Micah P. Hinson

Name-check liquor, drugs, troubling women and time spent in the clink and you’ve got all the ingredients of a Country & Western song. Be a slave to all these before you’ve even reached the legal drinking age in America and you’ve got stories to weave a rich tapestry of a musical career. It is this story and Micah P. Hinson’s reputation that precedes him, but with the greater portion of his life ahead of him, his new-found clean living and critical acclaim will hopefully be the more important epitaph to this life less ordinary.

It is well documented that Micah was brought up by a Christian family in Abeline, Texas, but less so reported that his family were less fundamentalist and more devout members of the Church of Christ. What is true in so far as Micah living parallel to his parents’ Christian path was that he and his brother eschewed religion at an early age. This was not a destructive start, but rather a typical story of brotherly influence; inspired by their parents’ collection of John Denver and Neil Diamond records, the brothers took hold of the instruments that were commonplace fixtures in their house and a healthy rivalry ensued. His love of making music ignited his musical passion and his collection reflected a wider world than his small-town Abeline existence would license him to experience.

Like an American indie film, a thoughtful and oppressed teenage Micah discovered skateboarding, girls and narcotics to a soundtrack of Nirvana, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. His attitude was a raging crack in the walls of a numbed-by-tradition town and his original take on lifestyle was enough to get him expelled from his Christian High School. Micah explains…

“I had thigh-highs on my arms and the big Robert Smith hair; I’d wear skirts and stuff. That didn’t go down real well in Abeline…”

For teenage years that typically are cited to pass painfully slowly, this was a fast decline for Micah. Enrolled in Abeline Christian University, where his father was a professor of Psychology, Micah encountered another of life’s greatest vices – the wrong woman. She was a model, years older than him and a widow to a man who’d lost his life to drugs, which only fuelled her dependency on prescription narcotics. Where some women will encourage their man to grow a beard, smarten their appearance and curb their laddish behaviour, this woman was the catalyst to Micah’s own dalliance-come-addiction to what would later become his greatest ruin and constant challenger.

When she got all she could from him, this fleeting Jezebel and her relationship with him had driven away nearly all Micah’s friends and family and left him with but one companion – his voracious addiction. Forging prescriptions to ease his wanton hunger, he was arrested and lost everything he called his own – his car, his home and all his possessions.

While this is not a recommended route, this period helped Micah re-evaluate and focus on what he had to do…

“Nothing saved my ass except me just kind of sitting in this messed up hotel room that my grandfather had paid for because I was homeless, and just realizing that no-one was gonna save me anymore.”

There had been an earlier, fortuitous meeting between Micah and John Lapham, of The Earlies and Lapham had taken an interest and formed a belief in Micah’s burgeoning talent. Armed with a full length demo, ‘Baby and the Satellite’, Lapham eventually got Hinson a recording contract under Sketchbook Records, leading to the eventual release of his debut album, ‘…And the Gospel of Progress’. Such is the life of Micah P Hinson that it wasn’t a steady climb to success thereafter; in 2005, a playful exhange between Micah and a friend resulted in a slipped disc which was exacerbated by Micah’s refusal to give in to his greatest demon, prescription medication. Consumed by pain and bed ridden for a time, he lost his hold on his own career and released ‘…And the Opera Circuit’, admitting that he felt only a small part of that record in its entirety.