Biography
Adam Gnade's (guh nah dee) work is released as a series of books and records that share characters and themes; the fiction writing continuing plot-lines left open by the self-described "talking songs" in an attempt to compile a vast, detailed, interconnected, personal history of contemporary American life.
INTERVIEWS WITH ADAM GNADE
BACKLASH MAGAZINE
THEFOUROHFIVE.COM
BLOGGERTRONIX
EAST TEXAS AVE ZINE
GAYCONDO.WORDPRESS.COM
THE MAG
FIELD RECORDS
SUBBA-CULTCHA
HELL IS CHROME
FOLLOW FOR NOW AUTHOR ROY CHRISTOPHER
JULIE IN MITTENS AUTHOR RICH BIAOCCO
REVIEWS OF THE PALACES/WHIDBEY ISLAND DOUBLE-CD
THE MAG A genuinely unique voice, Adam Gnade is something of a travelling minstrel, trailing his "talking songs" of bleak lives, bleaker landscapes and hard drinking across lengthy tours of the US and the UK, gathering critical acclaim and writing a number of books and albums along the way. The latest additions to this prolific catalogue is this 2 CD set released through small US indie Bad Drone Media.
The ying to the others yang, these are two markedly different sets in terms of both content and delivery. First up, Palaces - a bleak, self-recorded record full of unsettling noise loops, tentative guitar plucks and a wasted set of vocals are unsettling and dark, like the alternative folk soundtrack to a David Lynch movie. As with most of Gnade's songs, the plots are bleak, the lost and the wasted of the world, cast out upon the winds of humankind and struggling to hold onto the precipice.
By comparison, Whidbey Island is a far more laid back affair; spacious folk and country guitars roll themselves out on the sun porch and take in a little easy time. Yes, it's still pretty downbeat but compared to the nightmarish sections of Palaces it's like a copy of Spiceworld! It's possible that the influence of David Christian (credited here as a co-conspirator) had a lot to do with this, perhaps coaxing the pessimist out into the light for a short time at least but back to back - the two albums work as a whole.
Like the spring sunshine the morning after the storm the night before, when consumed as a whole each needs each the other to lighten the dark and yet still smudge the edges. As a lyricist Gnade remains a gifted artist at work; macro portraits are constructed, giving us cinematic views of the characters in the music and instantly dropping the listener square in the middle of Gnade's world of hopelessness, long windy nights and a cast of hopeless romantics making their way through the world.
Far more gentle in approach than the Youthmovies collaborative EP reviewed elsewhere in these pages, this is a great starting place for anyone looking to explore the back catalogue of Mr Gnade - more reflective and easy going than the exhausted sounding Run, Retreat, Hide, Surrender and more representative of the man than Honey Slides, this is the true voice of modern Americana and one that (further boosted by the release of Hymn California his first book out Valentines day) should hopefully see the name creeping into more and more record collections with every passing show.
BODYSPACE.NET (translated from Portuguese) As it becomes more three-dimensional and longer, the narrative map that Adam Gnade extends through an endless amount of singles and EPs, which are complemented by some written material (two novels [note: one] and several loose texts), the fiction he develops is slowly transformed into a typically American plausible reality which you can only glimpse in the creation of the San Diego-born author. The universe he crafts seems to be exclusively his. He turns the three EPs which were released in 2007 into additional parts of the Adam Gnade puzzle and, at the same time, an equal number of steps forward in the adaptation that is required by someone who is dedicated to their own talking songs – instrumental pieces accompanied by the voice of someone who tells a story and not someone who reads a poem or a speech. Even more so since Adam Gnade's tone is nothing like the one that Jello Biafra or Henry Rollins use on their spoken word records. Quite cleverly, the length of each of these EPs is short and thus freed from the wearisome weight that the spoken record would have if it were to be longer than 30 minutes.
Adam Gnade can even rely on the advantage of being able to fail – to some extent – in the music surrounding his voice, when the eloquence and personal touch of the latter is enough to hold the foundations of the themes included in the EP. True enough that the music in itself isn't that different from Giant Sand's consistent Americana or from the onyric folk from the Fox Glove scene architected by Brad Rose, even if, in the intimate and deeply personal Palaces, it comes out revitalized by some experimental unease (never as much as the press-releases state) and with some field recordings that try to emulate the unique sensations of a North-American space.
