Mike Doughty has always sounded like a man tuning in to strange frequencies no one else can hear. Now he’s back with Ghost of Vroom, a new album that plays like a dub-soaked séance with the specter of Soul Coughing, the band he famously walked away from—and then, somehow, kind of made peace with.
“I wrote this record and went to Soul Coughing and asked them if they wanted to do it,” Doughty tells me. “And they said no.” So he called up longtime collaborator Andrew “Scrap” Livingston, dubbed their duo Ghost of Vroom (a nod to the dub remix they never made of Ruby Vroom), and started recording cello-fueled weirdness in Mario Caldato Jr.’s house. “We just went nuts on every instrument,” he grins. “Plus weird noises on the cello.”
There are breakbeats from YouTube, upright bass parts written on GarageBand, spam voicemails in Mandarin and from “Donnie Farmer at the IRS,” and a recurring structural twist: each song ends with a surreal epilogue. “We call them ‘dreams,’” Doughty explains, “and every song has one. It’s gonna be a Ghost of Vroom trademark.”
If all this feels suspiciously familiar to longtime fans, well, that’s the idea—but not on purpose. “I didn’t set out to sound like Soul Coughing again,” he insists. “People just kept pointing out to me that it sounded like Soul Coughing. It was extremely organic. I’ve never had a premeditated drive to go back to an old sound. Much to the consternation of my audience.”
But maybe there’s something in the air. Or, more precisely, maybe it’s just the apocalypse. The record oozes political and existential dread (in a good way). “It’s a politically fraught time to make an album,” he says. “The last sound on the record is a backwards loop of a W.B. Yeats poem about the apocalypse. We’ve got a song about James Jesus Angleton. We’ve got the IRS calling. There’s a lot of apocalypse in there.”
It’s not his first biblical rodeo. Doughty previously staged a Revelation-inspired rock opera for WNYC, and one of Ghost of Vroom’s standout tracks, “Revelator,” reanimates gospel lyrics and actual scripture. It’s not a cover of “John the Revelator,” he points out—“lots of musicians have tackled that”—but something more like a gospel noir fever dream.
Still, Ghost of Vroom isn’t a nostalgia trip. “This is not a sentimental record,” Doughty says. “It’s not looking backward. It’s just, you know, a weird old man being as weird as he possibly can.”
That weirdness was cultivated early on, with help from his poetry teacher at The New School, the same class that counted Ani DiFranco as a peer. “He was all about being the most authentic version of yourself,” Doughty remembers. “And stealing. He was big on stealing.”
That philosophy seems to have stuck. On a song like “More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle,” you’ll find samples he’s used before, like on Golden Delicious. On others, you’ll find phrases that sound invented mid-syllable, like “beat up born,” which he admits is just placeholder nonsense that became canon. “Some singers do ‘blah blah,’” he shrugs. “I use words.”
Doughty’s whole approach to songwriting feels like reverse-engineering a signal from another galaxy. “I just want to be completely different from everything else,” he says. “Everything’s really smooth? I try to be really rough. Everything’s in tune? I try to be really out of tune.”
It’s a philosophy that accidentally timed itself perfectly in the ’90s, when weirdness was mainstream. “The culture of weird exploded,” Doughty recalls. “Ren & Stimpy, late-night MTV, squirrel nut zippers—people were just listening to insane shit. And I was dumb enough to think I could make pop music out of it.”
Looking back, the timing was divine. Irresistible Bliss turns 25 this year, and Doughty can admit it now: “That was the one with the radio hit.” (Yes, “Super Bon Bon” still slaps.)
And while he may never reconcile with the other two guys from Soul Coughing, he’s more than happy being the lone professional version of himself. “I’m the only professional me that I’m aware of,” he deadpans. “WWNED: What Would Nobody Else Do.”
If you need a mission statement for Doughty, there it is.
[editors note: Soul Coughing have since reunited]
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
