Micah P. Hinson - The Torment of Beauty

The day Texas sank to the bottom of the sea

The dawn light filters pitilessly through the crumpled sheets of the motel bed. The bed is empty. She's gone: the boy knows it well, yet it's as if the seduction of that shadow keeps following him wherever he goes. He no longer has a home, no longer has money, no longer has innocence: it's only thanks to the help of a few relatives that he's been spared yet another night under a bridge.

No, it wasn't all just about a woman: beauty is the dominant thought that has gripped him, that beauty which seems unable to exist without torment. He hasn't hesitated to burn everything down in pursuit of that allure. Solitude, drugs, prison: at just over twenty, nothing seems left to save in the downward spiral of Micah Paul Hinson's life. And yet, his voice has still managed to find its way to stab even our own hearts.

He couldn't have imagined what would happen, the first time their eyes met. He probably wouldn't even have cared to know.

He, Micah, was nothing more than a college kid from Abilene, Texas, with a passion for skating and a father who taught psychology. About his hometown he thought exactly what Kerouac had written in "On The Road": "why the hell would anyone ever want to live here?".

She, Melissa, was a "Vogue" model far too used to pills, who had come back to Abilene after finding her husband Wes Berggren, guitarist of Tripping Daisy, dead of an overdose.

"I was used to having to work hard just to get a girl interested in me, and suddenly this beautiful woman took me in her arms and we simply went off together. No struggle, no shouting, no broken hearts: it was that easy".

But the price to pay was far higher than Micah could have imagined: dragged into addiction, convicted for forging medical prescriptions, weighed down by a dark depression, Micah soon found himself adrift. "After all the money was gone, after all the credit cards were maxed out, after my car had stopped running and we'd been evicted from our apartment, and I had no friends or family left, she decided to leave me and walk away".

In that squalid motel room, only one thing was left to Micah: a soul capable of translating his own anguish into verses of visceral simplicity. He had been writing songs since he was twelve years old. Guitar, mandolin, banjo, dulcimer, piano: he tried to play practically every instrument that came into his hands. He rifled through his parents' John Denver and Neil Diamond records, stole his older brother's Cure albums, and listened to Sonic Youth and Nirvana like every teenager of his generation. His music, however, comes from somewhere else, from another time. And from the bitter depths of abandonment it rises like a cry demanding to be heard.

The possibilities are endless

It's a friend from Abilene who's the first to notice Micah's talent: John-Mark Lapham, keyboardist of the Anglo-Texan Earlies. The sketches recorded by that bespectacled, baby-faced kid, woven through with the experiences of loneliness and ruin he'd had to face, leave him breathless: so, every time he sends a label something from his band, Lapham always attaches Hinson's demos as well. And when he's asked on the radio to pick his favorite tracks, he includes one from his protégé too, which doesn't fail to catch the attention of talent scouts. Meanwhile, Micah's family has decided to give the prodigal son another chance: his life seems to start over with a new horizon. After the legendary Rough Trade passed on him at the last moment, it's the English label Sketchbook that decides to take a chance on him. And so, in no time at all, Hinson finds himself flying to England to record his first album with the Earlies' support. "I don't think many people get to see their dreams come true after they've completely destroyed their own lives".

A fairy-tale carpet of mellotron, a prologue with almost eels-like shades. Then that voice arrives, and everything suddenly seems to take on another meaning. It's made of darkness and dust, of regret and hope. It comes from the depths of the earth, from the flesh-and-blood ghost of Johnny Cash: it seems impossible that it could belong to that frail-looking young man. In a whirlwind of strings and female voices, "Close Your Eyes" grows into a solemn, pressing march, sullied by a tail of electric distortion: thus announces itself The Gospel Of Progress, the fruit of Hinson's journey to Manchester in the company of the Earlies: bare and imposing at once, resting solely on the strength of a vibrant sincerity.

Diaphanous as the obsession of a ghost, unfinished as the fragment of an ancient sculpture, beauty is something Hinson has pursued since the album cover itself, reflected in the image of his muse and black widow, or rather in her idealized transfiguration. A Leonard Cohen-like arpeggio introduces the dreamy, crystalline melody of "Beneath The Rose", punctuated by accordion and piano. Then, with the inexorable tread of destiny's clock hands, the guitar marks out the progress of "Don't You (part 1 & 2)", in a repetition of verses as insistent as a plea, ready to rise in the ardent crescendo of the finale. When he sketches the essential patterns of "The Possibilities" or "You Lost Sight On Me", Hinson has the bare intensity of Black Heart Procession and Smog; when he entrusts himself to the bucolic flute of "As You Can See" or the melodramatic orchestrations of "At Last, Our Promises", he lifts his gaze in search of a cloudless sky.

