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and not surrounded by the ones that you love, then you kind of want to be with the familiar, you know. So I discharged myself the next day, and they were really fucking mad, but I went to a hospital in Texas when I got home. I didn’t want to, but my parents totally tricked me into it. Tey gave me an arm brace – I didn’t even get an arm brace in Spain; I even had grass still stuck to my arm – so they cleaned me up and that was it. In Spain, they wanted to keep me in the hospital for, like, two months, but here they were like, ‘oh, here’s a better sling, now go see your doctor!’ From there, I had to have these really like medieval tests; they took these huge, long needles and they put them all inside my body and I had to flex. Tey made this distortion sound, like on a speaker, then when I was calm, they’d be silent. Tat was hell, but we found where the damage had been done.


Nerves only grow about an inch a month, so there was damage at my shoulder, and then at my elbow, so it had to go all the way down to my finger, then back up. My hand shed like a snake, like all the skin died and stuff - it was fucking gross. And yeah, the doctor said he could work it out mathematically and he was like, “after two years, we’ll know where you’ll be for the rest of your life. At this point, we can’t make anything better with nerves.” Tat was like seven or eight months ago now, and my arms still feel like they’re made out of sandpaper. Anything it touches, like my shirt, it hurts. I’m getting better at playing the guitar now, but at first it was like, ‘OK, I need to play a G’, and it’d play like a fuckin’ D-minor, or something. Between my brain and my hand, it wasn’t making that connection.


THE ROAD TOWARDS ‘MICAH P HINSON AND THE NOTHING’


After the accident I definitely thought, ‘I’m gonna retire, I’m gonna be finished and that’s OK.’ ‘…the Pioneer’ was the last record I had, and from ‘…the Gospel’ all the way up to ‘…the Pioneer’, I think I’d captured the sound, and I’d gotten better at the sound. I’d got it to where I wanted it, you know, and of course you want it to go further, or go to a different


26 / April 2014/outlineonline.co.uk


themselves, or they can just fucking hate each other, so you have to be aware of how they get along, and how they react to themselves.


Tere were all these tunes that I had, and I’d been playing for years and I wasn’t happy with where they were all going, but it seemed like they should all go together, this bunch of misfits. Why not – if I’m gonna start over with a new sound, or go a different way, why not just take these. So I took them over to the studio, I fucking hated them, like REALLY fucking hated them and then after the accident, it was like, ‘well, I could get better’. Like I said, I played with a string section – got to do the Frank Sinatra bit for a while – and I thought, ‘maybe I can do this.’


Micah P Hinson plays the Norwich Arts Centre on April 22nd. For tickets, go to


www.norwichartscentre.co.uk. To read the rest of Micah’s fascinating story, head to


Outlineonline.co.uk for the remaining chapters.


I started working with my staple, T. Nicholas Phelps and my string players that played with me when I was fucking hurt. I got in touch with Band of Buriers, who were with me a couple of tours ago, and who will be with me on this one, and we just started working. So there’s actually like a first version of ‘…the Nothing’ that I did, and I turned it into the label that I was on at the time, and they said – and I quote – “none of these songs, or this record, are commercially viable.”


place, but I was OK with it. I thought I would go back to school, you know; I’m a Chickasaw so if I keep up my good grades, I go to school for free.


So there were all these avenues I could have gone down, but if you listen to the album, there’s all these songs like ‘Te Same Old Shit’, I mean hell, a lot of the record – ‘…Just a Dream’, I wrote that song when I was like, eighteen. Some of these songs I’ve had around for a long time; the newest one was ‘God is Good’, and that was written like six months before the accident. But yeah, these were all songs that had never fit; I’d recorded them before, I’d messed around with them and tried to fit them on previous records and they just never seemed to work. I’m a firm believer in that songs make themselves, and then records in turn make themselves. Tey can get along, they can be patient with


Tey told me that here on the streets of Austin, when we were there for SXSW and I remember looking at them and thinking, ‘I’ve been playing some of these songs, like I’ve seen people mouth the words to ‘Te Same Old Shit’, like people know ‘…Abeline’. Tey sing, they clap, they’ve watched them on the internet, and stuff.’


So to me, I felt like these were completely viable songs, but who cares? I’ve been going at this thing for, like, ten years professionally without making new fans; I’m fine with who I have. Tey’re the ones I try and make happy, so if they hear those songs, they’ll be like, ‘oh, I finally have ‘Tere’s Only One Name’, and ‘…L. J. Nichols’, I’ve heard him play every time I’ve seen him. To me, that’s viable. It’s more than commercially viable, it’s personally viable. For these people, it’s a bit like finding some treasure, and that’s definitely the way I see it.


Emma R. Garwood


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