We sat down with Adam Green before his show at 7th St. Entry in Minneapolis.
Me: How do you feel about Lindsay Lohan?
ADAM GREEN: (brief pause) Indifferent.
BD: I have sort of a Lohan fixation.
AG: She’s very freckled.
BD: She’s squandering the firecrotch, though. There’s been a bunch of pictures leaked on the internet lately where she’s not wearing underwear.
KRON: Is it hard to find those pictures?
BD: No, there’s a website called
lohangroupie.com that you can go to, and they pretty much keep you updated.
AG: There’s something magical about girls with red hair, but often times they don’t age very well.
BD: They seem to have soft skin.
AG: They do. It’s so fair that it doesn’t age well.
BD: So how did you first get into music and what kind of stuff did you like early on?
AG: My first concert was the
Grateful Dead at Giant Stadium.
BD: Were you a big Grateful Dead fan?
AG: Not extensively, but I mean, I knew their greatest hits. I remember Jerry Garcia came onstage in a big purple shirt. I knew that he was a big deal, you know, it was clear.
BD: It’s fun going to shows with that big deal element. Like on their last tour, the Strokes had the drum kit elevated like ten feet in the air.
AG: Oh yeah, [the Moldy Peaches] played with them here [7th St. Entry], two shows in one night.
BD: My friend Cole Larsen went to one of those shows. And he said that the Strokes were great, but that
the Moldy Peaches really blew him away. He talked about your performance for months, and he wore the tee shirt, and that kid doesn’t even like baseball style tee shirts.
AG: That’s terrific. I remember it was a fun and exciting show here. There’s something about this place, with all the tiers and different levels. Everyone gets a good view, which is rare in a small room.
BD: Yeah, I saw
Wesley Willis here.
AG: Oh yeah, I liked him when I was a kid. I headbutted him.
BD: Yeah I heard he headbutted people.
AG: Yeah, he’s got a bruise on his head where he always does it. What were we just talking about?
BD: Early music.
AG: Oh yeah.
Nirvana, for sure,
Mississippi John Hurt, traditional American folk music. I lived right next to a record store that was really good, and I got a lot of knowledge passed on to me from the people that worked there. It closed in 2000, and it won’t be replaced, because a Borders books moved across the street and drove it out of business. It’s a bummer, because you can’t go into a chain music store and ask an employee if this is a good record, or something that they’d recommend, you know, they’re just not that knowledgeable. That’s not what they’re there for. But with a small place, the people are almost like librarians that work in used record stores, they have a vast scope of knowledge about the history of music.
BD: Have you been to the
Electric Fetus in Minneapolis?
AG: Maybe, is it the place by
the comic book shop? That place was pretty good.
BD: No, that’s
Let It Be, that place closed down. It was a bummer. And the comic store moved.
AG: I was planning on going there later. That’s the thing about these places, when they close them, they don’t bring them back. They’re an anachronism now. They won’t be replaced by anything, they’ll just cease to exist anymore, you know, for our children.
BD: I guess that’s the give and take of the internet generation, where everything’s so accessible to the point where it chokes out some of the smaller outlets.
AG: It’ll be a surprise to meet people who are completely informed by the internet. For me growing up in a small town, it made all the difference to have that [independent record store], whereas a town two towns-away might not have that, so I would never have known anything, you know, cause it wasn’t available online then. So yeah, record stores were helpful. I’d ask a lot of questions and such, spend all day shuffling through the bins. But also, I went to a lot of shows when I was younger, I used to have older friends that would take me into the city and I’d see, who knows, a million bands, like at that time it was
the Make-Up,
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion,
Beck,
Cibo Matto,
Dub Narcotic Sound System,
Elliott Smith,
Mary Lou Lord, I don’t know, lots of weird shows I went to when I was younger, probably around 13, 12.
BD: Sounds like a good period.
AG: Yeah, it was really good. I came in right after the whole death of Nirvana, you know, that’s when I started looking around. I remember seeing videos like that on MTV, like the
Lithium video, and I identified with it, even though I didn’t know a lot about what was going on in the Northwest. And I remember going to listening stations in the blues sections at record stores, and hearing these Mississippi John Hurt records. That kind of sparked an interest for me in traditional American folk music. That led me to purchase things by
Hank Williams,
Skip James,
Leadbelly, and from there, all kinds of obscure, banjo-playing hillbilly musicians. Also, I was in a noise band, too, as a teenager. I was really into trying to play eastern sounding things, kinda like Jewish melodies, I can’t tell what they are. They’d sort of get in my head, and I’d get together with some friends and take a lot of drugs, and we’d record stuff in the closet. We’d wire up all kinds of recording gear and go in the coat closet at my house and smoke a bowl in there, and then try to exercise some sort of demons. Actually I’m really proud of some of the noise stuff we did. I think a lot of people don’t realize that I did stuff like that, cause my music sounds really neat. But everything I did before my 20s was really sloppy. I just kind of threw it together at the time, without really thinking about it a lot.