"Patience" is a caress, a cry, an open wound that spills into an uncontainable climax: rage and desire dissolving into the most searing of invocations. The spectral waltz of "Stand In My Way" is colored by brass, the desolate piano of "The Nothing" stays suspended over a tremor of synth.

But it's the closing track that holds the most ambitious composition of Hinson's debut: "The Day Texas Sank To The Bottom Of The Sea" laps at the shore with a whispered arpeggio, lets itself be carried out to open water by strings, and finally rises amid siren songs with the placid slowness of a tide. “I’ve been waiting / So long / Up in these trees / Trying to hang myself with / Thoughts of you / Thoughts of me / I’ve been wishing so long / Why can’t you see?”.

The Gospel Of Progress hits record stores at the end of 2004, and critics, riding the wave of folk rediscovery stirred up by the fleeting pre-war phenomenon, immediately hail it as a revelation. The acclaim comes more from Europe than from his home country: "in America there's someone like me on every street corner", Hinson demurs, "I'm just one among millions". But anyone who's had the chance to attend his concerts, charged with a magnetic, cathartic intensity, is ready to swear that Hinson is anything but ordinary, despite the debt his debut owes to the lessons of 1990s American singer-songwriting.

The dreams you left behind

A step back. Before the fall, before the rebirth. When the young Micah, having traded his skateboard for a guitar, recorded his first songs at friends' houses, among them future Earlies member Brandon Carr. The Baby & The Satellite, released in 2005 in the wake of The Gospel Of Progress, is a collection of Hinson's earliest demos, dating back to spring 2000 and presented both in their original bare-bones form (included as the album's final track) and in a new, partially revised version reworked with the help of the ever-present John-Mark Lapham. "It's a record that has a lot to do with salvation and forgiveness", Hinson notes. "Finding your way in this crazy world, finding or offering hope in the midst of abandoned times".

The skeletal drums and jagged guitar of "The Dreams You Left Behind" accompany a melody as mournful as a Will Oldham lament, turning even more bitter at the flute's caress in the closing reprise. "Wasted Away" springs from just a few keyboard chords, flowing into an aching ballad whose ending is streaked with synth.

The songs on The Baby And The Satellite have a rawer, more unadorned soul than those on The Gospel Of Progress, but also blurrier edges: more than the organ's faint breath on "Or Just Rearrange" or the limping waltz of "For Your Eyes", what really stands out are the clawing vehemence of "The Leading Guy" and the drum-machine echoes of "The Last Charge Of Lt. Paul", with the ghost of his voice hovering between the solidity of the guitars and synthetic touches worthy of Conor Oberst's earliest electro-acoustic excursions. The guitar arpeggio and piano notes of "The Day The Volume Won" close the album like a prophecy of Hinson's new life: “You came to rescue me / Despite all that I have done / You rescued me / From me”.

The collaboration between Hinson and Lapham comes to fruition the following year in the parallel project The Late Cord, an experiment that aspires to merge the pair's folk and electronic inspirations into a classicism with a hazy, nocturnal atmosphere. The EP “Lights From The Wheelhouse”, released by 4AD in the summer of 2006, captivates right from the ouverture, a “Lila Blue” with a placid, rarefied pace almost worthy of Sigur Rós, with a deeply emotional alternation of surges and silences, amid organ beds, blurred voices and discreet electronic beats. “New liturgical music”, as the duo themselves call it. The brief cello score of “Chains / Strings” and the ethereal harmonica of “Hung On The Cemetary Gates” seem to be mere hints of the duo's compositional potential, while the dark, repeating keyboard notes of “The Late Cord” and the lulling piano of “My Most Meaningful Relationships Are With Dead People” stay closer to the boundaries of song form.

Meanwhile, Hinson takes part in the Buckley family tribute Buckley album “Dream Brother: The Songs Of Tim And Jeff Buckley” and in the Beach Boys tribute “Do It Again: A Tribute To Pet Sounds”, dressing “Yard Of Blond Girls” in unexpected country cadences and laying bare the shadows of “I'm Waiting For The Day”. But by now, the real wait is for the true successor to The Gospel Of Progress.