Aware of the need to stir the waters, so that they don't accumulate mud from the sedentary folk, the Honey Slides EP, recorded in cooperation with the British Youthmovies (who are incapable of repeating themselves), comes out as a no man's land that encompasses festival rock and complex electronic soundscapes where the voice from the North-American artist is filtered and made more robotic (with no apparent damage) – a sort of "Remixed Adam Gnade" that literally adopts that task in the reptile-mystic fantasy "Snake Lore, Part II: Hold Back the Flame, O Weary Friends!" that takes the more sober original from Whidbey Island to a reformulation that involves a constant violin and sounds turned inside out. An intense moment.
But there you go – even if all of that failed, Adam Gnade's voice would still ooze America from the eyes of someone who's still discovering it and showing it to us. You feel in him that anguish of one whose affection is scattered through several friends in different states and who isn't afraid of a night lost behind the wheel if that is the necessary sacrifice to attain a more enlightened vision on an ever changing country. Adam Gnade talks like the narrator on a Gus Van Sant film and not like a professional in a stupidly patriotic advertisement. His voice is to the America of somnambulists and bohemians like Morgan Freeman's is to prison escape films. –Miguel Arsenio
FROM ITALY'S KRONIC (translated from Italian) American Adam Gnade has endeared himself to overseas critics with his experimental folk, which is capable of accessing myriad emotions thanks to the power of his vivid narrative. After the remarkable debut, Run Hide Retreat Surrender, the US composer decided to release a limited-edition double-vinyl set that follows the themes of the previously mentioned work. The first five tracks, the Palaces side (note: CD 1), are marked by a minimalist approach where banjo and piano orchestrate gaunt melodies as the ground for the stream of words evoking a kind of hard-fighting romanticism. The second side of the 12" (note: CD 2), Whidbey Island, runs contrary with more fluid pieces in which David Christian's charismatic guitar contribution sticks out, leaving lo-fi sonorities behind for more countryside ambiances. Cohesively, Adam Gnade has created a series of intuitive songs which give voice to the intimate while simultaneously speaking to, and picking apart, a culture, giving life to a double work of elevated aesthetic purity. –Alessandro Bonetti
DAMP SNEAKERS, CRACKED BLACKTOP Waco, my crumbling city, has about 600 homeless people currently shifting about its cracks. Once an industrial center, this town has seen tornadoes, floods, and gradual economic decline for the general non-university population. Amid the wandering souls, changed, perhaps, by drugs, or alcohol, or war, or the sixties, or by some injury, there are always the preachers.
They are the ones to catch you by the elbow, and through yellowed beard or watery eyes start telling you about the theory they've devised. And sometimes you just wait patiently and excuse yourself, or buy your way out, but sometimes a question will slip around the cigarette you let them bum that leaves you not really able to come up with an answer and bothered for the next several days (at least).
i've been looking at outsider art a lot over the last few days. People who were struck with a vision from a stone, or an angel, or a demon-spirit, or their own wandering brains detached from the societal skeletal system that all the rest of us find so necessary. Among so many of these creatures that i, patiently inking dots in art school, don't really much understand, one that struck me to the core was Miroslav Tichy. A man from the Czech republic who, having been through art school, was imprisoned for rebelling against the communist takeover. After his release, he began making cameras and, with an impossibly keen eye, found out the beauty of shape within the truth of the candid world.
What does any of this have to do with music? Adam Gnade.
You know where asphalt starts rotting and cracking apart at the edges of an old road? And the richest, awkwardly crumbled soil that's every colour but brown, with little pieces of glass and paper and tiny dead and growing sprouts show in the spaces that were once blanketed away?
That's what Adam Gnade sounds like.
I wrote him this long soppy letter, once, about a lot of the reasons i love his music, and it could all really be summed up.
This creature's words have the ranging eye of the crazed street preachers, and his eerily prophetic voice (like Tichy's lenses or Cheval's stones or the tiny sparkling bits of glass that Helen Martins spread everywhere before they made her blind and she killed herself) shows the flashes of somehow-goodness weaving through our earth. There will never be smooth gleaming prettiness except in make-believe, but i'm in love with the mess that makes up the art of this context in which we are placed. I love the sweaty sprawl of hair and smears of face-paint as my camp arise, headachy and muffled, to sniff at leftover bottles and trail off to work on a cloudy morning. i love the water that slicks itself through the colours of the trash caught between the rocks of the creek, which smells of petroleum, flowing under the highway.