BD: Did you purposely moved toward the more polished sound, or did it happen naturally?
AG: It’s happened naturally. Something exciting fell into my lap to move towards music and romantic songs. I worked with a string section to create some of the sounds that I’ve heard in my head since I was really young, but I never knew how to build them, cause I just didn’t have that kind of discipline. So it was funny feeling more comfortable and growing into my own skin, and being able to concentrate more, having a longer attention span. I always look for something that’s exciting to do and sounds good, and just trust my instincts about music. That’s kind of the job description, you have to trust your own discretion and taste, or else you’re not really worth anything.
BD: Do you think you’ll ever release any of those noise recordings?
AG: I’ve put out some of the demos I did on the 4-track. Some of it’s even on the Moldy Peaches record. Like that song “On Top,” I was maybe 13 or 14 when I did that. There’s a demo song “Bleeding Heart,” that’s on my new single, that I recorded when I was 15. So I’ve been trying to let it go gradually. I have a whole collection of recordings, 4-track things, that I’ve never shown anybody. And a lot of it’s because it’s not that good. I was trying to figure out why songs aren’t that good when you start writing when you’re young, and I think it’s just because the standard is low, and it’s really easy to impress yourself with something that’s maybe not that dynamic, because it’s new and you’ve never done it before, so it’s exciting. But I don’t think it was necessarily high quality what I was doing at that time. Some of it was.
BD: I like “No Smoking at the Bronx Zoo.”
AG: Yeah, that’s one of those things. I found a tape of when I was 8 years old, me walking around my house, making up a song about a field trip to the zoo (laughs). It seemed good, so I put it out. It’s good to do that stuff on a B-side, that’s what they’re for. I always fight with that, though, cause I never wanna write a song and just commit it to being a B-side. It seems like I oughtta regard it more highly. I spend so much time to write it, and then just throw it on as a bonus. Anything I write, I like to think has a place somewhere on an album. But now that I’m getting older, I start to realize that it’s just not possible. I write too many songs, I can’t put ‘em all on an album.
BD: What’s you’re recording process like? What’s the time frame from when you start writing a batch of songs to when you record the new album? It seems like people have different approaches, like every time Ryan Adams has ten new songs, he records a album.
AG: That’s one way to do it. I pretty much do that, just maybe a little slower. I try to put out an album every year. There’s a few songs always that don’t make it. Most the time, I spend two weeks on each song. And by the time I’m done with a song, I feel like recording it, so I make an album. But there’s always a few [songs] that just don’t work.
BD: So you tend to write on a song by song basis?
AG: Yeah, absolutely. I never write thinking of an album. It just ends up becoming an album because the songs were written in a certain time period, so they’re a reflection of what’s going on in my real life during that time. And they relate to each other in certain ways. And also, an album becomes an album by the nature of how it’s recorded and who played on it. I try to keep it all in a frame of time, so that it’s not a collage, you know, it has a story.
BD: You mentioned the importance of who plays on a record, and it seems like your collaborations have been good for you. I read an interview today where you said that being in Moldy Peaches is really what taught you how to write and perform songs.
AG: Yeah, I needed to do the Moldy Peaches to get out and feel comfortable. I had to. And it was great, because I got to see the world and put my head together with somebody to create something that’s more than the sum of its parts. The Moldy Peaches was a true collaboration, like a band in the real sense of the word. And if I had another band, I could only hope that it was as much of a band as that one.
BD: I also read one where you said your new touring band had really helped you discover rhythm.
AG: Oh yeah, when I started with these guys, I started thinking all different about music, because they’re musicians of a really high caliber, and they excel in many different aspects of music, not just with technical proficiency, but also in terms of feel and intuition, even improvisation. I really couldn’t wrap my head around what they could do at first. I had to start writing for them. Even things that I could never pull off if I was playing all the instruments, for them it was really easy. There’s nothing I wrote that I couldn’t teach them in a day.
BD: So you write the instrumental parts on your albums, for the most part?