Finding truth in your own ways

Micah P. Hinson's second album sees the light of day at the end of 2006: richer and more ambitious than its predecessor, rawer and more exuberant, impatient to crown its author among the pantheon of songwriters of his generation.

If The Gospel Of Progress had come across as a revelation, The Opera Circuit aims for the breadth of a classic. Hinson wrote it while confined to a bed, recovering from back surgery that forced him to once again face the painkillers that had already pushed him into addiction in the past. “It was like having to share the bed with an old, malicious lover”, he admits.

And so, his home in Abilene becomes the meeting point for a varied congregation of fellow travelers ready to give shape to his new compositions, from the talented American singer-songwriter Eric Bachmann to England's Henry Da Massa, on harmonica both in The Late Cord and on Hinson's previous album.

Banjo, accordion, brass, strings: Hinson's circus band knows how to cut straight to the soul even when staging a melancholy celebration in his folk theater. As in a nightmare dreamt up by Emir Kusturica, here's the Texan digging a grave by moonlight to the rhythm of the gypsy march of “Diggin' A Grave”, before launching into the rippling waltz of “You're Only Lonely”, which bursts into a final storm of a thunderous crescendo worthy of Bright Eyes.

Over the music-box air of “Jackeyed”, The Opera Circuit finds its most intense melodic inspiration in a horn counterpoint borrowed from Van Morrison. And over the airy strings of “It's Been So Long”, Hinson's voice turns so wrenching that it forces total identification with his lovesickness, earning forgiveness even for the occasional lapse into naivety.

The Opera Circuit has the drive of Conor Oberst, but with a sharper sense of balance; the austerity of Will Oldham, but with a gaze that refuses to resign itself to despair; the torment of Bill Callahan, but with a less bleak understanding of pain. Hinson floats with the absorbed air of Leonard Cohen over the chamber arrangements of “Little Boy's Dream”, dresses Devendra Banhart-style romanticism to lay it down on the banjo of “She Don't Own Me”, and steals from Mark Kozelek the silences of “Drift Off To Sleep”: “When you sleep what do you see / A million star to wish upon or just me?”. And when, in the end, he relies solely on the bare notes of a piano, he can't help but corrupt them with noise in the desperate plea of “Don't Leave Me Now”, which hangs suspended like an unfinished story, or a secret promise: to keep enduring the outrages of unjust fortune relying only on the open wound of his own music.

The Opera Circuit is followed, between 2007 and 2008, by two EPs released on the Texan label Houston Party, A Dream Of Her and The Surrendering. The first, made up of just three tracks, edges closer to The Late Cord's chamber ambitions with the piano tremors of “Me And You”, the interweaving with Pachelbel's canon on “A Dream Of Her”, and the bare gospel of “The Disappearing”. The Surrendering carries on in the same direction, between the piano fragment of the title track and the Balkan accordion of “The Soundtrack Of Our Lives”, though with a more traditionally singer-songwriter feel, as in the acoustic vignettes of “Brothers And Sisters” and “Oh, No”.

Just afraid of dyin’ alone

After touring The Opera Circuit, Micah P. Hinson leaves everything behind to retreat within his own four walls, once again laid low by the back problems that had already marked the making of the previous record. A forced exile during which the American songwriter ends up slowly losing faith in himself and his own abilities, to the point of no longer knowing how to carry on his career.

It's a letter from John Congleton of Paper Chase that brings him back to life: “that letter tore me out of the routine I'd found myself stuck in; when I received it, something clicked into place and I understood it was the call meant for me”. And so Hinson sets back to work with renewed energy alongside Congleton, already a producer for names like Antony and the Polyphonic Spree.

Meanwhile, in a gesture worthy of the old Johnny Cash, at the end of a London concert he asks on stage his girlfriend Ashley to become his wife. And just a few months after the wedding, in July 2008, here he is back on the scene with The Red Empire Orchestra, a record in which every wound seems to fade into the sweet, nostalgic glow of a summer sunset.

With the by-now familiar interweaving of life and art, the image of his young bride appears not only in the album's refined booklet, but even on Micah's guitar. The invocation of the muse in “Come Home Quickly, Darlin'” arrives like the echo of a forgotten gramophone, before rising into the steps of a waltz over which the organ stretches out soft and enveloping. The Red Empire Orchestra, released by the English label Full Time Hobby, continues along the path laid out by The Opera Circuit, dressing Hinson's now-classic “violent country”—as he himself likes to describe his music on MySpace—in orchestral elegance.