So when my $10 brought me two EPs and a bundle of papers and pins and hand-scrawled notes, i was happy.
And i think that if you look into this kid's music, you won't regret it. –Naomi Whatley
BLOGGERTRONIX Gnade is an artist based in Portland, a writer, musician and all round super talented lad. Over the past few years he has toured the States and the UK twice with numerous eclectic music makers, he has also released records on a handful of indie labels including 'Drowned in Sound Records', 'Loud + Clear', 'DeathBombArc' and 'Try Harder Records'.
Gnade has collaborated with various bands and last year he released a rambunctious, fit of a culture clash E.P called 'Honey Slides' with Oxford, UK based 'Youthmovies', a bold record that featured Gnade's brand of talk-record Americana, fused with infectious British, electro-noise rock.
During his last UK tour he released a self-published 60-page Novella, 'Seasons Loving Nothing' which was only available on the tour, it soon sold out and another run of the book was printed once the tour was over and was distributed on his myspace profile. The last run also sold out quickly and Gnade's first full length novel 'Hymn California' is to be released this spring by 'Dutchmoney Books'.
His style is raw, sharing prose in his very distinct and unique way, crafting "talking songs" that shoot for the gut and stick it to your heart. Songs of love, life, city living and country rambling, war, peace, stories from home, stories from the road, dripping with vivid imagery, exploring the light and darkness of everyday life.
Performing Live, he sometimes plays alone, a beaten guitar and an assortment of unlikely instruments, some homemade, at other times he plays with a band of traveling music makers, disjointed and often displaced, but all sharing the passion to make noise, to unite and produce something larger then themselves alone.
The Palaces/Whidbey Island Double E.P in cd format was released late last year on Bad Drone Media, the 12" Vinyl release with each E.P pressed on either side is set to drop in a few months under the same imprint.
The Double E.P is a Limited Edition and features handmade artwork and liner notes. Spray painted card-slip cases in purples, greens and pinks are stamped with black and silver images of trees, palaces and names, each one is tied together to form a double package with coloured embroidery thread. Every cd is unique and different, sweet, pretty gifts that contain clips of someone else's time and space, life observations on love, politics and world affairs.
This fella has the right idea. If artists are going to survive in the music business, during this digital revolution they're going to have up the ante, raising the bar for themselves and others, making their product more desirable and unique. DIY releases are seriously the way to go if you want to secure your fan base and create a record that is going to stand out, not just in content but visually. Anyone can download a track and listen to it, but to recieve a real cd, that is a limited edition, to hold it in your hands, a handcrafted and beautifully presented package is truly something else, special. Gnade shows us that its the little things that count, not only with his words, but with every album he releases, his cd's are consistently sold out and always in high demand for a reason.
Palaces: This 5 song E.P will give you a taste of Adam's gritty-edge, his honest recounting of seemingly normal daily activities which as he explains them become little worlds, with poignant meaning and note worthy impact. His music is not easy to catergorize, a mix of styles, elements taken from old talking blues records, working songs and spiritual tunes of time gone by, some call it Americana, others traditional folk, but the common thread which links all these genres is a raw and real roots element that is most definitely present throughout this record.
'Palaces' first song features sparkling bells and twangy banjo, it is the E.P's namesake track and relays a dark tale of being displaced, and feeling alone when coming back to a city after being away for sometime.
The tunes on this E.P are full of haunting, dark imagery; grave yards, compost heaps, dirt, coffins, stink bugs, lonely corn field and expressways, but as in the 3rd song on the E.P 'Farmhouse's there is normally a little lyrical lightness to lessen the oppression of the heavy subject matter-
"We'll sit in our kitchen and eat apple pie and oh lord how we'll talk!" - 'FarmHouses', Palaces.
'Farmhouses' also features the kalimba giving the song a innocent, childhood musical box air, this coupled with the moody lyrical content, can really set you on edge and make you feel just as uncomfortable as the characters within the song.
