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
The lines of a story.
Speaker 7 (08:53):
That's gonna say, I'm Mike Dodie and I live in
Memphis and I am a our songwriter.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
I suppose the thirtieth anniversary of your band's debut album
is as cool a reunion story as any. Something to
put in the press release and pitch to the fans
what else you got?
Speaker 7 (09:11):
And then yeah, I was actually I was in a
mental institution and I was talking to my friend Juicy,
who was another patient.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
He just had a very like cut and dried, like,
why don't you just fucking do it?
Speaker 7 (09:26):
Man? Like he never heard of us, but he's like,
why does just fucking do it? Like buget, let's just
do it. And when I got out, I started to
write in emails.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
So Juicy from the mental institution is responsible for the
Soul Coughing reunion.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Yeah, yes, Mad props to Juicy, mount Rone, mount roll,
(10:02):
mount ron an ron am rone mouth Ron.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
Mad props to Juicy sounds like it could be the
name of a new soul coughing song. Regardless, God bless
this man for his unlikely nudge.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
It was like kind of in my mind to try that.
He was the guy that's like time's a wasting.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Mike wastes no time reconnecting with bandmates Mark degli Antoni
Uvogabaye and Sebastian Steinberg.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
This time, the waters are calmer, and.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
The band appropriately announces a reunion tour with the words
we said it would never happen.
Speaker 7 (10:41):
We were just gonna do like the part of the
country that we knew we'd do very well in. And
then it just went so well that I wanted to
bring it.
Speaker 8 (10:51):
To Memphis, into Nashville, into New Orleans, and to Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
And to Austin.
Speaker 8 (10:56):
I mean, those are cities that are really important to me, and.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
So sold out seventeen show run has expanded to include
those cities and more. For a second round of Soul
Confering Reunion in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 8 (11:08):
We did the second part is in the first part
went well.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
The Brooklyn Bowls set consists largely of songs from the
debut album Ruby Room, and a lot of the early
material that got the band noticed first by fans like me,
then by fans at Warner Brothers.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
The casual alternative music fan probably.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Knows circles of super Bond Bond, but even the more
obscure songs from Ruby Room seemed to resonate more with
the crowd. I interviewed Mike Dody in twenty eighteen, very
(12:50):
pleased to have with me someone who I go way
back with. Maybe he doesn't know that he's about to
find out. Well, I'm sure you have many stories like this,
being who you are and that you were in before
your solo material, and you've had quite an illustrious career
you are. I am talking to Mike Dody, a singer
songwriter who's now in Memphis, Tennessee.
Speaker 4 (13:08):
You live in Memphis. Hip has a long history in
New York City.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Indeed, I was in a men called soul Coughing in
the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
We do this little Did I know that just a
few months later I'd be leaving New York too, and
leaving the fast, talking, flame throwing life of Top.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
Forty radio in my wake.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Man, I've never done coke in my life, but I
sounded like I was on coke, like I'm A few
years ago, he wrote a rock opera based on the Book.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Of Revelation, cannot get a name.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
Man. He's busy, he's the master of his own destiny,
and he's the founding member of a band that I
thought was super cool back in the mid nineties called
soul Coughing. Few months after I interviewed Mike in Manhattan,
I made my escape, first from New York, then from
corporate America. My life is calmer, My patter slower paced,
(13:56):
being independent mind it is paying off, seems Mike's It's
made some changes since then, too.
Speaker 8 (14:02):
I don't relay any part of the experience to the past.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
When I first interviewed Mike, soul coughing was over toast,
and this was some moldy bread a near two decades
of inertia. The toast was burnt, charred, inedible. I didn't
really know how bad things had gone until I read
Mike's memoir, The Book of Drugs. There's a lot of
drugs in this book, and Mike's taking most of them,
(14:29):
but a large part of the book is dedicated to
not so fond recollections of Mike's soul coughing experience.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Well that that stuff is all still real.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
But within those same pages, Mike also takes accountability candid
confessions of being ego driven, sex driven, apathetic, difficult, and
certainly narcotic compared shit, He practically takes blame for his
own behavior in the book's preface.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
So what's changed?
Speaker 7 (14:54):
It was just that it was very of the moment,
and I guess as a person, I am hesitate to
say blessed to be someone who lives in the moment.
The only time I actually thought about the past was
a bunch of people used to work at Warner Brothers came.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
To the LA Show.
Speaker 7 (15:10):
They like they had their own little reunion, because you know,
they were the people that worked Soul Coughing and the
Flaming Lips.
Speaker 8 (15:16):
And the Boredoms and like the weird bands on Warner Brothers,
and so that was kind of interesting and fun and unusual.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Interesting, fun and unusual. That's a great way to describe
the Soul Coughing experience. And in the early nineties I
was already a fan, having seen them at now defunct
watering holes like Cbe's Gallery and Wetlands Preserve. It was
exciting to see such an odd band packing houses, getting notice,
building a buzz for a guy in his own odd
(15:45):
band trying to do same. This was cause for celebration.
