Micah P Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs
Album released 21st June 2010 on Full Time Hobby
“Have the elder races halted? Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!” Walt Whitman, Pioneers! O Pioneers! (extract)
Micah P Hinson and the Pioneer Saboteurs is the fourth full album by Abilene, Texas-based singer-songwriter Micah P Hinson. Drenched in strings and desolation and inspired by the political changes in his native America, it’s Hinson’s most ambitious, fullest, grandest and most punishing recording yet, with instrumental beauty and words of brutal wisdom and bewilderment.
“The Pioneer Saboteurs are a set of individuals with their hearts set to rabid,” says Hinson. “We watch the world change, and we don't like what we see. The change only helps the ones on top. We stand up for the ones on bottom. The pioneer saboteurs ain't just a name for band. It's a fuckin' revolution, man. Who is willing to pick up their axes? Who is willing to draw their arms? Without folks doing this in the past, I ain't sure it would be a world I would recognize. Hell, sometimes I don't even recognize the one I live in now.”
Walt Whitman’s poem Pioneers! O Pioneers! provided the inspiration, but America provided the context. Says Micah: “I tried to make sense of everything that’s happening over here…the death of the American dream on the coat-tails of the modern US of A. A citizen cannot be unaffected by the things that are happening around him. If he does not, he is not a citizen. So it’s that, mixed in with all the things I always sing of: love, relationships, death. But I guess the point I try to get to all my songs and records is the fact that I want people to know they ain't alone in all this here mess we have. The world is on pins and needles, homes are burning to the ground, kids can't find their parents, tidal waves are blocking out the sun, tornadoes are hitting Los Angeles, and all the while The Great Magnet in the Sky is looking down, wonderin' what we are doing to ourselves."
The album was recorded in Hinson’s home in Abilene, Texas, a sleepy town full of gun-toting men beneath wide Western skies, and also a world away in New York with T. Nicholas Phelps. Some strings were recorded in a canyon in Colorado and some of the strings were recorded in small apartments in Zaragoza, Spain. The string arrangers are Eric Bachmann and “a fella from Spain I call Manitee,” and the players include members of Techanko, Devotcha, Crooked Fingers, and “other sundry folks I found around town to play the horns and backing vocals.” Micah even got his wife behind the microphone. The album was mixed in Argyle, Texas with Matt Pence of Texas outfit Centro-matic, then mastered in Nashville by guys who cut their teeth working on Dylan and Stax records. “I had a hell of a team,” says Micah. “The band with me, for every record has to change. Not do I just want it to change, I need it to. That's the only way the music can get out properly. It needs all these different, brilliant folks to gather around the fire, throw their kindling in, and watch the fire burn from red to blue just like that in front your eyes. It's a stunning and right beautiful thing to witness.”
Born in Memphis, Tennessee, Hinson is an old fashioned trouble man who fell pray to drugs and loose women, winding up homeless, destitute and incarcerated by the time most of his peers were filling in college applications. Music was his saviour, and since his 2003 debut, he’s pieced together a life for himself in his sleepy hometown, even proposing to his now wife live onstage in London. Currently riding a fertile creative patch (he’s already started working on a new album, he’s completing a set of Spanish EPs and he’s releasing a Spanish-language novel), everything that’s happened to him so far is apparent in And The Pioneer Saboteurs, his most fully realised work to date. “I hope people find hope in these songs,” says Micah. “I hope they find comfort. All things that lead to a good, happy existence while we are stuck on this revolving ball. And if they don't find that, I hope it shows them how much better they are than some poor, sappy Texas boy.”
This biography was provided by the artist or their representative.
