TLOBF Interview :: Adam Green

“Excuse me, I’ve just gotta go fart in here”, Adam boyishly admits as he steps into the green room toilet of Leeds’ Cockpit, prior to the fifth gig of his European tour. Adam, like many underground artists, has secured a notably loyal fan base across Europe, selling out a considerable amount of venues, whilst showcasing his latest album, Minor Love. The album, his first in two years, has gained decent press and claims to showcase ‘a tender side of the often arrogant and emotionally unavailable bully/singer’.

“It’s been difficult logistically, to rehearse with this band,” which consists of close friends and old band mates, “before going to California to rehearse with The Dead Trees”, Adam explains. Yet whilst on the road, boredom doesn’t seem to be an issue for him and his band, “I keep busy. I get up in the morning, I read books, I write, I practice during sound check, I do interviews and then I start drinking…which is fun. I’m only on tour with my friends really, so yeah, I don’t really know why people don’t like it.” Quickly though, Adam sympathises with the other party, “I mean, it’s difficult for people in long-term relationships. It’s really hard to maintain one.” After recently coming out from a short-lived marriage, it’s clear that Adam is being self-referential here. His whole demeanour changes, his eyes widen and his voice is painfully close to breaking as he describes the struggle, “Despite what’s shitty or crumby about having a girl back home while you’re on tour, it’s absolutely unsolvable. You’ll never figure that one out. It’s very difficult.” Distancing himself further from the immature Adam that I was introduced to just moments before, he goes on to explain the lonesome and isolated lifestyle a musician on the road can often adopt, “I don’t even talk to girls that live in NY city at all. When I’m at home I don’t talk to anybody,” he breaks, “because I don’t want to make any attachments. So I’m just completely silent. Even if I go out I don’t say anything. I’m a mute.”

However emotionally debilitating it may be to live a life that is constantly interrupted by long periods of traveling, touring is clearly an integral part to Adam’s life. “I’ve been touring since I was 18 years old.” And with Adam’s style continually evolving (from the lo-fi simplicity of Garfield, to the choral vocals of Sixes and Sevens) it calls for an astuteness to adapt each album to the stage suitably. “Sometimes you have to change the whole groove of the song because naturally, when you record, there are atmospherics and stuff. Especially Minor Love, it’s heavily reliant on atmospherics, very stylized in production.”

Anyone who has ever attended a concert of Green’s will surely vouch for his inherent ability to entertain the crowd. When asked whether he believes if he feels the duty to entertain the audience, he answers straight, “Yes, unquestionably. There’s no way in the world you couldn’t see that what I do is entertaining. It doesn’t affect the way I approach my records per say; when I make records I’m someone who’s doing that, but when I’m playing shows, then I’m someone who’s doing that. There’s no connection between them. It’s almost like, let me think…”, he pauses for what seems like an eternity as he tries to summon up a suitable analogy, “…like um…. If Jimi Hendrix drove a…truck. They’re totally different occupations. And I have a few different occupations and that’s how different they are for me”.

“Performing is different from making records and I consider them to be completely separate. I can’t allow how I’m performing to sway the records I’m making. So, it was time for me to make this type of record. It was an area, sonically, that I hadn’t explored a lot. I was trying to make it kinda sloppy – playing all the instruments – that’s what I wanted to do intellectually. Performance-wise, all I want to do is have a rock ‘n’ roll concert. It’s really two different personalities – one’s throwing all this shit at one guy and the other guy is trying to figure out how to present it. It’s really hard but it’d be boring any other way. I can’t ever let the way I’m performing affect the way I want to make records. They always have to be separate.”

It’s interesting, then, to understand how the audiences differ between countries and how they each react to his various stage antics. “From night to night it’s amazing the variance. I guess half of it has to do with my own attitude to the show, but I do believe that half of the show, if not more, is the audience’s own involvement in it. I guess in England now, most cities I play to the same amount of people, so it’s not a surprise. I usually know that I’m going to be playing to a couple hundred people or something. I’ve played with other people and they’ve been like, “Oh tomorrow we’re going to play in Porto Alegre and those people are crazy about us!”, and then we get there and are like, “Well, uh, last time they were”. You just can’t predict. I just had like the best show in Chicago and sometimes I have the worst one, I don’t know why – I don’t feel like I did anything that differently. Also, I bring the audience into it a lot. If anything, I get accused – not accused, like a victim, nah! – my management tells me I’m talking too much on stage, but I think it’s an important part of the concert.”