And it was during this time that Mike Dodie and
I first met, and I hugged you and told you
how much I loved the band. And you were out
there on the floor at Wetlands just kind of greeting
the public of being the rock star behind stage, meditating
or eat a banana or doing whatever. And you were
(16:07):
so cool to me, even though you could have easily
not been, you know, and then singling me out during
bust to Beelzebub while I was standing like psyched at
the side of the stage. That was it from that
moment on like excellent.
Speaker 7 (16:22):
Well, I'm sure they had much to do with your
personality because I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
There are plenty of people.
Speaker 7 (16:29):
I wouldn't say I was not nice to them, but
that I sort of bifurcated my life from theirs very quickly.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah, Mike takes words like liminal and bifurcated, changes up
the rhythm, turns them into music. His catchy wordplay and
his beat poetry the most delicious ingredients in his band's recipe.
Speaker 7 (16:51):
There were two songs, Paco Nation and City of Motors
that I was really afraid I was going to forget
the words, so I had manager print out the words
and duct tape them to the stage in case I
needed a guide. But I remembered everything. I mean everything
just kind of kind of was right there waiting to
(17:12):
be accessed.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Well, one other thing that I noticed that I appreciated,
and I was one of those people for the most part,
was you had the crowd singing along, especially to the
older songs.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Was that a surprise, No, not.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
A surprise at all.
Speaker 7 (17:25):
I mean, I am well aware of the dedication of
the fan base been here for a very long time,
and I have been here with that.
Speaker 5 (17:37):
Than you, good friend on a keyboards settler.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Tonight, please meet Mark Kelly.
Speaker 8 (17:44):
And from.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
Halfway through the show, I scanned the room, catching glimpses
of joy from the crowd. We're all watching this cat
up there, strumming his guitar, spitting his beat poet word jump,
and his slightly nasal passages, backed by a bunch of
guys he once wanted nothing more to do with.
Speaker 7 (18:06):
Exits to freeway is twisted like knots on the fingers,
jewels cleaving skin between.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Breast.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
I wonder if a lot of the folks here know
or care about the backstory. Maybe they just like soft
serve or have enjoyed Mike's prolific post soul coughing solo career.
But maybe some of these folks have read Mike's book two.
Maybe they've heard about his pandemic experience mostly spent relapsing
and losing his marbles until he checked himself into a
(18:39):
mental hospital to get better and play Jenga.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
With Juicy Mad props to Juicy.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Maybe some of us can relate to Mike's pain even
more than we can to his music. We appreciate him
for his candor as much as we do for his songs.
And so we're not just here to bop up and
down to the beat. We're here to root for our champion.
Reading the book, I felt more of an appreciation for
seeing you enjoying yourself. Did you feel that experience as
(19:05):
an older gentleman, like, how's your body doing? Obviously you're
not up there doing splits, but it's still in an
endurance test.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
Wouldn't you say, body's doing great, voice is in good shape.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
It was very smooth.
Speaker 8 (19:18):
Our crew were like super great, super good people.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
It was pretty much entirely good.
Speaker 12 (19:28):
To Los Angeles. It is fat Los Angeles.
Speaker 3 (19:41):
Our conversation includes no promises of future soul coughing shows.
After a successful reunion tour, two separate jaunts on the
bus to reconnect with American fans, one might enjoy a
siesta instead.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Mike Dody does a very Mike Doughty thing.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I have a couple of friends in Rome. I went.
Speaker 7 (20:00):
I went to Rome right after well, as soon as
you could buy plane tickets after in the mid the
liminal area of before and after the pandemic, as soon
as you could buy a plane ticket I was.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
I was like, where am I going?
Speaker 4 (20:14):
Rome?
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Go to Rome? Rome by all means Rome.
Speaker 7 (20:19):
And I met a couple of people there who when
I came back, they set up a show for me,
and that went really well. It was just a little solo,
acoustic kind of nothing. They set up a bit of
a more formal show in like kind of a venue.
The other one was just kind of like I set
up in the corner. I don't do particularly well in Italy,
(20:40):
never have, and because that went so well, we're just
doing five shows over there.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
I will cherish my visit here in memory as long
as I live.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
Living in the moment is likely a little more fun
when the moment includes.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
A few under the radar shows in Italia. Mike's still
eager to get home to Memphis, a place to unwind
from the whirlwind with his dog's Lunchy and Eustace and
the best backdrop from Mike's commitment to his songwriting craft,
something he continues to work at in a very specific
corner of the Internet.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Next year is gonna be ten years I've been on Patreon.
Speaker 7 (21:17):
It's been at least a song a week, and then
lately I've been putting out five songs a week, so
twenty songs plus a month.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You know, it's just sort of like an open notebooks
kind of a thing.
Speaker 7 (21:48):
My practice daily as an artist is to get up
and get a beat off the internet and then play
bass to it, and play guitartood and play piano to it,
and then add a vocal, play some sound effects. And
that is my practice. That is my discipline. You know,
(22:14):
it's cool playing old songs and leave me. I'm happy
if people engage in that.
