ALT.COUNTRY

At 25 years old, Micah P Hinson seems a little young for the world-weary sorrow etched into his melancholic tones, but the Texan singer songwriter has experienced more than his fair share of heartbreak and misery.

Hinson was a young teenager when he met his ‘first muse’, as he puts it, a Vogue cover star and widow of a notable local rock star, who introduced him to drugs, leading to a spiralling problem which ended with him in prison for forging prescriptions, desolate and disowned by his family.

By 19, Hinson was homeless and penniless, but throughout all the hardship he kept writing plaintive songs in whatever friend’s apartment he found himself. His luck changed for the better when some of those songs found their way to The Earlies, the Mancunian/Texan band and producers, who took him under their wing.

The resultant 2004 album, Micah P Hinson and the Gospel of Progress, was a remarkable beast which showed Hinson to be up there with the pack of recent American alternative singer songwriters such as Iron and Wine and M Ward.

But just when life seemed to have turned around, Hinson suffered a freak back injury on the eve of recording his new record, undergoing surgery and remaining housebound and immobile for months. Nevertheless, friends rallied round and the album got made between painkillers and bed rest, the resultant Micah P Hinson and the Opera Circuit being another triumph of alternative country. If it’s true that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, there can be few stronger of heart than Micah P Hinson.