The embroidery of strings delicately adorns the crescendo of “Tell Me It Ain't So”, lending it an air that is both intimate and solemn, while the declaration of love in “Sunrise Over The Olympus Mons” slips by languidly like hours passing in the embrace of a lover, shattering into a fine dust of electric crackles. Then, from a gypsy lament that could enchant Matt Elliott, blooms the chamber elegy of “I Keep Havin' These Dreams”, with Hinson's nocturnal voice revealing itself in all its vulnerability: “And I keep having these dreams, that you were all I needed”.

The Red Empire Orchestra is an album that reveals itself more slowly than other chapters in Hinson's discography, marked as it is by a lyricism full of emotion, yet less vibrant than in the past. "The Fire Came Up To My Knees" settles into the now well-established canon of The Gospel Of Progress, while "You Will Find Me" gets carried away by its own emphasis. Better are the brief illuminations of tracks like "When We Embraced", with its light, spirited banjo, or "Throw The Stone", with violin weaving through guitar arpeggios.

Hinson unleashes his inner Fifties crooner, slipping into the guise of a romantic Roy Orbison on the notes of "We Won't Have To Be Lonesome", dancing with the ghosts hidden in the folds of "The Wishing Well And The Willow Tree", before finally letting himself be lulled by the dramatic strings of the closing "Dyin' Alone": "I'm not afraid of the suffering or of the pain / I'm just afraid of dyin' without findin' you". For young Micah, peace lies entirely here: in meeting a gaze alongside which even facing pain becomes possible.

A year after The Red Empire Orchestra, the time has come for Hinson to look his own roots in the face: in September 2009 came All Dressed Up And Smelling Of Strangers, a collection of no fewer than sixteen covers with which the American songwriter takes on the challenge of measuring himself against the music that shaped his path. But this time the right alchemy almost never seems to click, and the album turns out, unexpectedly, to be the first misstep in Hinson's discography. There's no shortage of sincerity, nor of the courage to put himself on the line: what's missing, rather, is that dose of deliberation capable of redeeming the fate of a work in which urgency too often gets confused with improvisation.

Of the two volumes into which the album is split, the first — entrusted almost exclusively to Hinson's voice and guitar — seems also the weaker: partly to blame is the choice of a series of songs that are, frankly, too imposing to take on, and partly the lack of personality in the American songwriter's reinterpretations, from the Dylanesque "The Times They Are A-Changin'" to Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne".

Old juke-box atmospheres and a rough-edged electricity instead provide the backdrop for the album's second chapter, ranging from a mannered "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" to an almost grunge "In The Pines": the result, however, doesn't change much, and the pairing of evergreen melodies with spartan distortion soon wears thin.

And yet the American songwriter proves he hasn't forgotten the art of inhabiting someone else's work in order to draw something new from it: you can sense it in the lulling sweetness of arpeggios and organ accompanying the skeletal rhythm of "We Almost Had A Baby", written by young singer-songwriter Emmy The Great; or when the drama of the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is dressed up with filtered vocals, chimes and electric vibrations worthy of a lost Sparklehorse outtake.

In the end, All Dressed Up And Smelling Of Strangers remains, essentially, a missed opportunity: it would seem Micah P. Hinson isn't quite ready yet to reckon with his own family tree.

A call to arms

And after the time of reconciliation with himself and his own heritage, the time of battle arrives for Micah P. Hinson. A call to arms, as announced by the impressionistic overture that serves as prologue to the Texan songwriter's true fourth album, The Pioneer Saboteurs. An appeal to the hearts of those willing to go to war with the world: "The sabotaging pioneers have hearts full of rage. We watch the world change and we don't like what we see".

Serving as its icon is a dark lady with gun drawn, ready to steer an unmistakable black-and-white imagery toward territories of Tarantino-esque noir. Serving as its guide are the verses of Walt Whitman on the epic of the American frontier, ready to set spirits ablaze and spur them to fight. Hinson and his indomitable saboteurs lift their gaze to reclaim their mission as men: "The sky watches us and asks what we're doing to ourselves. Chi vuole prendere in mano le armi?".

