Folk singer/songwriter Micah P. Hinson has formally announced his new album I Lie To You will release on December 2 via Ponderosa Records. Along with the announcement, he also shares the debut single “Ignore The Days,” accompanied by a sweetly haunting animated music video. Hinson’s 11th studio album finds him collaborating with an outside producer for the first time, Italy-based Alessandro “Asso” Stefana (PJ Harvey, Mike Patton), and “Ignore The Days” features special guest musicians John Convertino (Calexico) and American jazz bassist Greg Cohen. 

“When I wrote this song, a few years back now, it was very much like other songs I had found myself writing – the lyrics seemed almost trivial, as if I was writing about someone else. It happens,” says Hinson. “Then, as time went by and the song started gathering the slightest layer of dust, it hit me: the song was exactly what my life had felt like for years – this sense of loneliness and invisibility, but rather than a heavy loneliness, a place where to be stuck. The song had a trap door. The song wasn’t speaking from emotion, or speculation, or fantasy, the song was coming from a deep truth that I couldn’t shake, nor argue with. It was that way, it is that way. Some things cannot be argued with, some things just are, and with that, looking at my life and looking at my songs, and even more so living with my life and living with my songs, I felt I had finally found a place of giving in and moving forward. Some things cannot be changed so we must change ourselves.”

Born into a strict fundamentalist Christian household in Memphis and raised in the evangelist Abilene, TX, Micah sings with a weathered, husky, prophet-like voice. His songs feel like a patchwork of life experience, from his unsettled early days through his more recent years as a devoted father navigating divorce. Infusing his raw, poetic folk lyrics with inspiration taken from the industrial and alternative music of his youth, Hinson has established a reputation as one of the more innovative and interesting singer/songwriters in the international alt-folk scene. 

But in early 2020, after releasing ten critically acclaimed albums and building a loyal international fanbase from the ground up, Micah P. Hinson nearly walked away from his music career. He felt trapped, explaining “It hit me that all I was doing was writing about my previous relationships and situations, and that meant I had nowhere to go. How can you progress as a human being into the future if all you’re doing is writing about all the shit that chains you to the past?” 

When he found himself hunkered down in Spain at the start of the pandemic, Hinson took advantage of the time and space to reflect and recalibrate. He vowed from then on to only write about things happening in the present, but first wanted to gain closure by reworking and recording all of the remaining songs he saved over the last 25 years. I Lie To You represents the final chapter of a career spent looking in the past, featuring tracks written from his teenaged years through his thirties. The only song on the album written since he turned 40 last year, “Ignore The Days,” is an appropriate debut single that acts as the bridge between Hinson’s past and the new forward-focused life he is just beginning. 

Photo Courtesy: Natalia Andreoli