In I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound, musician Mike Doughty presents stories about life on the road as an indie rock musician, taking readers deep inside the dislocated life of an itinerant performer, the exhilaration and terror involved in getting up in front of strangers night after night, and as far behind the curtain as they've ever dared to venture. Doughty's writing is deeply provocative, eliciting visceral responses from his readers, and this extraordinary book will blow the minds of people who have never considered what life is like for those on the other side of the stage. I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound is composed of strange, surreal tales from on the road that draw from dream-like conflations of memories of times and places, especially New York City in the '90s. It looks at why diminished circumstances are sometimes, bafflingly, more profitable than chart success, how the nostalgia of fans is both a boon and a burden for an artist struggling to stay vital, and what it means--and how it works--to grow into middle age while still playing hundreds of shows and releasing albums prolifically. Both a fascinating and dislocated narrative and a highly review-worthy examination of what it is to be an artist at this cultural juncture, I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound is funny, unsparing, vulnerable, and incisive.

Mike Doughty first came to prominence as the leader of the band Soul Coughing then did an abrupt sonic left turn, much to the surprise of his audience, transforming into a solo performer of stark, dusky, but strangely hopeful tunes. He battled addiction, gave up fame when his old band was at the height of its popularity, drove thousands of miles, alone, across America, with just an acoustic guitar. His candid, hilarious, self-lacerating memoir, The Book of Drugs ,featuring cameos by Redman, Ani DiFranco, the late Jeff Buckley, and others,is the story of his band's rise and bitter collapse, the haunted and darkly comical life of addiction, and the perhaps even weirder world of recovery.

Cult poet and musician Mike Doughty makes his print debut with Slanky, a black-comic stroll through the demimonde of pop culture and modern urban life. Doughty's poems are at once absurdest and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he re imagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in "For Charlotte, Unlisted," he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.