The spirit of the saboteur won't accept having its cry silenced. The spirit of the pioneer won't accept roots fossilizing in the past. Hinson gives voice to ambition, venturing toward the frontier: after the stumble of All Dressed Up And Smelling Of Strangers, he raises the stakes and defies the folksinger stereotype with an album bolder than ever. And yet, this time it seems love for the idea prevails over love for the substance: and the songs of The Pioneer Saboteurs, despite their imposing guise and the breadth of the orchestrations, end up falling a notch below the pacified heartache of the previous The Red Empire Orchestra or the evocative power of The Opera Circuit.

There's a jaggedness of rhythms, a surge of electricity, a chasing of choruses with Morricone-esque overtones: "2's & 3's" perfectly sums up the atmospheres of The Pioneer Saboteurs, marrying the unease of The Gospel Of Progress with the broader scope of the records that followed.

Strings play an essential role in shaping the contours of the songs: "The Cross That Stole This Heart Away" drifts over a long symphonic prelude, before spilling into a baroque elegy streaked with interference, closing on the solitary notes of a trumpet. Hinson goes in search of more complex architectures, winking at indie-rock on the emphatic tone of "Watchers, Tell Us Of The Night", with its martial drums and blazing guitars, while the western epic of "The Striking Before The Storm" cloaks itself in dark drama: "Seems like a disease / That I couldn't question anyhow". But choices like the seven minutes of shapeless distortion cluttering the closing "The Returning" seem to serve no purpose other than earning the Texan songwriter a kind of (sterile) "alternative" credential: when the theme of "Dyin' Alone" finally resurfaces from the past, it's hard to shake off the nostalgia.

Hinson's autobiographical diary resurfaces in the explicit dedication of "The Letter At Twin Wrecks" to his wife Ashley (also credited as vocalist). But the comparison to early Waits isn't enough to ward off the excess of lyricism that seems to run through more than one track on the album.

The images conjured by the verses of The Pioneer Saboteurs emerge less vivid than in the past, from the classic fabric of family failures in "Seven Horses Seen" to the loneliness of the faithless preacher in "My God, My God", delivered with an unexpected touch of choral lightness. It takes the plain-spoken country-folk of "Take Off That Dress For Me" to admit that the only truly revolutionary gesture is to open oneself completely to love: "My sweetness, you can come be by my side / Against all hope and sense of human pride". Once again, the keystone of Micah P. Hinson's music lies entirely in this overwhelming, inexplicable redemptive force.

On the way home

After collecting enough misfortunes to fill an entire songbook, Hinson seems to have finally put an end to his misadventures: the wounds of the heart healed by a passionate love, his artistic ambitions nurtured by an increasingly prolific muse. But it only takes a car crash to throw everything into question again.

In the summer of 2011, the American songwriter's van flips over on the side of the road to Barcelona: "I was trapped like an animal, fearing for my life every passing second," he recalls. Then come the paramedics, the hospital, and a terrible discovery: his arms won't move, lying lifeless as though dead.

This is how Hinson finds himself face to face with nothingness: long months not knowing whether he'll be able to return to a normal life, whether he'll ever pick up a guitar again, whether he'll be able to finish the recordings left half-done before the accident. The slow, grueling road to recovery becomes the road to a hard-won reconquest of himself.

Even when he finds himself dropped by Full Time Hobby, Hinson doesn't give up. He releases a collection of outtakes and alternate versions (The Junior Arts Collective) with a Spanish music magazine, and records a Christmas Ep with his relatives (Wishing For A Christmas Miracle With The Micah P. Hinson Family). And as soon as his physical condition allows it, he's back in the studio in Santander, Spain again, to make a new record in just a couple of days, this time for the French label Talitres.

The title, The Nothing, echoes one of his earliest songs. But it's impossible not to read into it the mark of the battle he fought to wrench his face free from the grip of nothingness. The choice to record everything live, meanwhile, restores to the music of the thirty-three-year-old Texan a rawness that was missing from the previous The Pioneer Saboteurs, making it one of his leanest, most direct works ever. The album of his homecoming.

It's no coincidence, then, that the track chosen as the album's preview single is called "On The Way Home (To Abilene)": it's the emblem of a record in which Hinson seems ready to fully reconcile with his own roots. "From Abilene I got a sense of beauty and struggle, inner strength and drugs," Hinson recounts with a bitter smile. But the corner of Texas where he grew up is no longer just a place to flee from: now it carries the warmth of an embrace waiting at the end of the road.