AG: I wouldn’t say that, I mean, I write the melody, the words, the groove, the rhythm, and the chords and stuff. I write the song. But with the arrangement, I leave some stuff up to them—as long as it doesn’t rub me the wrong way, then I’ll say something. Especially with something like the bass, I don’t really play the bass, so I’m not gonna enforce some bassline or beat if I don’t even have it in my head. I never even thought about the bass at all, I’m not just gonna all the sudden try to become a bass player. But about the rhythm, I’m very picky. It needs to stay in that groove, I’m kind of a Nazi about that. But with the guitar, there are so many subtleties to a guitar part, I just write the chords, I don’t really expand on it. There’s so many grace notes or augmentations of a chord that make the song more expressive. I don’t know all those little passing chords and things.
KRON: Do you know music theory at all?
AG: No, I gotta say I don’t. I think that so much of it is intuitive. It’s like something I once read, an interview with the director
Robert Rodriguez. He said that the average person knows all that they ever need to know about editing, because they watch so much TV. And I think that’s true; you know, you hear so much music in your life, you don’t need to know exactly what you’re hearing, you just hear it. And if you work with good musicians and you spend the time with the guitar and piano to figure out notes, who cares what it’s called? It just goes like that. Music is sort of a universal language in that way. But I’m always impressed with people that know [music theory]. I guess it saves time if you want to describe something to somebody. And I’m always surprised how many stupid people know that stuff. I don’t know, maybe they learned it at a young age when it seemed like less daunting of a task. Sometimes really stupid people know really complicated shit. Like I used to eat at this pizzeria by my house, and it was so good, but the guys who worked behind the counter were so dumb, and it was like “How do these fucking guys know how to make such good sauce?”
BD: We talked about collaborations. Is there anybody specific you’d like to collaborate with in the future?
AG: Sure, all kinds of people. I want to do more Moldy Peaches. Also, I want to do a remix of “Novotel,” the single off my new album. I wanna remix it into something more electronic. Who else do I wanna collaborate with? Oh,
Andre from Outkast. I wrote this song that I want him to work on with me, I think it would be really good. I don’t think he’s ever heard my music, I don’t know for sure. And I wanna do a collaboration with, ah… she’s kinda like a porn star,
Jenna Haze. I wanna have her sing something. I found her on the internet.
BD: Does she have one of those nice porn voices?
AG: Yeah, It’s really unsettling. I think she’d be a good singer.
BD: I like the sound of that. I liked it when you did the duet with the robot on “Apples, I’m Home”
AG: Yeah, I could see doing a lot of things like that, duets and things, I just need to think of it. It’s been a really weird few years for me. I got kinda lost in the world, touring so much. I’ve been meaning to go back to New York for awhile. I think I’m gonna get the chance after this tour, to just go back to New York and live there, cause I really miss living there.
BD: What are your favorite parts of the city?
AG: I suppose midtown. It’s where my parents live. I just really like the big buildings. I like how crowded it is, and nobody knows each other. I want to go to a place like Starbucks, a stupid place like that. I think I like Starbucks cause I’m the coolest guy there. I like being in a place where I’m the coolest guy. (laughs)
BD: There was a show of your drawings in Stockholm, how’d that go?
AG: It was good. It was really crowded, felt like a real art show. It felt like an event. There’s something going on in Sweden, and I know very little about it.
BD: I heard the women there are nice.
AG: There’s no other place with such a high concentration of bikini babes. It’s like an untapped reservoir, like visiting a virgin kingdom.
BD: Sounds incredible. Do you still draw regularly?
AG: Yeah, but I haven’t so much in the last year. I just haven’t done it. But I think if I started again, I could pick up where I left off. Right now I’m just reading books and writing songs. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist, I don’t really anymore.
BD: It’s gotta be a lot of work.
AG: Yeah, there’s something about a line, the way to draw a line. I think some people draw lines too fast, and other people draw lines too slow, you know, and I think there’s a perfect way to do it. And it makes me feel kinda uncomfortable, finding the best way to draw lines. It’s not too fast and not too slow. There’s a lot of expressive potential in the wrist, if you spend long enough. The wrist is like a seismograph. I think there’s a storm lurking underneath the skin of every artist. And if you just draw slow enough, there’s all these vibrations in the wrist that inform a line and make it into what, I think, is really artwork.
BD: So you’ve traveled all over the world on tour?
AG: Well, not everywhere, but there’s probably about 100 different cities around the world that I play, and I’ve cycled them now, a bunch of times.
BD: What are some of your favorite cities?
AG: Uh, let’s see, I don’t wanna knock somebody’s town. Whenever we go to Paris, I’m excited. When we go to Sweden, it’s great. Switzerland can be nice, but I can’t say it’s that thrilling, it’s just beautiful. Also, Rome, in Italy.
