Recently, I got to interview Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg about his work on the new Fiona Apple album. And it was great to see people react to the piece and talk about how much they love Soul Coughing, and then there was a larger wave of nostalgia for the band last week when "Super Bon Bon" popped up in ESPN's The Last Dance. The 20th anniversary of their breakup passed a while ago, and they're one great '90s band that just seemed to cease to exist at the end of the decade and will almost definitely never reunite. But I was happy to kind of break the news in my Sebastian Q&A that Mike Doughty is on better terms with the rest of the band than he was for a number of years, even if he'd rather do things like last year's Ruby Vroom 25th anniversary tour as a solo artist.

Soul Coughing deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. The Idiot Kings
2. Casiotone Nation
3. I Miss The Girl
4. Disseminated
5. Unmarked Helicopters
6. Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago
7. Maybe I'll Come Down
8. Paint
9. Mr. Bitterness
10. Lazybones
11. Houston
12. $300
13. Buddha Rhubarb Butter
14. Janine
15. A Plane Scrapped Its Belly On A Sooty Yellow Moon (with Roni Size)
16. White Girl
17. City Of Motors
18. Fully Retractable
19. Collapse
20. True Dreams Of Wichita

Tracks 2, 6, 9, 14, 17 and 20 from Ruby Vroom (1994)
Track 5 from Songs in the Key of X: Music From and Inspired by The X-Files (1996)
Tracks 1, 4, 8, 10, 16 and 19 from Irresistible Bliss (1996)
Track 15 from Spawn: The Album (1997)
Tracks 3, 7, 11, 12 and 18 from El Oso (1998)
Track 13 from Lust In Phaze: The Best of Soul Coughing (2002)

Obviously, Soul Coughing only had 3 albums, so a relatively small catalog to make a playlist from. But I love most of the songs on those albums, this was just fun to make. I was able to include a couple soundtrack songs, and one b-side that was featured on their best-of compilation, Lust In Phaze (which was the original planned title for Irresistible Bliss). It's a weird comp, skips a couple of obvious singles like "Down To This" and "Soft Serve" in favor of a lot of the same album tracks I used on this playlist.. But the bandhad a lot of other non-album songs not on streaming services that are worth seeking out ("A Murder Of Lawyers In Overcoats," "16 Horses," "The Bug," "212," "Lemon Lime," "The Brooklynites," "Blow My Only," "Rare Star Ball," "Wooly Imbibe," etc.).

I think the song that's grown in my esteem the most over the years is "Mr. Bitterness." Back then, I thought the four-on-the-floor house groove felt a little simple and obvious compared to the twitchier and more unique shuffles and virtuso drum'n'basss homages of their other songs, and I thought it was unnecessary that it was at the time the band's longest song (and still their third longest after 2 collaborations with dance producers). But now I'm just in awe of how perfectly the band leans into that beat, Yuval Gabay on "Mr. Bitterness" is one of my favorite performances by any drummer ever, just masterful. Another song that I'd point out that absolutely no band but Soul Coughing could have made is "$300," which is built around a sample from a Chris Rock comedy album.

Steinberg and Gabay were just an incredible rhythm section who brought a lot of swing and musicianship and Knitting Factory avant jazz creativity to the kind of rhythm tracks that had usually been made with loops and drum machines. Mark De Gli Antoni played the sampler like a piano in a band context in a way that nobody else has even come close to in the last couple decades of sample-driven music. And Doughty had this infectious and absurd but also densely literary way of putting together words, and treated his guitar largely as another percussion instrument. Just a really remarkable band that I think deserves better than to be sort of awkwardly lumped in with other hip hop-influenced major label alternative acts that flourished in the wake of Beck and the Beastie Boys.

I think at different points each of Soul Coughing's albums has been my favorite, right now it's Irresistible Bliss, but I could see it going back to Ruby Vroom at some point. El Oso has some amazing moments but maybe doesn't hold together in its entirety as well now, and I enjoyed some of those songs more live. I saw Soul Coughing live 4 times, one was a festival set with bad acoustics but the other 3 were pretty amazing, even the show I saw at the 9:30 Club a few months before they broke up, I just kind of thought they were going to keep playing that well and making increasingly weird records, and I'm still a little bummed out that they didn't. Back in those days I got to know Mat who ran the Soul Coughing Underground fan site, and now we've been friends for over 20 years and he produced and/or mixed every album I've made. And since Mat has kept in touch with the Soul Coughing guys he was able to help me set up that interview with Sebastian.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20, 2020 at 8:48 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.