So here come the Hinson family memories, dressed up in steel guitar to hop aboard Johnny Cash's locomotive on "The Life, Living, Death And Dying Of One Certain And Peculiar L.J. Nichols." Country accents, after all, run through pretty much the whole record, from the nimble banjo of "There's Only One Name" to the country-orchestra upright bass of "Love, Wait For Me." And "The Same Old Shit" invites M. Ward and Conor Oberst to ride side by side, loping toward the horizon line. Once again, the tangible sign of a voice no longer afraid to declare its belonging to its own land.

Better not to be fooled, then, by the slightly ramshackle punk clatter of the opener "How Are You Just A Dream?": the fabric of "The Nothing" is something else entirely, and the album's opening track sounds, more than anything, like the release of an impulse held back for too long.

A pulsing sense of destiny is, instead, the true constant running through Hinson's songs, now with the heartfelt tones of the declaration of love in "There's Only One Name," now with the menacing ones of the chain gang crescendo of the hidden track "The Crosshairs." The sacred and the profane become one on the folk-gospel of "God Is Good," while Micah finds himself holding the "good book" of his fathers: “The rivers they keep on moving/ And the homeless they keep on looking/ And my good book says that God is good”. His Texan soul is right: the void left by the woman who stole your heart is the same void left by the absence of God. The need for something that lasts forever.

The final songs I’ll sing for you

The Book of Micah is raw and passionate. A Texan apocryphon in America's great Bible. It has the voice of an old prophet, or maybe a wanderer looking for the way home. It took Micah P. Hinson two years to write it. No more black-and-white female figures, no more collective credits: this time the cover features only his own portrait, with that unmistakable démodé Woody Allen air about him. "A modern folk opera," he calls it. The work he'd been chasing for a long time.

The Holy Strangers, which in 2017 marks Hinson's return to the Full Time Hobby roster, isn't just a collection of songs. It's the soundtrack to an actual novel, which accompanies the first limited-edition copies of the record. And, as in any self-respecting soundtrack, the instrumental tracks share the field more or less evenly with the sung ones, giving Hinson's music a more evocative breadth than ever. The instrumentation is strictly analog, the approach intimately personal. Less flashy than in the past, perhaps, but precisely for that reason able to dive deeper into a journey with such ambitious intentions.

The Holy Strangers opens with a sinuous prologue charged with anticipation. Guitar echoes float over the hazy haze of "The Temptation," the glow of a dawn slowly making its way through. Then "The Great Void" introduces the story over one of those classic bittersweet music-box melodies tailor-made to cradle Hinson's gaunt baritone: the cry of two children coming into the world, two lives destined to remain intertwined. Their first meeting, their first sigh of love, takes its cue from the rough-hewn country serenade of "Lover's Lane," a shameless homage to the romanticism of the Man in Black.

"The Years Tire On" announces the record's first instrumental interlude, lending the passing of time a looming sense of fatality, underscored by the cello's dark undertones. The wait is long, but at last the children arrive: Hinson picks up his guitar and intones a lopsided lullaby for little aliens ("Oh, Spaceman"), in which the cries of his firstborn son Wiley T. also make an appearance.

But The Holy Strangers, in case there were any doubts, is not the story of a family idyll. The shadow of war, over the dusty notes of a spinet, looms menacingly over the title track, tearing the husband from the walls of his home and abandoning him to the violence of the front. Nothing will ever be the same again. "The husband finds a Bible, opens it, and reads words that fill his soul with wrath and scorn," Hinson explains. And so, in the long spoken word piece "Micah Book One," we find him grappling with a reading of the Old Testament (the book of the prophet Micah, of course...), declaiming visions of sin and punishment over a hypnotic backing track, with the relentless tone of some character out of Flannery O'Connor.

The story's second act opens on a repeated, insistent piano note, with Andrea Ruggiero and Ambra Chiara Michelangeli's strings lending a chamber-music aura to "The War." “All is lost/ The words we hold onto/ The things that defeat us”, Hinson murmurs in duet with his wife Ashley on "The Darling I Fear," as bare and aching as a Black Heart Procession litany. Blood calls to more blood, and the veteran's hands are stained with a brutal crime. A preacher's voice can be heard, mellotron and choirs take on an unusually Eels-like tone to accompany "The Awakening." But all it takes is a glance for the wife to understand: "When you fell out of the forest with the blood on your hands/ I felt alone, I am alone."

