After his hipster New York band Soul Coughing crashed and burned in 2000, the band's singer-songwriter (and former Knitting Factory doorman) was back at square one without a label or even a first name.

Mike Doughty -- who had to that point gone as "M. Doughty" -- was faced with kicking a heroin habit and starting a solo career with a stripped-down project, "Skittish," that the record company didn't want.

He resorted to touring the country in a rental car, selling burned CD-Rs of the record at the shows.

Enter Dave Matthews. He ran into Doughty at the Bonnaroo festival in 2004, and having heard the solo stuff, signed Doughty to his ATO Records, which released the proper solo debut, "Haughty Melodic," a year later. Gone was the jazzy, avant-funk quality of Soul Coughing (best known for "Super Bon Bon"), replaced with a more a traditional singer-songwriter approach, albeit one with an odd, raspy voice and offbeat sense of humor.

"Haughty Melodic" made a name for the singer, thanks in part to "Grey's Anatomy" and independent radio picking up on the single "Looking at the World From a Bottom of a Well."

Now, he's issued a follow-up, "Golden Delicious," that finds his band taking on a bigger role. It opens with "Fort Hood," an anti-war song named for the base that's lost the most soldiers in Iraq. It contains a few simple lines that captures the pathos of the war as well as any that have been written. "See them coming back, motionless, in an airport lounge," he sings of the soldiers, adding, "You should be getting stoned with a prom dress girl/You should still believe in an endless world/You should blast Young Jeezy in a parking lot."

Another "Golden Delicious" highlight is a remake of "27 Jennifers," the song that originally caught Matthews' interest. Last week, the good-natured Doughty talked to us about his solo career in advance of his show Sunday at Mr. Small's.

So, I was reading your blog and found it interesting that you wanted to explain "Fort Hood." You haven't written many message songs. What made you write this one?

There was a couple things. First of all, I just felt like no one's addressed the war in terms of songwriters. We're so much smarter as a country than we were during Vietnam, during the last great explosion of political songs. Everybody is anti-war here and sensibly so. My dad was in Vietnam and grew up on Army bases, and it was pretty clear that all the adult men around me were having some nightmares. It seemed like a normal life when I was a kid, but looking back on it I realize these guys really had stuff going on in their heads. I wanted to address it because people weren't doing it and it was hard to get the complexity into words. But then it's sort of a song about post-traumatic stress disorder and transcendence of the country and anger at a lack of political unity. It's awful to write a "war bad, war bad" song.

How did the chorus of "Let the Sunshine In" pop up in the middle of that song?

I went to WFMU's blog and they had an MP3 of the original Japanese version of the cast of "Hair," which I thought, "This is going to be hilarious," and it was. But when they got to "Let the Sunshine In" they switched from Japanese to English and it was so powerful. I was moved by it. It's a subtle parallel to me between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. And then there was the simplistic irony of "Let the Sunshine In," let's change the country, let's transcend this nightmare experience.

How would you compare your songwriting for the solo stuff with what you did for Soul Coughing?

I'm just kind of more awake than I used to be. I'm a lot more emotionally and spiritually connected to who I am. I think the songwriting is a lot more honest. I think I had some moments in Soul Coughing, but when I look at it, it seems kind of unfinished and there are a lot of forced lines and areas where I had dropped the ball, and I just kind of throw something in there that doesn't make a whole lot of sense now. That's probably horrifying to a lot of Soul Coughing purists, but ...

Do you think a lot of Soul Coughing fans have gotten on board with you now?

I think a lot of them have and a lot of them never will. On the other hand, there's two bizarre elements that I never expected to come out. One is the people who like "Skittish." A lot of people are mad at me for not sounding like Soul Coughing anymore. A lot of people are mad at me for not sounding like "Skittish" anymore. And I presume down the line there will be a lot of people who will be mad at me for not sounding like "Haughty Melodic" anymore. The other thing is that there are a lot of people who didn't like Soul Coughing who like what I do now. It's exactly what I was going for: a new life, a new audience, a whole new thing.

I guess the rock elite probably sides more with Soul Coughing in that it was a bit more out-there, more avant-garde.

Yeah, and that's kind of hard for me to take. It hurts my feelings a little, because after all, "Looking at the World," the song that became successful on the last record, has the word "decathecting" in the bridge. So, "C'mon, guys, this is not a mainstream dude. Good Lord." It's something that is really hard to come to grips with as an artist, which is that you always have to operate under the weight of people's memories. Those critics, if they liked Soul Coughing in the first place, are just as guilty as the rest of us -- when you hear something and fall in love with it, you never want it to change. And it's hard to accept that people want to grow and change, and they are people with lives. For me it's hard to accept. I just have to keep working and doing stuff that I feel good about, feel proud of and not pay attention to people who are never going to let go of the past.

These must be tough days for an artist, because you can go on the Internet and read all sorts of negative things about yourself.

If, like me, you suffer from bouts of low self-esteem, it's like "Well, I'm just going to go on the Internet and look at all the horrible stuff people have written about me." It's definitely a trap.

After Soul Coughing it sounds like you really had to persist as a solo artist. Did you hit a point where you thought you might have to pack it in?

I didn't. Because there's nothing else I can really do. I contemplated diminishing returns, but I think if you're going to do this, you just do it. Fortune plays a role. I could stumble upon a hit single and be a millionaire. I could have not stumbled upon the fortune I stumbled upon and had a half or a quarter of the audience. But it's just what I do. I don't understand when people quit music because they can't retain a certain level of success. When I quit Soul Coughing, it was like, OK, I got dropped by Warner Bros., I have not had a record deal in like eight years, I have to get in the car and drive around the country and be like "Hi, it's me and this is what I do now and you're going to be really [angry] because it's really different."

I read where you said, "I'm a song guy, not an album guy." Why is that? And how do you go about making your own record when that's what you think?

Fortunately, when I sit down I look at everything as a comprehensive whole and try to sequence it. The whole time I'm doing it I know this is totally ridiculous, they're just not relevant anymore. You can defend the song as the measuring unit of popular music more so than an album. A song can be like a perfect curve, a perfect encapsulation, like a painting -- what Ray Johnson called the "moticos." This moment in motion. The simple answer is, I can fall in love with a song and I listen to it over and over.

So, "Busting up a Starbucks" -- how did you get away with that? Every time I hear it on the radio I can't believe what I'm hearing.

It's a song about futile rioting. I got really angry after the 2000 election. I remember hearing Rage Against the Machine talking about a third party and Ralph Nader. And I was like, "Have you listened to this George W. Bush guy?" He's a [expletive] idiot. I was concerned about Roe vs. Wade. I didn't even know they were planning a war that they were looking for an excuse for. So, it was, "Let's see, Al Gore's smart, George W. Bush is really dumb. It's not like you're voting against Bob Dole. This is serious. This is not the year to take a principled stand against the two-party system."

And it was just in general about the riots in Seattle and the anti-WTO protest, and having this nihilistic view of the universe. It's not political, it's just about rage. And that's what the song is about. I told everyone. I don't know if I want to put it on a record, because everyone's going to think it's about destroying Starbucks. And they're like, "Oh no no no." And it comes out and everyone thinks it's about destroying Starbucks and I had to speak to someone who was an executive at Starbucks and sit her down and be like, "Look, here's what the song's about. I'm neither pro- nor anti-Starbucks."

Yeah, I'm picturing this mad contingent of Mike Doughty fans running around and destroying Starbucks.

Oh, God! My nightmare. It hasn't happened, thank God.