I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound

November 1, 2020
The former Soul Coughing frontman recalls moments from a musician's life that are funny, infuriating, or just too strange not to share. Doughty's debut, The Book of Drugs (2012), was a relatively conventional addiction memoir, relating how his appetite for narcotics was exacerbated by his status as a famous-ish 1990s bandleader. In this follow-up, the author dispenses with an extended narrative arc and instead constructs the book out of brief anecdotes, some as short as a paragraph, relating tiny epiphanies and disappointments. Many of them turn on the phrase "the world was absolutely new," usually relating to moments of musical revelation--e.g. hearing Nirvana and the Replacements for the first time or playing with an idol like the MC5's Wayne Kramer. But Doughty's earnest proclamations of glowing fandom have a counterweight in his seeming knack for attracting low-grade calamities into his life. There's the roommate who climbed onto a fifth-story ledge, drunk; the producer of a Soul Coughing best-of album who sowed discord with his estranged band mates; a supposedly game-changing invitation to write a song for an X-Files soundtrack that ultimately fizzled; moments of disorientation in Kyoto, Shanghai, and a Las Vegas strip club's Champagne Room. It's all relatively inconsequential stuff in isolation, but Doughty has a finely honed, smirking style of observation that justifies most of the vignettes: The strip club's bathroom was "as bright and cold as a Whole Foods"; a Tinder date "had written her profile in half-disguised twelve-step argot"; Shanghai's skyscrapers "look like they were drawn on a coaster." Together, the book accrues an entertainingly bemused, why-is-this-happening-to-me vibe, and Doughty's terseness evokes the simple quirkiness of a Lydia Davis short story. Fans will appreciate his stories of struggling to finish his breakthrough solo album, Haughty Melodic, but he's a talented observer in many contexts. A witty rock memoir delivered with arty, aphoristic verve.

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