BD: I went there once. Skittles come in a box there.
AG: Yeah, Skittles come in a box. I wanna go to Florence. We’ve gone to Japan a couple times. It kinda puts me out of my element, and I like that. But sometimes you go to a place like Montreal, and for whatever reason, it’ll be a thrill. You drive a few hours and you’re in a French-speaking country. Montreal is a surprisingly vibrant city. Maybe not even surprisingly, I just didn’t know. And you know, we go to Los Angeles, and I’m always like “Something crazy’s gonna happen, we’re in Los Angeles.” Travel’s great, though, you never go anywhere that’s just like New York.
BD: I wanted to ask about the jump in sound from your first record, which was pretty lo-fi, to your second record, which was done with a string quartet.
AG: That was sort of a crossroads for me, where I had this opportunity to make a different type of record, and I took it and made this strings record. And it’s been really great for me, because I got to do my own thing and kinda break away from the pack, I guess.
BD: Do you think you’ll set out to make a certain kind of record again, like an Adam Green rock record, or a country record?
AG: I always entertain those ideas. But most of the time, instead of becoming records, they become one song. And, you know, I think about that, like “I’ve gotta start making R&B music, like
Destiny’s Child.” And that’ll turn into one song, rather than an album.
BD: That reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote, about serious writers versus comedic writers. He said that with comedic writing, you can hit one idea, joke about it, and then move on to the next one, whereas with serious writing, you write much longer about each idea. He said that if he’d been a serious writer, he’d have had to write much longer books.
AG: Right, that’s true. It’s fun when you’re not taking it too seriously, to sort of mix the elements together. The attempt is just to come up with something of a certain level of quality, and move on. Most of the songs that I’ve written in my life, I never really stay up at night because of them. I write them as a hobby. Well, I shouldn’t say that about not staying up at night, because I do write down stuff in the middle of the night. I just never look at a particular song as an opus or something. I was just always thinking along the lines of making it feel pretty good.
BD: “Bluebirds” is kind of an opus, in my opinion.
AG: (laughs) But you can’t think of it like that, you know, I think a lot of people in the world are maybe better off not really going for masterpieces. And I’m probably in that camp, where I’m just better off working song to song, and not trying to make these grandiose concept albums or songs with really pointed intentions to change the world. I think most of the time, when I come up with an idea for a song, and it’s really defined, I lose interest in writing the song, because I feel trapped by the authority of the idea. I feel like there’s nothing left to be excited about, because the idea’s already in place. So my favorite is to work on a song semi-blind to what I’m doing. So at least then, I’m excited when I finish it, to sort of decide what it’s about. I think a lot of songs that change the world weren’t conceived with that intention. In a world-changing song, I think the majority of communication is just inferred, just types of things that make people catch on to a certain vibe. And that’s what triggers the change. It’s not like some sorta lyrics that tell you how to live your life. It’s everything behind the lyrics, it’s everything that you can see the person doing by example, and not some actual phrase or commandment. I don’t really write music with commandments, I never have. There’s other people like
Woody Guthrie or people that are very square-one and just tell you the idea. And I’m not knocking it, I think that’s important. It’s just not my style. It’s not how I feel comfortable living. I’m just not that confrontational.
BD: This is an unrelated question: did you draw the cartoons on your album cover?
AG: No, my friend Galen did that. That’s his artwork. He also directed the videos for
“Baby’s Gonna Die Tonight,” and
“Dance With Me” and
“Friends of Mine” and
“Novotel.” A bunch of my videos. He’s a really good artist. Actually, it’s a shame about
this "Novotel" video, I’m not really happy with it. It’s the last video I did, and it’s the worst one. I think it just wasn’t very well planned.
BD: How many videos do you usually do per album?
AG: I usually do as many as my label wants me to, cause videos are largely a promotional tool. I don’t think it’s necessarily intuitive when you write music, to conceive a video. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re asked to. In my case, I don’t really feel comfortable using someone else’s idea for the video. I feel like that would be similar to letting someone else write one of my songs. If there’s going to be images associated with a song, it should be my own. But I’ve sort of given up on that. It’s just simply that people want to do their own ideas when they direct a video. And you have to fight really hard for the original idea. I sort of directed about five of my videos. The last one I did like that was
“Nat King Cole.” I always had it be my own idea, but now I’m starting to think differently about it.
KRON: Does the label demand a lot of control with regards to the videos?