Speaker 8 (22:19):
But in terms of like what I consider my life
to be about, it's definitely the Patreon.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Stuff, illustrated covers Mike's generating for these new Patreon singles,
or just another way for him to make art for
art's sake.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
He'd been handling that project on his own.
Speaker 7 (22:39):
And then I found that I could go to an
ai a couple of ais I use, actually, and so
I would go.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Okay, describe the image that I.
Speaker 7 (22:49):
Just uploaded, and it would go it's a man holding
a Chihuahuan in front of orange door with an a
new film boaster, and he's got molt colored scribbled lines
covering states, and I would.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Go, okay.
Speaker 7 (22:58):
Generat an illustration based on that, and what it does
is so strange, so uncanny. I just find it so interesting,
and it always does it wrong, but it's the wrongness
of it is sort of the best part.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
When I first met Mike Doty, I was still a teenager.
The music he and I played and the music we
loved was strange and uncanny, and that's why we found
it interesting. Back then, it was abundant, even popular. It
was a brief era and major labels could afford to
dedicate money and manpower to quote unquote the weird bands,
(23:46):
a time where weird bands like Soul Coughing still felt
different in the post Cobaine Meltdown, providing an alternative to alternative.
In today's era of milk toast music, unlimited plays and
instant acts, guys like Mike and I remain archaeologists of
the weird and the wonderful.
Speaker 7 (24:05):
This is great band on Spotify called Penis Angel. I
actually found the guy on Instagram and I've been communicating
with him. Lives in Kansas City, actually in his own right.
His name is ten ten Benja, a great singer songwriter,
and some of what they do is like them and
(24:25):
others is then using an AI and giving it prompts,
and it is just insane and weird and creepy and
hilarious and like so many artists are just like enjoying
the hell out of this moment.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
I think AI is gonna get.
Speaker 7 (24:42):
Boring in you know, two years or five years, or
however long it takes to just become your average mid
illustrator or mid musician.
Speaker 1 (24:54):
Or whatever, just mid mid mid.
Speaker 7 (24:56):
For now, it is so fucked up and so fascinating.
It reminds me a lot of when the synthesizer was invented,
and you know, it was invented to like sound like
a violin, sound like a trombone, but in actual fact,
what artists were doing were like trying to fuck it up,
trying to confuse it, trying to like find something new.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
So I'm I love it. I'm all about it.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Mike Dody embraces the role of mad scientists, always trying
to find something new, but US fans are grateful that
he returned to something classic.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Punched it.
Speaker 5 (25:35):
I gotta I got so much thing soon, and I
got a phone up.
Speaker 13 (25:40):
I got a phone now if towne up town, I
gotta say, I've got a little bit of Bush Gotta
stand it on the corner Bush shuck a bomb, got
a baby, gotta stand on the corner.
Speaker 5 (25:56):
I gotta thing, I gotta thing, see, I gotta it's.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Such dream shoe, dream.
Speaker 5 (26:12):
Shoe, dream zone, of which it's all.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
When I exit the venue holding my vinyl copy of
Ruby Room, I spot a handful of folks standing by
the tour bus. Maybe Mike can hug them at a
show when they were nineteen two. For whatever reason they're there,
I'm sure they all have their soul coughing story, willing
to stick around to tell it to a band that
means a lot to them. This one's mine, Mike, Dodie
(26:45):
and I have met three times now. It's not just
journalism or fandom.
Speaker 4 (26:50):
It's fuel.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Fuel to do the podcast, fuel to spend more time
with the thing I love the most, music, to go
to the show, to be around people, to exist in
the world. And it's a fine example to live in
the moment, commit to my craft and always try to
find something new. Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta
(27:12):
go listen to Penis Angel.
Speaker 7 (27:18):
Will Lagunslip Only Striver and Crash under Queens.
Speaker 5 (27:28):
I've seen though cops Robos the damn it's the same.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Find out more about Soul Coughing at soul coughingband dot
com and follow Mike on Patreon at Patreon dot com.
Slash Dodie big thanks to Mike for another great candid conversation,
and got to give a special thanks to Nate me
S at seven S Management for coordinating another reunion. And
oh look, I've still got a great big gob of
(27:56):
gratitude left in my thank you bag for you loyal
podcast listener.
Speaker 4 (28:01):
Here you go, it's a little sticky.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
Thanks for spending this gob of your time with me
in the podcast since twenty twelve. If you're still here,
how about leaving a kind review for Independent Minded on
Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Smash the five star button, share
the links, tell your friends if you have any, and
as always, the most appreciated way to support what I
do here is to purchase of music at Baldfreak dot com.
Speaker 4 (28:29):
Independent Minded It's.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
A bald Freak music production and me I'm still Ron Scalzo.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
You're a nice You're a freak.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Fifi. Thank you very much.
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