The stage is set for the drama to play out. There's only time for one last farewell among the keyboards of "The Last Song" before the flames devour everything. From the ashes of "The Memorial Day Massacre" only one figure re-emerges: the wife, the mother, the sole survivor of the family, a desperate American Medea. Jumping on a train isn't enough to escape the curse of guilt. Hinson borrows a waltz from the Carter Family, in one of those folk thefts so dear to the bard Dylan (who, not by chance, drew on the same source for "Tempest"); and the echo of a gunshot hangs suspended in mid-air in "The Lady From Abilene": “She took the shiny sixer/ She’d cleaned it again and again/ Put the gun to her temple and now she too was dead”.

This, however, is not the final word. Like the chorus of a tragedy, the epilogue of "Come By Here" transforms the famous spiritual "Kumbaya" into a rarefied funeral prayer, its melody unspooling in slow motion against a grainy backdrop. "Someone's screaming, Lord, come by here." In struggle, in suffering, in death, it's the cry for the great mystery to make itself present. Every river runs to the sea, as the quote from Ecclesiastes that Hinson places at the album's close recites, yet the sea is never full: it's that incompleteness that truly makes us human, foreign saints bound by the same fate, no longer strangers to one another.

Knowing all the things I have seen

Blood rains down from Micah's black sky. The sepia-toned reel had already been torn apart by The Holy Strangers, but with When I Shoot At You With Arrows, I Will Shoot To Destroy You the break is irreversible: the very possibility of figuration drowns in a spectral, two-tone suprematism, painted on the peeling sign of a saloon. Clunky yet terse, just like its author, even the title seems lifted from some dreadful western (ideally one whose final duel plays out on the plain of Jehoshaphat), but that's not really the point: for once the protagonist pushes his imaginary orchestra into the background and chooses to speak in the first person, with all the clarity a maimed, dyslexic prophet can muster. Maybe because he really is alone now, with himself, his red wounds and his black night. Maybe because there's nothing left beyond that night, and when it's all darkness there's no point hiding.

And yet the young-old Micah is not alone — in fact, he's never been in such good company: standing beside him is a sizeable crowd of trusted friends, chosen among those who "had shown him a new way to think, a new way to play, a new way to master life and death." As for the world out there, it may be shaking, but it's still standing: if anything, it's him who's falling apart.

So, what's going on? What's going on is that the reckoning has arrived, the definitive one, and our hero has no intention of backing down. Ever since the first cries of his career, the fire-eyed Texan has been laying bare his falls and comebacks, but now his own personal Judgment Day has come: an ending from which a new beginning can sprout, following the tides of his rough, tormented spirituality. Forget darkness, then: never before has he conceived a work this luminous, precisely because light remains a promise, and as such it shines with the supernatural flash of visions.

He carries out his intentions with a ritualized meticulousness that only a person adrift is capable of: seven songs written in a couple of weeks, recorded in a single day "somewhere in Texas," strictly with analogue gear and natural reverb. Returning to the source in order to be reborn: clichés, in the right hands, become hand grenades.

As for his backing musicians: the boss won't tell us who they are, almost as if to protect accomplices to whom he's promised to take all the blame himself. Nameless hands, in a band that nonetheless does have a name, once again: "The Musicians of the Apocalypse," like the stone instrumentalists who surround Saint James in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Micah the sinner has never been a saint, but the ordeal he recounts is as real as a bad accident, and his army truly does unleash the Apocalypse: not by spewing out chaos, which is already triumphant and should if anything be contained, but by inducing a hypnosis that might bring the world back into line, a corpse dropped onto the keyboard of a pipe organ, generating drones so deep they could stop Time itself. There's no room for sermons here, straight to the facts.

It's therefore a kind of cosmic stillness that envelops "I Am Looking For The Truth, Not A Knife In The Back," yet one so embedded within reality and life that it permeates and reabsorbs them into its flow. The build-up is laborious: a full minute of creaks and ambient noise to give weight to the staging, with the orchestra still tuning up right up to the starting whistle. The exhausted murmur of a condemned man walking to the gallows, with lyrics in his mouth that pull no punches ("That wishing well won't stop the spell of sorrow/Knowing all the things I have seen"), and the Hinsonian path to slowcore is served, with the inexorable gait of a caravan of desperate souls through the dust: just try to stop him with a knife in the back, a man who's looking for the Truth.

