THIS IS AN INTERVIEW WITH ADAM GNADE. HE IS VERY NICE AND PLAYED ME A SONG.
BUY HIS RECORDS!
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Getting there is the first hurdle. Miles upon miles of rural English country roads, thousands of arched tree’s making for a menacing nocturnal canopy. Worth it though, for the respective sets from Adam Gnade’s and Youthmovies’, the former’s dense narratives as bewitching as ever, and the latter pulverising with their swollen, convoluted epics.
Adam has a new record out soon, called Palaces/Whidbey Island. Youthmovies are releasing their first LP, Good Nature, in the new year. The two of them have just released a collaborative EP, the super lush Honey Slides, and they have been on a joint tour ostensibly to promote said CD. I interviewed Adam after his set on Friday night, and found him to be an interesting and engaging kind of guy. He even shows us a pile of ravaged books he picked up earlier in the day, including one he bought for Andrew from Youthmovies, which is pretty sweet. The things below are everything else that was said.
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So how’s the tour been going to this point?
It’s been pretty good so far. We’ve had a couple of shows that were really weird or bad, that we shouldn’t have done, shows that were just ridiculous.
How so?
We played at this one venue, in a small town where no one lives I guess. We get to the venue and it’s like this auditorium, this huge fucking venue, and they have a smoke machine already going, and this huge lighting set up. We go backstage, and it’s this massive area just for us, with piles of booze. They gave us a lot of money to play and 5 people showed up. And they were there just to watch a movie that was playing downstairs. So we went crazy and turned it into a weird New Year’s Eve party. We found all these balloons and covered the stage with them and a bunch of toilet paper. It was just fucking weird. We sang happy birthday, and we were lying to everyone…
It was no-one’s birthday was it.
No! We lied to everyone, said the guy from Jonquil had had a baby. It was great.
How are you finding the English audiences? With the exception of the small ones?
Yeah, they’ve been really good so far. Well, we played Scotland and that wasn’t so good. I don’t think Scotland like me very much. but English audiences so far have been pretty good.
You’re playing a song with Youthmovies later…?
Yeah, we’ll be finishing the set with Honey Slides, a dance song. We did it last night in Kingston, and we all got really fucked up. I ended up climbing onto the barrier, and security guards were grabbing me, and I fell into the audience (laughs), and then Andrew (Mears, Youthmovies singer) jumped into the audience. I think some girl broke her arm. Graham from Youthmovies did a flip, and landed on her. He’s a killer.
Will he be busting any of that out tonight?
The works! The lot. Even though he feels really bad.
So the Youthmovies EP, who initiated that?
I have NO idea. We toured last year and Drowned In Sound set it up. We didn’t know each other, but just kind of got together, and (Youthmovies’ guitarist) Al came up with the idea. We had the day off, so we recorded two songs really fast, and it was gonna be a 7″, and then for whatever reason it ended up being a 5 song record. I recorded the other songs at my house.
How did you find that way of working? Writing and recording words for music you couldn’t hear?
Yeah, it’s weird. I recorded three sets of lyrics and…it’s a lot more freeform than the two songs we recorded together.
It works really well, given that you didn’t know each other before. It seems like a good match.
It could have been horrible. I mean I was really worried, ‘cos the chances of us getting along as well as we did were pretty slim
It seems a lot more direct than anything you or they have ever done.
Yeah, the two tracks we did in the studio are like, some of my favourite stuff that we’ve ever done. They have a lot of immediacy…ah it feels really bad to say shit about your own songs. They feel a lot more natural, and it just seems like those two songs work really well. The other ones are really cool but I think those two we did together…maybe because we were locked in a van for two weeks together and we just bonded really well (laughs).
I really like the third song, “We Walk Unknowing In The Cross Hairs”.
Oh yeah. I haven’t heard the record yet. I mean, I’ve heard the rough mixes and stuff, but I just got over here and haven’t had a chance to listen to it. It feels bad listening to it in front of other people, like, “Come on, let’s listen to our record! We rock!”
Yeah, it’s kind of something you want to do on your own.
Oh yeah (laughs).
I wanted to talk about your writing. You’ve said about your lyrics, that they come from prose, not spoken word or poetry. Who influences you as an author?
Oh man. That’s tough. Uh, I read a lot. I like Saul Bellow a lot, especially “The Adventures Of Augie March” and Steinbeck, just ‘cos I grew up on the West Coast, so that’s almost a cultural thing. Hemingway too, he’s pretty good. I’ve been reading Hemingway for years, and it finally clicked in with me like how good he is.
What is it about Hemingway that you like?
It’s just…he knows what not to say. It’s kind of like…his sentences are really sparse, but it’s more than that. He’ll describe something, like this wall or something, but the things he leaves out are the things he knows people are gonna fill in. Maybe that’s like a cultural thing, where he knows Americans will fill that in and so on. I don’t if that’s actually how he worked, but he’ll describe a setting in a way that makes your brain do all the work, and you have this five word sentence about this place that he’s at and it’s vivid as hell, y’know, it’s really clear. He kind of has this reputation as being a thug, but I think he’s a lot smarter than people thought.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a modern author, not that they’re bad. There’s just so much stuff out there. Going to that book store was amazing. There was all this Kipling and Dickens and Twain and stuff, and it would take me my entire life to read it all, and it’s all a lot better than I know a lot of contemporary stuff is.
