“‘Where’ve You Been?’: Soul Coughing – ‘Maybe I’ll Come down’”

*The “Where Have You Been?” series handles individual songs and diagrams their history, from their inspiration, to the writing, to their eventual contexts and implications it’s had in our culture, with an emphasis on the geography of all these things, or the “where,” in other words.

Hey, I said I was launching a series. I didn’t say I’d be making your head spin with a blistering speed of output. 

But I have, after all, anyway, finally come to inspired fomentation of the second installment of my “Where’ve You Been?” series. Basically, just to recap, the series intends to detail a roughly complete module of places and general geographical sectors which would have been instrumental in the formulation, materialization and, perhaps, overall meaning, of a particular song. For the inaugural segment I handled Chuck Berry’s eccentric comeback tune “You Never Can Tell,” which of course was featured in Pulp Fiction in that Jackrabbit Slim’s twist dance competition. 

For the second installment I’ve looked to one of my favorite bands, the long-defunct but ever original, insatiable and defiantly rhythmic Soul Coughing. Soul Coughing called New York City their origin, with lead singer/rapper Mike Doughty originally from Fort Knox, Kentucky, now residing in Memphis and what’s more beholden to some impressive singer/songwriter solo albums like Skittish/Rockity Roll, Haughty Melodic, The Heart Watches While the Brain Burns, et. al. 

Anyway, Soul Coughing, with New York as pretty much their home base, was active from the early ’90s through 1998 — the year they’d split up and also the year they’d issue their last album, El Oso. Now, El Oso is what I consider to be their most consistent album, even if it doesn’t necessarily contain their best song. The last song on it, hence standing as the last Soul Coughing song, is this eerie sort of minimalist rant “The Incumbent”, bequeathing the repeated mantra “New York New York / I won’t go back / A gullible reminder of the steel I lack / I gave you seven years / What did you give me back? / A jaw gone [1] disposition to a panic attack”. So the culmination of El Oso, then, gives interesting insight into what drove Doughty out of the Big Apple, and, possibly, as a result, out of his big, famous band, the remainder of which was composed exclusively of New Yorkers.

Now, just to make this clear, “Maybe I’ll Come down” is nowhere near my favorite song on El Oso: in fact it might be my least favorite next to, say, “Pensacola” and “I Miss the Girl.” And then “Houston” has one annoying freakin’ beat to it. On the other hand, I happen to like and generally cotton on to the singles “Circles” and “So Far I Have Not Found the Science,” the type of catchy pop tunes that in the’ 90s it was chic and raging just to hate because they weren’t, like, jarring, uncomfortable Nirvana songs or unapproachable Steve Albini crap or whatever. The extent to which you hear “Circles” on satellite radio to this day, anyway, speaks volumes of its staying power and overall artistic merit. I mean, it’s certainly not overly poppy compared to, say, “Let it Go” by James Bay or “Ho Hey” by The Lumineers. 

“Maybe I’ll Come down,” for its own credit, anyway, does furnish what I guess I thought was a pretty compelling lyrical combination, in terms of imagery, of this big, scary place New York City, and of drugs, what with the apparently obvious reference to substance abuse right there in the title. Actually, I diss on “Maybe I’ll Come down” above and one reason for my overall adverse disposition to it is that this one part is a blatant xerox copy of a part of another song, on their proceeding album, “Soft Serve.” The chorus of “Soft Serve” is composed of various lines which all have an identical rhythm, one of them ending in “Marietta,” to rhyme with the next one of “The words you mouthed were sweeter” [2]. “Maybe I’ll Come down” contains the exact same rhythm and da** near the same exact melody in the prechorus of “I knew the gas was gone / But I had to revv the motor”, hence, of course, setting up the obvious joke of that repetition of phrase representing a revving of the motor to produce a reservoir of fuel that’s already been exhausted on another track prior. So, in this way, one place “Maybe I’ll Come down” has been is, uh, within the song “Soft Serve.” Yuk yuk yuk. 

Sorry. Back to brass tacks here, or as close as this post will get to such a thing. Now, within the song we get a reference to The Big Apple: “Oh I dreamed a great parade / Shooting all the guns in Brooklyn”. Now, of course, this line itself doesn’t obviate that he’s actually IN  Brooklyn for the composition of this song, or even necessarily that his muse metaphysically resides there. We do, though, get a slight bolstering of this sense by the opening line “I need time to scrounge the rent”, with New York obviously a city with rather stringent apartment rental rates. 

From Doughty’s last book I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound the reader gets the admission that “When I wasn’t on tour I crashed with a girlfriend in London or a tour manager’s friend in Pensacola (Florida)” (77) the date of this chapter in the book being 1996, which you’d think would have to be close to when “Maybe I’ll Come down” first saw light of day. One idea this gives me is that the title could in fact carry the ulterior meaning of “coming down” to Pensacola, particularly what with the line “Pull back your hand / You might get it cut off in the rudder”, an obvious reference to boating, a practice readily available in the Florida panhandle town aforementioned. 

One snippet of I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound that gives us some lucidity on Doughty’s New York conditions goes something like this: “I lived on Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue… We called it by the acronym of its phone number: CAT-BUKS” (26). Now, one thing interesting to note here is that anyone familiar with New York will quickly observe this address to be Manhattan (with the two numeric intersecting streets, one dubbed “Street” and one “Avenue”), whereas in “Maybe I’ll Come down,” interestingly, Doughty references Brooklyn, another borough and county [3] entirely within the city. With regard to the aforementioned lyrical theme of “rent,” then, we can at least haphazardly glean the conclusion that Doughty would be finding cheaper rent rates in Brooklyn, but that said borough, with this being the pre-gentrification ’90s and Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z and several members of Wu-Tang, in addition obviously to countless others, hailing from B.K.N.Y., is a little bit rough and more conducive to the kind of “panic attack” he mentions in “The Incumbent” as having driven him away from N.Y.C. in the first place. All in all, I envision Doughty sitting in CAT-BUKS composing “Maybe I’ll Come down,” perhaps a little short on melodic sense (evident in larceny of “Soft Serve”) but plenty redolent on the earnest lyrics rife with imagery, and, I think, imagining Pensacola and “coming down” there. The song just has such a tropical feel about it: it’s slow, lazy and hazy, like the South is, and for some reason when I was in high school and first getting into this band and album I envisioned a tree, like a tropical banana tree or something along those lines that Doughty were swinging on, or imagining swinging on, and debating the prospect of “coming down” from. As for what drugs I was doing in high school, for their own right, that might have to comprise a different post entirely. 

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[1] Wikipedia has the lyrics as “jaw-grind” but I personally think that’s a mistake and that Doughty meant “jaw gone” as in fear or panic of getting his jaw broken as a slight double entendre meant to connect to the phrase “dog gone.” 

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[2] Of course, I’m not accounting for Doughty’s hilarious habit of extending every final syllable with a hearty, robust “Uhhh” elocution. I wasn’t sure how to stylize that, to say the least. 

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[3] Yeah it’s pretty interesting but I recently learned that every New York borough is actually its own county… the Indiana country bumpkin in me is completely agape. 

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Works Cited:

Doughty, Mike. I Die Each Time I Hear the Sound. Hachette Books, 2020.