Suddenly the march comes to a halt, clouds gather and the voice becomes saturated with violent omens of Love and Death, Dylan-ized by a mercurial Hammond organ: it's "The Sleep Of The Damned," restless and dreamless like a suffocating present that threatens to last forever.

The acoustic guitar returns to drain the Flood, and what remains is the out-of-phase nursery rhyme of "My Blood Will Call Out to You From the Ground," shot through with a hope that is anything but reassuring in its studied childishness ("There i go to my wishing well/Looking for true love/Watching misery make my bed"). After the goodnight, eternal sleep (of reason): the nine astonishing instrumental minutes of "The Skulls Of Christ" are the strangest and most frightening thing Micah has ever composed. Tangled up in disturbed TV samples (preachers, politicians, journalists: the chaos of our times, if not of all times), it begins like "When The Levee Breaks" and ends like "I Heard You Looking," with, in between, jagged tape-lever tears, a wall of sidereal distortion, a knot of silence, a nightmare of noise and an angelic choir that swallows the entire universe in its majestic undertow. We can only imagine the words, but in the presence of the Word, they're no longer even conceivable.

A brief collection of long episodes, rarefied yet extremely dense, it's his darkest and least tragic record: a prerogative of things destined to endure. The folksinger with the fascist-killing guitar is well and truly buried, and whatever follows this asteroid will do him good and us harm. Like an arrow shot with the right aim, which can only kill.

After so much darkness and, at the same time, so much splendour, one might reasonably have expected a continuation of the path already traced, yet instead I Lie To You — recorded in Italy thanks to producer and musician Alessandro Stefana and thanks to an invitation from Vinicio Capossela to the "Sponz Fest" — shifts register and abandons the dark apocalyptic scenarios. Because the eleven tracks of Micah's new work seem closer to a fable, albeit a macabre one, than to an imminent end, a series of short, intimate and solitary folk tales born out of the Irpinia countryside (where the album was recorded) and the memories of a difficult American childhood.

"Ignore The Days" and its video immediately chart a different season, with a simple melody and the tale of a fable for adults who are still children at heart. Micah confirms himself as a doomed poet in the small orchestral moments ("Carelessly") and in the tragic folk ballads ("What Does It Matter Now?"), painting small watercolours for voice and guitar, each one running between two and four minutes.

"I Lie To You" is probably a step back from the greatness that came before, but even on a smaller scale, the music and the autobiographical, authentic lyrics know how to hit the listener square in the chest, and the impression is that Micah barely even has to try. From "People" to "Find Your Way Out," there's no missing the great American folk musicians, directly honoured with the cover "Please Daddy, Don't Get Drunk This Christmas," a famous song by Texan folk-singer John Denver.

There's finally light in Micah P. Hinson's sky. After twenty years of albums marked by a past that never stopped knocking at the door, The Tomorrow Man (2025) represents something more than just a new chapter in his discography: it's a genuine redefinition of identity. The title already reveals the will to break free from his own emotional legacy: the idea that tomorrow is finally a livable place, no longer a threat. A pull towards rebirth that Hinson had timidly hinted at in the previous I Lie To You (2022), but which here takes over completely and becomes the defining trait of the whole record. Optimism surfaces already in the opening track, "Oh, Sleepyhead," dedicated to his sleeping son. The orchestral arrangements — among the most beautiful ever to appear on one of his albums — with strings and brass build a sonic world light years away from the austerity of his previous records. The advice not to waste time on sad thoughts and to look only towards "afterwards" takes on the tone of a universal message, the concrete possibility of a life without wounds.

The album is strewn with striking melodies, which Micah composes (as ever) with astonishing ease. His crooner's voice, more central than ever, conveys a definitive break with what has been: a rebirth, perhaps even the abandonment of that stern God who has watched over him his whole life ("I Don't Know God"). "Hallow" represents the record's tensest side, a nervous mantra sustained by martial rhythms and layered guitars. Among the many vocal melodies, "Walls" stands out, a poetic snapshot of contemporary America: ever higher walls, now become impassable, a natural evolution of themes already present in "People" on I Lie To You.

With The Tomorrow Man, Hinson finally seems to find a space of quiet: not a denial of pain, but the conscious choice to move past it. It's the record of a man who, for the first time, truly decides to belong to tomorrow.

Contributions by Ossydiana Speri ("When I Shoot At You With Arrows, I Will Shoot To Destroy You") and Valerio D'Onofrio ("I Lie To You", "The Tomorrow Man")

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