Haughty Melodic

About Haughty Melodic

Haughty Melodic is an album by Mike Doughty released on May 3, 2005. The album title is an anagram of the artist's fuller name; Michael Doughty. Doughty described the album as "a bunch of songs about yearning and redemption and happiness and hope." The album's sound is dense, stuffed full of multi-tracked guitars, horns, keyboards, and Doughty's own voice multiplied over himself in harmony; a departure both from the sounds of Soul Coughing and Doughty's solo acoustic work. It was gradually recorded over the course of two years at the home of producer Dan Wilson (of Semisonic). In contrast to his previous stripped-down releases, Doughty brought in many other musicians to record Haughty Melodic, including multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, upright bass player John Munson, and N. E. R. D. drummer Eric Fawcett. On Amazon.com, iTunes, and other places online that carried listener reviews, the record was either trashed with indignant one star reviews that decried it as overproduced, or defended passionately by fans that lavished four or five stars on it. Some fans, many new ones brought in by the single "Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well"—peculiarly, a radio hit based on a scene from Haruki Murakami's novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—were struck by the imagery drawn from Doughty's recovery from drug addiction, and the album's themes of loss and redemption. more »