Between an image of a cursed composer that accompanies him despite himself and an attempt to change his musical focus, the grave and indecipherable voice of Micah P. Hinson lands tonight in Barcelona (La Nau, 8:30 p.m.) on a tour of small venues of the European geography where to date it has sold out all the tickets. The new work by the folk singer-songwriter from Memphis, I lie to you (Ponderosa), goes through a few years marked by a sentimental break with the mother of his children, the pandemic and an emotional crisis that was on the point of definitively removing the already-already from music. Veteran artist, who for two years has lived between Texas and Madrid, where he lives with the muralist Lina Castellanos.
I lie to you “is a turning point after realizing that I was making songs anchored in the past, going too far back in my relationships and my feelings,” Hinson explains to La Vanguardia from the Bologna airport, his deep voice resounding on the phone of his tunes.
Assuming this inflection led the musician to write songs like Ignore the Days, which opens the album, or Wasted days and wasted nights, where he talks about lost loves, the past but also redemption, in a dozen melancholic melodies that give off a tender rawness , far from the telluric sound that emanated from his previous work, When I shoot you with arrows, i will shoot to destroy you. The album also includes material from previous years, “a bunch of old songs that I thought were the best I had left, songs that I felt needed to be heard.”
After disagreements with his previous record label, Hinson found the support to record I lie to you with the Italian Alessandro Stefana, Asso, producer of an album that started in 2019 and was definitely forged during the months of the pandemic and confinement, while the Texan musician made a living with temporary jobs. In those months of uncertainty, the singer-songwriter sent his recordings to Italy, “I’m not even sure we would have planned to make a record, just record and see what happens,” he explains. “After the plague (that’s what he calls the pandemic) I was able to come to northern Italy to finish it. It wasn’t a hard record to make, the hard part was the time we made it.”
His tall body, his glasses and the cigarette with a black mouthpiece always in his mouth have become a hallmark of Hinson, who has now made two decades and ten studio albums, having created a reputation as a cursed musician that he does not share. But it is difficult to resist the topic when his biography makes him born in Memphis into a fundamentalist Christian family to move to Texas as a teenager.
In the desert Midwest is where Hinson, who also has Chickasaw tribal blood, began his musical career while maintaining a relationship with a model who introduced him to the world of drugs and, from there, to lose practically everything happening. even by police cells and living in destitution, disowned by his own family Everything changed when, through a friend, he contacted the British label sketchbook, which paid for him to travel to the United Kingdom to record his first work, Micah P. Hinson and the gospel of progress, published in 2004.
“I don’t feel responsible for what they say about me, I keep reading articles where they say I went to prison when I never have, I just went through the dungeon” Micah explains patiently, distancing himself from the suggestive images with which he could dress his music . He prefers to offer it as it is, dark, deep, with sometimes cruel lyrics wrapped in a sound that links him to the American folk tradition like John Denver’s version of Please daddy don’t get drunk these Christmas. “Denver is my main influence, but I didn’t grow up with Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, I don’t listen to country but it’s possible that my music sounds like that because I was born in Memphis and grew up in Texas,” he explains, leaning his musical tastes in the direction of Siouxie and The Banshees, Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana or the Pixies.