Humour always seems to be at the centre of Green’s life, whether it’s his phonetically written blog (The Lakeroom), his often-witty song topics, or even his stage banter, there always seems to be a way to flip a situation to make it fun with Adam. However, being the joker can catch you up, and when asked about his drunken appearance on a German TV show, Adam explains, “I’ve been, in a sense, blackballed from television because of it.” He looks serious for a moment – a reflective moment of maturity, perhaps? Continuing with a mischievous smirk he asks, “But do I regret it? No! I think it was really good. I contend that it was good television.”

Minor Love, much like the rest of his work, showcases his sense of humour but in a darker light than before, often pairing the topic of love with a bitter humour. “I always got in trouble in interviews for saying I was ‘medium-serious’ in my music, which I thought was fair because I’m serious in that I am somebody that believes in the expressive potential of music and I’m not a comedy song writer, but I’m also not one that really believes that I want to go up in front of people and look them dead in the eye with a certain kind of stoic look and be that either. I hate that kind of thing. If someone posses that quality in life, why shouldn’t they implement that into their music? If they’re not, then isn’t their music less honest? I’m not sure if music has to be honest anyway, it’s just I feel very comfortable making music the way I make it. Music is not a scripture. These statements you make are emotional, they’re not the absolute truth.”

Yet, by openly displaying his the day-to-day life and his boyish sense of humour, fans of Adam often assume that he is considerably more approachable than most artists. When describing his relationship with his fans, Adam explains, “I would never be mean to anyone, unless they were being really obnoxious. We go out after these concerts and tell everyone where we are going and it’s usually just a bar. In this case, last night was Wetherspoons! Do you know what’s funny, I don’t know if people don’t believe us or something, but I didn’t see anyone from the show at Wetherspoons and I told everyone on stage that’s where we’re going. I don’t believe in concealing information anymore than I have to just to survive because I feel I’m doing the same thing either way, so what does it matter if people are looking at me? I don’t care. If someone was sitting by me, I’ll write a song in front of them. If they want to have a look into it, then let them. I believe what’s good about life and what you do with it is actually what you do, not what people imagine you to do.”

Whether or not it’s a good thing, Adam seems to be adapting to the English lifestyle whilst on tour, “I went in at 10 in the morning to get some breakfast and it was really crowded with old men drinking Guinness. And I was like, “Yeah, I’ll just get some eggs…and a…beer I guess? A…Guinness?” I thought everyone was going to laugh at me if I didn’t get one! Then this morning I got up and thought, ‘I’m going to get some more breakfast with beer!’ I thought, I could embrace the country and its traditions, or I could dislike them. But I’m choosing to embrace them. But the truth is, if I did live here for a long time, I’d probably die. I could get carried away a little too easily.”

Following the release of Minor Love many critics used the term ‘gentler’ and ‘maturing’ to describe the shift in Adam’s sound. “In my mind, Minor Love is completely fatalistic. In my eyes, the Lakeroom (his blog) is really just the part of my personality that is satanic. It’s the part of my brain that wants bad things to happen to everything. It doesn’t want anything to work out. And I think this album is like the Lakeroom. In my mind it was really hard on people – I’m sure there are people who think the songs are about them, Carly Simon style. And I think they would feel that it’s pretty mean. And the same with the Lakeroom – a lot of it’s supposed to be humorous, the lake room and the album, but ironically people think that the stuff that’s true on the lake room is a lie and vice versa. It’s like 50% fiction.”

“I’m coming at it from the opposite angle. People who were writing that were assuming I was some kind of brat as a kid, which I never was. I wasn’t like a kid who was throwing a trash can through a window of a convenience store. Any rebelling I did was more intellectual than physical. And then beyond that, it’s demeaning to the records I did before. I think that all that happened is that this time they understood the lyrics because they were less abstract. So, if less abstract means mature, maybe.”

At this point Adam seems to lose himself in his own thoughts, musing, “I wonder if at some point I’m going to stop releasing records entirely and just make them for myself.” He looks fragile, hurt even; this is not the guy that opened the interview with toilet-humour. “I could see why it makes sense for some people to make music and not show it to anybody, because it just subjects you to all kinds of weird situations where people judge you.”