Song, by Toad

One thing everyone knows about Micah P. Hinson is the fairytale story of his fall and rise from the depths of a drug related incarceration after falling in with the wrong woman, to the valedictory release of his beautiful debut album Micah P. HInson & the Gospel of Progress back in 2004. He was saved by the music, we tell ourselves, fitting the whole thing neatly into a nice, Meg Ryan-friendly narrative that fits the kind of one-dimensional storytelling to which we are becoming increasingly adherent.

I myself had pretty much that basic story in my head when I met him at the End of the Road Festival, in September 2008. Fortunately, before I could stray too far down a path that seems to quite irritate him, Micah himself decided to make sure I knew that was bollocks from the beginning. “The music for me wasn’t like a saviour to pull me out of the dark spaces” he told me early on, after explaining that the narrative in most people’s heads is a pretty superficial charicature of years of his life, the actual story much less neat and tidy than that.

“Even on the new album [Micah. P Hinson & the Red Empire Orchestra] there’s songs, like Keep Having These Dreams that I wrote when I was 19 or something. There’s some other songs on the record that are quite old. On Opera Circuit there are some other songs that are pretty damn old that didn’t come from that exact time. By the time I recorded the Gospel of Progress record I had a lot more than just a couple of dozen songs. By that point I’d been recording songs for eight years. Not sending out demos or talking to labels of any of that shit, but I had a four track and then I moved up to having a computer. By the time I had the Gospel of Progress I probably had five hundred songs maybe, I mean a shitload of songs, and so the Gospel of Progress was when we went back through all of those tunes and decided what the best ones were and that’s what made up the Gospel.

“So the Gospel didn’t come out of a certain time in my life, it wasn’t like there was a fall and there was this rise and all these songs came out, it was nothing like that. And even getting signed to a record label, from the time I lived in the hotel and I was writing songs, and you know my life had fallen apart, and I was bankrupt and all of that shit, to the time that I actually got signed by a record label like at least three or four years had passed between those points.” Read the rest of this entry »