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Mike Doughty (born June 10 , 1970 ), is a singer/songwriter who has released four solo albums: ''Skittish'', ''Rockity Roll'', ''Smofe and Smang'', and ''Haughty Melodic''. Born in Fort Knox , Kentucky , Doughty was an Army kid who moved around the country and Europe, spent his teenage years living on the grounds of the United States Military Academy at West Point , and eventually moved to New York City to study Poetry at the New School University , where singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco was one of his classmates in Sekou Sundiata 's poetry course, "The Shape and Nature of Things to Come." In 1992, Doughty, then a doorman at the New York avant-garde club The Knitting Factory founded the "Deep Slacker Jazz" band Soul Coughing , which enjoyed the minor hit singles "Super Bon Bon" and "Circles". Wearying of the band and addicted to heroin, Doughty broke up Soul Coughing in 2000, got dropped by Warner Brothers , cleaned up, and set off on a few hardscrabble years of solo touring. He drove around the country in a rental car (9000 miles on his first tour), playing acoustic shows, often to crowds of Soul Coughing fans bewildered by his switch from that band's hip-hop and spoken-word based sound to plaintive songwriter. After the shows, he would sit at the front of the stage and sell copies of his acoustic album ''Skittish''--then on CD-Rs in plain white sleeves--a record that he had recorded for, and which was rejected by, Warner Brothers in 1996. He sold 20,000 copies of ''Skittish'' over three years, and gradually developed a following independent of Soul Coughing. At the Bonnaroo music festival in 2004, Doughty and Dave Matthews --a longtime Soul Coughing supporter, who had the band open for him on two US tours, including shows at Madison Square Garden--bumped into each other. Dave professed to be a fan of Doughty's solo record ''Rockity Roll'', in particular the song "27 Jennifers". Doughty gave Dave a CD of rough mixes of an album he had been working on in Minneapolis with former Semisonic ("Closing Time") singer Dan Wilson . This album was to become ''Haughty Melodic'', which Matthews released on his ATO label. ''Haughty Melodic'''s hit single was "Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well"; it was heavily played on the radio in 2005; Doughty made a video for the song with director/photographer Danny Clinch , opened for DMB at Madison Square Garden , and appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman . He founded a band called Mike Doughty's Band, featuring "Handsome" Dan Chen ( Keyboard and Synthesizer , "Knapsack" Pete McNeal "The Man of Feel" ( Drums ), and Andrew "Scrap" Livingston ( Upright Bass ) and toured extensively that year. Miscellaneous: Doughty is an active blogger (see link below), commenting on pop culture, his life as a musician and his fans, and writing about and photographing his numerous travels, to Cambodia , Laos , Buenos Aires , Shanghai , Ethiopia , Eritrea , and Mississippi . In 2002, Doughty recorded four songs for the film ''EvenHand''. "Get Along" was subsequently released as a bonus track on '' Skittish / Rockity Roll ''. The other three songs, "Sweet Francis", "Love Theme From Officer Morning", and "The Devilish Verve of the Age Is Like a Man With a Staple Gun", remain unavailable. In 2004, Doughty recorded the anti- Iraq War anthem "Move On," which appeared on the compilation '' Future Soundtrack Of America ''. Doughty appeared with the Dave Matthews Band on December 12 , 2005 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Doughty's publicist Andy Adelewitz , aka "Mike Doughty HQ," sends out an annual April Fool's day email with fake Mike Doughty news. Past jokes have said that he was changing his name to Mike "Cougar" Doughty, and had accepted an offer to become the new guitar player in Limp Bizkit . In April 2006's message said that Mike Doughty announced he was running for New York State Senate, representing the 7th District (comprising most of northern Nassau County, Long Island), in order to ease tensions between Long Island authorities and soy gluten farmers. SOLO DISCOGRAPHY
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