[4/5] Micah P. Hinson isn't your average 20-something--unless you call getting tangled up with a former Vogue model and her hard drug habit, serving jail time for forging prescriptions and consequently being disowned by your fundamentalist Christian family "normal." But as The Baby & The Satellite--eight reworked versions of songs from his 2001 "dark period," plus a ninth track recorded that year--proves, hard living has been good to Hinson, or at least to his songwriting. The 24-year-old has the rasp of a career chain smoker and the candor of a sage, all of which makes his revisionist folk as startling as it is poignant. With his baritone tracing lines between Richard Butler and (Smog)'s Bill Callahan, Hinson sings, "Someday you'll find/the dreams you left behind/are not bright as they seemed," like a man who's already suffered decades of loss. If he has this emotive a soul at 24, it's scary to think how good Hinson will be at 50.
(SKETCHBOOK/JADE TREE) Casey Lynch
 Official Website: http://www.jadetree.com
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