New Year’s Resolution: Mike Doughty Goes to Hell

At the beginning of the year we asked for your creative New Year’s Resolutions, and you came through with hundreds. We picked a few brave souls who agreed to let us check in with them over the course of the year to see how they were getting along. One of them, composer and indie rocker Mike Doughty, used our challenge to motivate himself to start a project he had been contemplating for years: composing a rock-opera version of the Book of Revelation.

Halfway into 2014, Doughty has streamlined and condensed the complicated plot of the book, and started writing the music. “It has been surmised that there was a psychedelic substance involved [in the writing of Revelation],” he says. “Because the narrative is so confused.”

But by now, he’s got the plot down to its essentials. “It’s the story of Jesus psychedelically destroying the Earth,” Doughty explains. “It’s this relentless destruction.” Doughty has been drawing on a recent exercise in apocalyptic darkness for inspiration: HBO’s True Detective. “I’m taking a lot of tone stuff from that — really dark, creepy, swampy.”

Working with the Bible as source material has also reminded Doughty of the metal bands he loved as a teenager. He’s found some unexpected connections between them and the gospel music he’s drawing on. “We didn’t realize that there was this deeply Christian core to Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, buried underneath the layers,” he says.

Editing down the Book of Revelation might be necessary for writing a rock opera, but Doughty fears the stakes are considerably higher. “At the end of the book in the conclusion, John says, ‘If anybody messes with this text, you’re going to Hell,’” he says. “So, like, I’m going to Hell.”