Ghost of Vroom releasing 1st album
Former Soul Coughing front man, solo singersongwriter, author and Memphis transplant Mike Doughty is back with a new band, Ghost of Vroom.
The group — featuring Doughty and his longtime collaborator bassist/cellist Andrew “Scrap” Livingston — will release its full-length debut, “Ghost of Vroom 1,” through Mod y Vi Records on March 19. The album's first single, “I Hear the Ax Swinging,” is available now at all streaming and download services.
The record follows the group's debut EP, the cheekily titled “Ghost of Vroom 2,” which was released this past July and featured timely takes on the pandemic (“Rona Pollona,” “1918") and the summer's civil unrest (“Chief of Police”).
An Army brat, Doughty was born in Kentucky but was raised in upstate New York, where his father was stationed at West Point. He moved to New York City in 1989 when he was 18. In NYC, Doughty launched his career with poetic/hip-hop influenced alt-rock band Soul Coughing. The group broke though in the mid'90s with a trio of successful albums for Warner Bros., before Doughty went solo in the early 2000s.
In 2015, Doughty resettled in Memphis' Cooperyoung neighborhood, where he's become a high-profile presence working with a variety of local rappers and staging a series of improv music concerts.
Following the release of his 2016 LP, “The Heart Watches While the Brain Burns,” Doughty found himself pondering a reunion with his former bandmates in Soul Coughing. The spark for that came from working with members of Memphis' Unapologetic hiphop collective.
"Basically a couple Unapologetic rappers were [over] freestyling to a track I put up. I became envious of guys like A Weirdo From Memphis and Preauxx — they can freestyle brilliantly for like half an hour. While it takes me 8 hours to come up with 16 bars,” says Doughty, laughing.
“But working with those guys pushed me back into that area. I started working with samples, doing stuff on Garageband on my iphone, coming up with bass lines and doing my quasi-rap thing again. It wasn't a conscious thought of I'm going to circle back to the Soul Coughing vibe. I just looked up and it was like, 'Here I am again.'”
Doughty developed a set of songs for the project he'd eventually call Ghost of Vroom, a reference
to an unreleased dub version of the first Soul Coughing album, “Ruby Vroom.”
“I actually wrote Ghost of Vroom for Soul Coughing,” say Doughty, who approached his former bandmates about reuniting to work on the project. “But honestly, I got back a hot plate of crazy. I guess I was expecting that when I went to them. The possibility [of a reunion] was pretty quickly eliminated.”
Although the Soul Coughing reformation didn't come to pass, Doughty continued down the path to forming a new band after working with various musicians in a series of improvisational performances at Cooperyoung's Bar DKDC over the last few years — including Spooky Party (with guitarist Dave Cousar) Moticos (with drummer Stephen Chopek) and what would become Ghost of Vroom, with Livingston.
“I began really digging a group dynamic. That and the fact that Scrap and I have become such a tight unit, we sort of looked up one day and realized we're a band. It was a natural outgrowth of that relationship,” says Doughty.
“Me and Scrap work pretty organically. It's not a question of bringing in an idea and having him reproduce it, but rather having the material pushed and pulled and becoming a natural outgrowth of what we do together.” With both Ghost of Vroom projects, Doughty and Livingston worked with famed producer Mario Caldato Jr., known for his work with the Beastie Boys.
“I was a huge admirer of the Beasties, that was a huge part of it,” says Doughty. “Mario's sounds are so grimy and dirty and he's not afraid of throwing a delay on everything and weird effects. When you work with a guy like Mario you're essentially bringing another musician into the picture. He's not just setting up mics or telling you if a take is good. He really is almost another instrumentalist in what he brings in his production.”
Doughty completed work on the album at Caldato's studio in Los Angeles last spring, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was hitting. “Literally I was at Mario's place doing the mastering and sequencing when the lockdown started coming. I drove back home, hot footed it out of California,” he says.
“Since last March, when I got back to Memphis, I've had nothing else to do but write," says Doughty, who also published his second memoir, "I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound," last year. "I've just been writing songs constantly. So there's a good chance ‘Ghost of Vroom 3' may be written already.”
“Ghost of Vroom 2” is available for pre-order at mike-doughty.myshop ify.com. Doughty also offers exclusive music and visual projects through his Patreon page.