Have you been indulging in more English Literature while you’ve been over here?
(pause) No (laughs). I didn’t bring any books. Last time I didn’t read at all ‘cos we were raising hell the entire time, but we’ve been here for so long that eveyone’s starting to acquire their old hobbies back. And I’ve been freaking out, reading the NME, or the Gideon Bible in the hotel rooms.
Whoa. That’s a really unholy mixture. What are your opinions on the NME?
Oh…so much hype y’know? Like, I like the fact that there’s a lot of positive stuff, because I have a hard time dealing with criticism, where writers think they have to say something positive and negative to have a valid opinion. But the NME is kind of ultra positive. I think it’s too much.
It’s positive perhaps about the wrong things, or positive about things for the wrong reasons. …like always claiming something defines something.
Like Klaxons, the voice of a generation. Did you see that issue with them in all their crazy make up?
No. That issue was shrinkwrapped. I can only read it if it isn’t.
That’s the way to do it. I feel bad too, ‘cos they have like 10 bands in it, two stories on Klaxons, a little blurb on Klaxons, on the back cover will be Klaxons. It’s kinda cool, ‘cos a lot of our friends in the Youthmovies circle are doing well with the NME, like Foals. They’ve been covering them a lot lately but, fuck man…
It’s what they ascribe to the music, that it is something beyond what it is, beyond being a piece of music, like everything is a huge cultural event.
It’s gonna change everything! Y’know, music’s amazing and it gives you a lot of openings, but in the end, art is so secondary to so many other things, like having actual experiences in the world, having human interactions. I kind of wish it was back like how it was with Shakespeare, when he would write about the actors coming to the city, and they would be considered scum. People wouldn’t be like, “Oh what does the artist have to say about politics! What does the artist have to say about the grand cultural scheme!” I mean, fuck, it’s just a song.
Back to the lyrical thing, I read that your prose is never fiction, that it’s all based on real experiences. Does that apply to the novels you have coming out?
Yeah, they’re all… well there’s a lot of stuff that I don’t really want to admit is real, but I can’t really not write non-fiction, ‘cos there’s so many good things to say about things that have actually happened.
I wrote a science fiction novel! Last summer, when I was really bored and living in the south..the southern united states man, it’s so hot, and I didn’t have anything to do but sit around waiting for my first tour to start, so I wrote this psychedelic science fiction novel. It was so bad.
So it won’t be seeing a commercial release?
Oh I burned it (I laugh, like a fool). I’ve been writing books since I was really young and that’s kind of what I’ve done, burned every manuscript until I’ve felt like it was ready. So the book that’s coming out at Christmas, I felt that was the first one that was ok.
You sound like quite a perfectionist…
Oh I don’t know about that, I just don’t want any shit to come out.
So the science fiction novel. Shall we go there?
(laughs) It was like x-rated, psychedelic, surrealistic…it was just horrible.
It sounds like Scientology, like those novels…
Like Dianetics?
(cue a tangent about Scientology, specifically it’s geographical proximity to our current location i.e. the worldwide centre of it being just down the road. This has been deleted for reasons of narrative cohesion, and for the fact that THEY MIGHT BE READING THIS.)
Yeah, I’m totally obsessed with cult religions, my Mum was in one. Well kind of a cult religion, not as crazy as Scientology.
What was it called?
The 7th Day Adventists. It’s like a new religion that came out in 50’s, with all this bullshit connected to aliens. Like vaguely Mormonist things, but not polygamy, cos that would be kind of cool. I just find cult religions so interesting. There are so many different sects, like so many that people don’t know about. There’s this part of the Catholic church called the Polmarian’s (sic?). It’s where everything is just really strict and puritanical…this isn’t a really good story ‘cos I can’t remember any of the details.
That’s ok, this is like a whole other conversation that we could theorise on for hours and hours. Back to the novels, do they continue the themes and characters from the last record?
Yeah definitely, all the characters from the records…it’s almost not cool to call them characters cos they’re barely referred to, they’re characters as much as any song has characters, names, people and stuff like that…but a lot of the stories and characters are continued. A lot of songs came from prose stories. Some of those songs are like…a paragraph of prose story and then there’s like 15 more pages about that character. It’s all about the same universal characters and themes, and things that I kind of want to say.
What do you want to achieve as a writer of prose? Where do you see this going?
