Music

Two years ago, Micah P Hinson submitted to a live interview on Australian radio. ‘The woman was like, “I want to introduce you to Micah
P Hinson, a total drug addict, womanising, depressive piece of shit”,’ he recalls. ‘I thought: Shouldn’t you be nice to me for a minute first, and then we’ll gradually build up to what a miserable cock I am?’

An alt.country artist from Abilene, Texas, with a lugubrious voice that’s deeper than a grave, by the age of 23 Hinson had already done time in jails and mental institutions, had his heart broken by Vogue model and rock-star widow Melissa Berggren, battled an addiction to prescription drugs and wound up homeless. Just as life was simmering down, he permanently injured his back and found himself on the same cocktail of painkillers from which he’d just freed himself. Feature continues

When Johnny Cash auditioned for Sun back in ’54, label boss Sam Phillips told him to ‘go home and sin, then come back with a song I can sell’.
Before they sent Hinson to England to record ‘The Gospel of Progress’ – a sepia-tinted, often suicidal-sounding debut album where yearning slowly blossoms like red paint on wet canvas – all Sketchbook Records had to do was write a cheque for $600 of unpaid traffic fines.

Hinson is less a mere songwriter, more a classic American anti-hero, a character cooked up by JD Salinger or DBC Pierre. And his backstory has often been held up as proof that the best music really is made by the most miserable musicians. So when, at his recent Hoxton Hall show, the 27 year old announced ‘Ah am happy’, it was both a powerful and potentially disconcerting moment for his fans.

What did Hinson’s newfound contentment mean for his songwriting? Isn’t alt.country quintessentially sad-bastard music? It was a notion Hinson himself was acutely aware of. ‘People,’ he continued to address the Hoxton crowd, ‘do not like happy musicians.’

‘Yes ma’am, I would say that’s so, definitely,’ he confirms when we call him at the Texas home he shares with two Chihuahuas, a room full of Batman comics and his new wife, Ashley (Hinson proposed on stage at the Union Chapel in December).

‘A good example of the problem is the Polyphonic Spree,’ he says. ‘I saw them live and they were happy as fuck. But on record, you realise there’s a very short lifespan with that stuff. I don’t think people want that kind of happiness constantly shoved in their face. Also, from the press point of view, if I was the interviewer, what the hell would I ask the B-52s or Scissor Sisters? “Hi, guys. What makes you so goddamn happy?!” ’

But what about the link between mood and music? Is the saddest music necessarily made by the saddest people? Hinson has, he says, toured with plenty of alt.country singers who really are ‘miserable sons of bitches’. On the other hand, one of the jolliest musicians he’s ever met was a guy called David Bizone who sings ‘frighteningly dark songs about wife-beating’. As far as his own music is concerned, Hinson’s torn between seeing his early work as a stand-in for the therapist he couldn’t afford and recognising a wilfully self-destructive element of his life at the time.

‘If you’re in a troubled part of your life, the last thing you should read is Charles Bukowski,’ he advises. ‘And back then I was reading a lot of Bukowski. I got caught up in some… concerns, and I came to thinking: Hell, I could exploit this for art. So I wrote about drugs, women, sex and the destruction of the human soul – the degradations of humanity.’

The majority of Hinson’s new album, ‘The Red Empire Orchestra’, was written for his wife – her photograph graces the cover as well as being Sellotaped to his acoustic guitar; she even walked down the aisle to the string arrangement from one of the songs. His change of fortune, he says, can be felt in ‘the confidence, the grandness – it’s the best thing I’ve accomplished to date’. But fans can be assured that Hinson brings the same intensity and solemnity to his consideration of happiness as he did to sorrow.

‘I wrote the last song on the album, “Dyin’ Alone”, when I’d just met Ashley,’ he says. ‘It was creepy, writing about this person I barely even knew. She’d cycle past as I was sitting on the porch in my Marilyn Manson corset, getting over my back surgery, and I guess there was something in me that wanted to strive for my future wife. And here I am now, and that song’s on my new record, and my wife’s just in there taking a shower, and it’s like, y’know what, this prophecy has fulfilled itself. This shit has transpired.

'I can’t say I wake up every morning with bluebirds singing in my head, but I don’t wake up scared of what’s lurking in the shadows any more. And that’s a glorious thing.’

‘The Red Empire Orchestra’ is out on Full Time Hobby on July 14. Micah P Hinson plays Bush Hall on July 16 and Pure Groove Records on July 14.