AG: No, that’s the funny thing about me. The record label doesn’t control anything I do. I have this relationship with
Rough Trade where they’re completely hands-off. The only squabble we ever get into is over money. I haven’t not been able to do anything that I’ve really wanted to do. Except, I really would like to bring string sections out on these tours, but it’s too expensive. I found myself in a position in Germany last year, where I could pay for the string quartet and it was feasible. And I did about ten shows like that. I did one in Paris and in London. And you just lose tons of money. It was worth it, but it’s just about getting down to the line, man. Seriously, I’m not making any money, so I can’t do it. I can’t just throw out two thousand dollars to do a show. So I think I’m not gonna tour for awhile after this tour. I love touring, but I think I’m just gonna stop for awhile; just work on music and not be a road warrior. It’s just not very much fun when you do it for seven years in a row. I’m just kind of at the end of my--what do you call it?—at the end of my rope. So when I go back to New York, I’m gonna stay there, I think. I’m just gonna get into some shit, I don’t even know what. Something gruesome, I don’t know (laughs). A bloodbath. I’ve just gotta figure out what I’ve seen in the world, cause I’ve been traveling for a while, and I just need to put it together. I’ve been in hundreds of different cities, over and over again, and I’ve played so many different concerts and they’ve all gone pretty well. But I’ve just been lost. I have people pretty much throw me out on stage, and I don’t even know what I’m doing. I hire people to throw me out on stage. I hired people to tell me that I wanted to go on another tour. Like when I would say that I wanted to go home, they would tell me that I had to keep on going. (laughs) It’s just really funny, you know? I just get very disoriented. It makes it easier when the audience comes with something. That’s kind of the mentality I’ve had on this tour; I like to hear requests.
BD: I’ve got one: “What A Waster.”
AG: Yell it out, I’ll play it.
BD: Nice. You’re gonna be honoring yell-outs? Cause I’ve got some more.
AG: Yeah, I’ll do the whole thing requests, I don’t care.
BD: I’ve got one more series of quick questions. Just say whatever comes to your mind, you won’t be held to it.
AG: Okay.
BD: Favorite record?
AG: See, that’s tough. (Long Pause) I’m trying to think of one that’s good from start to finish, cause a lot of them have holes in ‘em. Maybe
T-Rex: Electric Warrior.
BD: Favorite movie?
AG: I love
The Holy Mountain by Alexander Jodorowsky.
BD: What’s that about?
AG: What’s it not about?
BD: Okay, I’ll rent it. Favorite book?
AG: There’s a comic book called
Hate, have you read that?
BD: No, I’ve seen it on the shelf.
AG: People should read from the first issue to the last issue of Hate. They come in these volumes. That’s the best book.
BD: So you’re a big comics fan?
AG: That one. If you want a novel, I don’t know,
The Old Man And The Sea. (Laughs) That’s always a good quick read.
BD: Yeah, that’s the one that you wait until the night before the test to read it, but it’s okay, cause it’s like 70 pages long.
AG: It’s great.
BD: Since you like comics, I’ll throw in this question, it’s a corny one: If there was an Adam Green cartoon, who would you want to draw you?
AG: (After long pause) I got it,
Rob Liefeld.
BD: The guy who did the Image comics? So you’d be all muscled-out?
AG: Yeah, I think I wanna be muscle-y.
BD: Do you like watching sports on TV?
AG: No.
BD: Favorite snack food?
AG: Cold Fritos.
BD: Last question: What are your thoughts on TomKat?
AG: I don’t know. I think Tom Cruise is sorta doing what Hitler did, but he’s doing it for good.
BD: You think Cruise is promoting good?
AG: You know, I think ultimately, he’s a good guy, a natural leader. Sort of like a little Gandhi for a perverse Space.
It turned out Green wasn't putting us on when he said he'd play all requests, which resulted in an incredible concert. He split things up evenly between solo acoustic songs (highlights included "My Shadow Tags On Behind," which should be featured in a Woody Allen film, the old-sounding new song "Jolly Good," and an especially great rendition of the Velvets' "I'll Be Your Mirror.") and more rocking numbers supported by his backing band (highlighted by "Novotel" and the psycho Jagger-channeling "Baby's Gonna Die Tonight"). The show basically spanned the greatest moments from Green's four solo records, including almost every track off his debut Garfield. It was one for the books. I think great things are going to happen the next time Adam Green visits the recording studio, and I can only hope that it involves robots, adult film stars, and some mandolins.
You should visit
Adam Green's website and
buy his records. And download this song:
ADAM GREEN - I'll Be Your Mirror (Velvet Underground Cover, Live, Paris Black Session) MP3your friend, Beck DeRobertis