That’s a good question. I guess I just want to do something I’m proud of and …with the book, create something I feel that stands on its own that I really believe in, even if nobody reads it ever again. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that I’m completely 100% proud of that I can sit on the shelf and say, “that’s a permanent thing,” and er, that’s kind of the main thing. I grew up being incredibly…not “inspired by,” ‘cos that’s a cheesy thing, but a lot of the stuff I read when I was a kid…I guess this is pretty common, like everybody does this…it kind of kept me alive, kept me going. Reading certain people helped pull me through, and I feel it would be a good thing to make people feel a little less alone.
Certain things that I’ve experienced have made me feel that…maybe I’m not as a crazy as I seem to think, that there’s other people doing things like this. I’ve always wanted to do what my heroes did for me.
A lot of people I know have a hard time with life. I mean, I’ve had a rough go of it, not because my life is hard but because I’ve got bad wiring in my brain or whatever, and there were certain things that kept me from not killing myself, or on the other side of things, not taking a 9 to 5 job that would crush my spirit. It’s just about having a reason to carry on, and even if you can do that for one person then that’s a noble thing.
That’s a wonderful thing to aspire to. With the new record, you seem to have consciously moved away from the starker, barer sound of the last record. Was there any event that presaged that?
Yeah, I’ve always done these records for a group of friends, ‘cos I didn’t think anyone else would really give a shit. I did Run, Hide, Retreat, Surrender because I was in a really dark place and I really felt that this was the end, like I was slipping into some kind of…I don’t know. I needed to do something….to not let go. I tried anti-depressants, partying really hard, traveling all over the country…and all these different things, and just nothing was working and I was getting sadder and sadder and I didn’t know why. There was no reason whatsoever, I had an ok life, but I was getting really bad, so I decided if I could do this record about all this stuff that maybe I could heal from it a little bit, and for the first time in my life…I mean I’ve never been happy, I’ve never, ever been happy…but I’ve found a place where I can be. I mean, I keep slipping back into it, like every few months, something just pisses me off and I get really hopeless again, but it’s not as bad as it used to be. Like what we were talking about earlier, I wanted to do stuff that was a little more positive to tell people that things aren’t always gonna be that bad. All the new songs are like pep talks for people that I knew that weren’t doing so well. For whatever reason I have friends and people around me that really have a hard time, and it’s really tough to see them deal with life so badly, so all of the songs on Palaces are pep talks, to try to help…I don’t know if it even articulates that way, ‘cos it’s so personal that it might not seem like it is, but that’s the way it is.
Would you say they were easier to write and record than Run, Hide, Retreat, Surrender?
It was completely natural. It felt like the thing that I needed to be doing. But the last record was like improv. We recorded it in a week or something, and we were all really, really drunk and unhappy. I didn’t play any music on it, I was too fucked up, and I was just like “play this!” and we tried to work it out. But these songs actually feel good to play. I can’t listen to Run, Hide, Retreat, Surrender, I can’t play any of those songs live. It just feels like listening to my own requiem or something (laughs). If that’s the right word.
So what are your plans post-Palaces? Where’s the rest of your year headed?
Well we’ve got a couple of weeks left on this tour. Me and one of the guys from the band Album Leaf were talking about doing a solo tour of California, but that’ll probably be it for a while. I have another book that I want to write. I’m trying to do one a year for the publisher that I have. So I’ll probably do that twelve hours a day for the next year, and that’s pretty much it for now.
Do you see music as a finite thing? Do you see yourself continuing more as a writer/author?
Yeah, that’ll be the thing I always fall back on. I mean, from the purely financial side of like feeding myself, it probably works better and has more of a shelf life, and I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve kind of had the feeling all along that when I make a record that I really like I’ll probably stop, cos I think the style I do, the talking songs, like I’ve never felt that it’s right. I just think that as soon as I figure out my shit and record a record that is completely done, I’ll probably finish it. I’ll probably keep playing it for myself, but not taking up so much of my fucking life! (laughs). I’ve been on tour all year man. It can be wearing.
You can call it fiction, but that’s my real true love, trying to come up with something as good as one of the people that I really love. I mean, I like the book I’ve got coming out but it’s not even near ready. I kind of look forward to being old and finally figuring out my shit. I mean, Henry Miller lived forever, and he wrote some amazing stuff in his twilight years, and I kind of like that idea. I mean, I never thought I’d live as long as I have, I always figured I’d be dead by 20 or something (laughs). Sometimes things are really shitty and hard but I think I’ll live as long as my health sustains me. I like that a lot, and I want to be writing books for the rest of my life.
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And that’s that. Adam also contributed a great performance of his song “We Live Nowhere, And Know No-one,” to this little project-a-rama, the original of which is available on his mini album Shout The Rafters Down! which was released last year as a digital download by Drowned In Sound. Listen to it, in all it’s brittle glory, there.
I also managed to get my sticky mitts on a copy of the new Adam Gnade/David Christian record. More info on that, and probably details about how to buy it from Bad Drone Media. I’ll review it sometime, should that be of interest to anyone, but not for a while, cos I want to live with it for a bit, rather than blahhing out thoughts on it without due consideration. It sounds like something that deserves real attention. It looks proper lovely as well.
That’s all for now. G’nite.
