An interview with Micah P Hinson

Micah P Hinson’s music combines lyrical wisdom beyond his twenty-nine or so years with the kind of deep, reassuring voice your dad might use to read bedtime stories to you in. Hailing from Abilene, Texas he is often introduced as ‘the guy who dated the Vogue model and went to prison for forging prescriptions,’ but in person, he comes across as incredibly articulate, grounded and open. Since 2006 he has brought out several EPs and five albums the most recent of which, Micah P Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs, just released.

What was the trigger for your new record and where did the material come from?

Most of my records come from the same place. I had started writing half way decent songs around my seventeenth or eighteenth year so you have a good five or six years that I was writing songs a lot before I got signed. There’s a lot of stuff in the past that I can go back to and kind of re-live and bring to my modern and my present. I think that’s a really good way to keep solidarity or continuity between the albums, it’s not just music recorded between each release it’s stuff that’s spanning my whole career.

Your early records had quite a melancholy style, why did you choose to return to that in The Pioneer Saboteurs having deviated from it in its predecessor The Red Empire Orchestra?

I did The Red Empire with a guy called John Congleton from The Paper Chase; a really fucking frightening band-amazing epic stuff. He was kind of the one and only producer I’ve ever had and been able to say to ‘here’s what I’m doing, what do you want me to re do, how do you want things to sound?’ That’s why that sounded so different, but I still think that record has its hefty bit of darkness. I guess I see this new record as a culmination of the sound I’d been gathering in all the different records. It was good to head back in that direction but I guess I never really went away from it because there are a lot of strange, loud and haphazard things on The Red Empire. It’s hard to categorise things man, when you get down to the nitty gritty there’s similarities between so many things you wouldn’t even guess.

You’ve been defined on many occasions by the dark stories of things that happened in the past. Does that frustrate you?

As we were coming in to London this morning I was telling a story about this interview I did in Australia. This woman comes up and is like, ‘Hello! This morning we have Micah Hinson, drug addicted, woman toting, complete ass hole – he’s actually been in a mental institution!’ Then she went on to ask me the same question and I told her it’s actually a good thing for me to speak about it because the more I speak about it the less real it becomes. Clearly, I need to remember things to learn from them, you have to remember certain parts of the past in order not to relay them in to the future but it does help to talk about them. I mean I was born in to a higher middle class family in Texas, my parents were church goers, there wasn’t any real reason for me to twist off and do the things I did, whether that be drugs or going to jail and all this. I made those decisions myself whereas some people in life they aren’t given a chance, their parents are cock-suckers, their brothers are drug dealers et cetera et cetera. I was given much more of a chance and made bad decisions that led me to hard times so it’s kind of a strange thing to have sympathy on any of those matters because they were my choice.

There are people with a similar modern folk sound to your own who’ve broken in to the mainstream. Does it bother you to see other people, for whatever reasons, blowing up?

Oh no, no man that doesn’t bother me at all! With the idea of a bomb blowing up, it has to go out. That’s what I fear. I would never want to be a bomb, I would much rather be the slow burning fuse like four miles away from the enormous warehouse full of gun powder, know what I’m saying? It takes forever to get there, I mean it may even only get there in my death but slow and steady wins the race. Unless you’re fucking U2 or The goddamn Eagles, bands don’t last. I’m just thankful for every minute that I get to keep doing this. You just hope that when people go up they don’t come down too hard. Some people can rise and they can stay but it’s few and far between. The masses are pretty unforgiving and the gods are pretty unforgiving too.