106.1 The Corner 8th Birthday Celebration ft. Mike Doughty

9 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT MIKE DOUGHTY'S STELLAR MOTEL

1. STELLAR MOTEL is a collaboration with the hip-hop producer Good Goose, and sounds markedly different from any album before. After years of establishing himself as an acousticky singer/songwriter, this is a pretty sharp turn.

2. The entire process was video'd and put online as the album was being made -- not just the recording, but the very writing of the songs.

3. There are eight guest rappers on the album MC Frontalot, Miss Eaves, Big Dipper, the Brooklyn trio of MCs Hand Job Academy, Jay Boogs, and the Japanese rapper Kim, from the band Uhnellys. In particular, Doughty was deeply inspired by the Brooklyn queer hip-hop underground.

4. Another guest on the album is the cellist Andrew "Scrap" Livingston, Doughty's foil on his much-beloved Question Jar shows, adored by fans for his abstract musings. Example: "You can turn a spider into food, but you can't turn food into a spider."

5. Doughty does a song, "Oh My God Yeah Fuck It," with the saxophone-and-drums instrumental trio Moon Hooch, who specialize in a frenetic dance/house/dubstep hybrid they call "cave music." He met them when they were playing on a subway platform in Union Square.

6. STELLAR MOTEL was crowd-funded through PledgeMusic. Doughty lives on the graces of a small, ridiculously dedicated core of fanatics.

7. Doughty has written extensively about how vital it is, when crowd-funding, to give pledgers odd and experience-based things, like private shows in his rehearsal studio, recordings of songs on microcassette (microcassette recorder included), framed Soul Coughing lyrics ripped out of journals from 1991. The big hit with pledgers was lyrics to any song the pledger requested, typed on a circa-1981 IBM Selectric typewriter by Doughty, and signed.

8. Good Goose also produced the last album, Circles Super Bon Bon Sleepless..., which was a reworking of Soul Coughing songs. After years of avoidance, Doughty has reclaimed the songs he wrote in the 1990s.

9. Doughty says, "I'm lucky, in that I love the touring life, and, particularly in these days, I'm an obsessive social-media maker and watcher. I make sure I love every piece of music I write and record, and I look for inspired and wonderful people to work with. It's a stressful job, but I've been doing it for 20 years -- I can't imagine wanting to stop."