A few years ago, Mike Doughty had an idea: Make a new album with his iconic genre-blending band Soul Coughing, their first since breaking up over 20 years ago. He presented it to the band’s former members, and it didn’t go well. “I got back a hot plate of crazy,” he laughs. Ever the resourceful artist, Doughty made lemonade out of lemons, as well as a whole new band: Ghost of Vroom. The duo’s debut LP Ghost of Vroom 1 is pure candy for longtime listeners of the innovative singer-songwriter and O.G. Soul Coughing fans, with tense breakbeats and dense wordplay that make for an album with endlessly rewarding replay value. Doughty’s new band with bassist and longtime collaborator Scrap Livingston made its initial bow last year with the Ghost of Vroom 2 EP, an electrifying release that followed Doughty’s solo album The Heart Watches While the Brain Burns from 2016—not to mention his ongoing Patreon-funded project that’s seen him write, record, and release over 250 songs in the last four years.”It’s made me a better songwriter, just through the practice of it,” he proclaims. “It’s been exhilarating working at this pace, and it’s been invaluable practice, too.” With Ghost of Vroom, Doughty is getting back to his sampling, breakbeat-loving, Tom Waits-meets-hip-hop ways, drawing inspiration from hip-hop legends Das EFX’s dexterous lyricism through loading these songs with dense referentialism that yields new delights with every listen. “Pretty much every lyric of theirs is a reference to something from the ‘70s,” he explains. “So I was like, ‘What if I do this with my kind of references?’” Specifically: ‘80s metal bands, Greek poets, German philosophers—and a whole lot more. “I cannot wait to see the Genius page for this album,” he laughs. Musically, Ghost of Vroom draws heavily from Doughty’s love of hip-hop and breakbeats—specifically, Scarface Records’ Classic Beats and Breaks compilations, which he rediscovered in recent years. “It’s been at the heart of everything I’ve been doing these last couple of years,” he explains. “They’re sampling bonanzas from the days when no one could make a legal claim to a drum part, so you could sample all the drums you want to and never get sued.” In an especially deft touch, Doughty also wrote a fair amount of the album’s bass lines using GarageBand on his phone: “The only good bass sound was the upright bass sound, so I ended up writing all these upright bass lines—which were pretty central to Soul Coughing, too.” Along with Livingston, legendary Beastie Boys collaborator Mario Caldato worked with the band to achieve their beat-driven, hip-hop-influenced sound: "I was quaking in my shoes working with that guy, because I'm such a fan. He's incredible at this sound we were making—the best in the business." Ghost of Vroom 1 was polished off in Caldato’s Eagle Rock studio space, three days before California went on lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We sequenced it, then I drove back to Memphis from L.A. just as the gates were closing,” Doughty remembers. “It was a very panicky moment to be finishing a major piece of work.” And a major piece of work it is, with the whole kitchen sink—everything from spam phone calls to Caldato’s collection of “weird-ass keyboards”—coming into play on the gloriously eclectic-sounding Ghost of Vroom 1. “More Bacon Than the Pan Can Handle” shudders with eerie samples and a clattering backbeat, while the discomfitingly dreamy “James Jesus Angleton” takes titular inspiration from the head of the C.I.A. during the Vietnam War. “I was reading a book about a British Soviet double agent, and there was all this stuff about James Jesus Angleton’s extraordinary paranoia that arose from this situation,” Doughty explains while discussing the song. “I was on tour, so I went up to my room, sat down with the iPhone and the guitar, and that’s what came into my head. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever written, and I couldn’t believe how easy it was to write. It was an incredible moment. You make your own luck when it comes to snatching things like that out of the air.” That being said, there’s nothing lucky about the success that Ghost of Vroom 2 represents—two longtime collaborators forging something new out of sounds they’ve explored through the years, emerging with something endearingly familiar while also sounding like little else out there right now. “This really is a band. It’s the center of my life now,” Doughty exclaims while talking about Ghost of Vroom’s future. “This partnership is everything.”
