It’s a tried and tested fast track to success: talented young artist is taken under the wing of one older and wiser and groomed for the public. But Micah P Hinson’s story is a little different. Befriended at a young and vulnerable age by a Vogue cover model and rock star’s widow in his adopted home town of Abilene, Texas, Micah’s life spiralled out of control until, rather than riding into town on glamorous fur coattails, he was arrested for forging prescriptions on her behalf and jailed. By the age of 19 he was homeless, bankrupt and rejected by his fundamentalist Christian family.
Fortunately, financial destitution inspired creative wealth in the form of a raft of songs that Hinson – a bespectacled 22 year old with a cracked but lugubrious baritone – chose to record in Manchester with The Earlies (under their Names On Records pseudonym), two of whose members were childhood friends of his in Texas. Their lushly orchestrated arrangements steer Hinson away from a potentially oddball self pity without detracting from the genuine intimacy of his songs, cocooning their skeletal forms with inspired instrumentation and a full blooded, human warmth. Had Bill ‘Smog’ Callaghan woken up in bed on the right side, he might sound a little like this (as, in fact, he did occasionally on 1999’s Wild Love), though Hinson himself sees Leonard Cohen as a more likely influence.
It’s an ambitious but striking debut that also shows how the tradition of acoustic songwriting need not be frail to be authentic or enhanced with electronic glitches to be contemporary. Whilst his innate fragility remains intact on tracks like the eerie The Possibilities and You Lost Sight On Me, Don’t You Forget concludes in a positively intense fashion and by On Your Way Hinson is roaring. So successful is this collaboration that any initial thoughts of Hinson as yet another tortured troubadour are dismissed. Truly, a gospel of redemption to believe in.
Q&A
MICAH P. HINSON on drugs and UK immigration…
What happened to the ‘Black Widow’, as you now call your former ‘muse’?
She got impregnated by a grass dealer from Dallas, TX, and, last I heard, she was getting her child taken away from her due to her love affair with prescription drugs. She must have fallen off the end of the earth or was swallowed alive by her pill bottle.
Without her influence, would you have made music?
The hardships in my life have made most of my songs possible. I’m sure without the hard times I still would have made my music; it just wouldn’t be so downtrodden and accessible to the human race. People like to listen to others in pain. It makes us feel more comfortable to know that we are not the only ones suffering.
Did The Earlies transform your songs significantly?
We were only in the studio for about a dozen days. And with that, the songs never left my sight, except for the song As You Can See when I was spending a pleasant twelve hours being interrogated by British immigration.
