I hope someone loves me when all this is through
Mike Doughty, when not laying down some madcap free-associative rhymes with his jazz-rock ensemble Soul Coughing (now tragically defunct), is a New York poet. So while he was rolling along with his band, he got a hankering to do one of those coffeehouse sensitive acoustic poet with a guitar sort of albums, and Skittish was it. Fortunately, this is the mighty Doughty, and it’s nothing quite so simple as that.
The album was one of those underground legends for a while, the label-rejected personal statement, sold direct by the artist at shows and finding its life on filesharing networks. Musically, it is very simple, pretty much just Doughty and his acoustic guitar with some additional background for spice, but lyrically it is complex and lovingly rendered. It’s lively and with a real sense of carefree fun, ranging from a bouncy cover of Mary J. Blige (“Real Love”) to a cold examination of drug addiction (“No Peace, Los Angeles”), without any sense of the pieces not fitting together. My favourite moment is “Thank You, Lord, For Sending Me the F Train” which is a troubled account of New York living – ‘This train speeds underground, this train speeds under the river, and I will drift back to the slope, some face unlit, there, stuck into the incline where I will sleep off all the noise, the soot accumulated, all my trials.’
There’s a beautiful cover of the very obscure “Looks” written by Pianosaurus’ Phillip Shelley, and the Blige cover is merged with a cover of The Feelies’ “It’s Only Life” but the rest, and the overall effect, is of undiluted Doughty, very different from the material with Soul Coughing, but still distinctly his lyrical voice.
82% => ****
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