The last tune 'Providence' is a passionate piece which samples an old gospel choir recording of "Goodbye Fair thee Well", scratchy and slowed down on vinyl, truly beautiful and yet also highly unsettleing. There's no way around it, this E.P is dark...dark but also lovely.
"It's a Texas Sun, Booming and Triumphant and big as a house, in Texas where heat mirage looks like a sheet of tin foil stretched out across the highway" - 'Sadie', Palaces.
Whidbey Island: This E.P is the first in Adam's "Island Trilogy" the second of which, 'Become an Island', is set for a limited-edition release later this year.
'Whidbey Island' was recorded in a house situated on a cliffside of Washington State's Whidbey Island with friends David and Thaddeus Christian. The E.P features five songs strung together with stories of family, friends and experiences which lightly float on a bed of deep acoustic bass, tinkle mandolin and warm, weathered acoustic guitar.
Compared to 'Palaces', 'Whidbey' sounds more open and fresh. The songs are packed with room noise and mic pops. Low-fi production was key in giving this E.P it's warm vibe, finger picked guitar tones support Gnade's smooth voice which delivers words about driving, small-town dreams, conversations and observations, responisibility, walks in woods, machines and animals. Between each track you are bought back to nature and Gnade's reality, with the use of field sample recordings, bird calls, dogs barking, open air distant conversations, streams and babbling brooks.
The E.P is revealing and thought provoking, simple sentences ring loud and true, commenting on what he sees and hears around him, more often than not the characters in his songs find themselves becoming disconnected and lost -
"In their houses they're silent and stare at boxes of wire and copper." - 'Stake a Claim', Whidbey Island.
The record ends with the powerful acoustic guitar driven song 'Bunkers' a tune which highlights struggles of balancing life in the country and city, reflecting on times gone by and how those events relate to present times. Using his voice as a call to attention, by relaying the struggles of pioneers and his lands forefathers, this song is a wake up call for those who are stuck in the grasp of city living -
The E.P ends with about a minute or so of recorded outdoor country noises, streams running over rocks and lapping at stones on the waters edge, bracken cracking underfoot and the drone of a plane overhead, a very calming and grounding outro, that reminds you of simpler times.
Adam has just finished writing his next record 'Trailerparks', the follow up to his last full length 'Run Hide Retreat Surrender'. He will start recording within the next few weeks, in regards to the new album he said - "it sums up everything I've needed to say for a long time now. Some of it, happy/guilty admissions. Some of it, bad haunted shit I need to put behind me. Also: a lot of water (rivers, oceans, lakes, streams, lawn hoses, bays, bathtubs) and a lot of worry and fear--and a lot of getting over worry and fear. I wanted to make a "healing" record and I think I did that but it's come out kind of dark and deathly". 'Trailerparks' will be released later this year on 'Try Harder Records' to find out more about this brilliant artist hit the links above.
REVIEWS OF ADAM GNADE'S NOVEL, HYMN CALIFORNIA
RAZORCAKE I just started grad school a few weeks ago. They sometimes assign up to three books to read in one week (which is impossible, but study habits in grad school are another story). So I want to make it clear that I actually made time for this book. It wasn't like, "Oh man, another book to read?!" No, I actually would take a break from my other books to read this because I enjoyed it that much.
Adam has been around for a while both as a musician and writer. Hymn California is described as an autobiographical novel and—from what I can gather—much of this happened to Adam in the past few years, but he also might have embellished a bit (à la James Frey), so he made sure all should know it's a novel. This monograph primarily consists of him driving back and forth across the country with friends and everything they feel, see, and do. To miss the connections to On the Road would be pretty hard. The characters here are trying to learn who they are and where they're going. But mostly they're floating along, going nowhere, very reminiscent of Douglas Coupland's Generation X but in a car. There are all sorts of vignettes about growing up, memories of childhood, events from recent U.S. history, and so on. There are also some hilarious moments, such as the Mexican father who scares his kid on the subway in NYC by pretending to be Chucky from the film series of the same name.
In the midst of a story told by one friend about a cat, another friend pipes in, "What?! This isn't the cat story I know! I thought this was the story where Karl hid in the bushes and jumped out and punched a cat?" It's a stream of lines like that which provide the book with unforeseen hilarity or poignancy, along with the description of life in Portland (a city which I miss), that kept me intrigued. (Although, where he and his friends came up with the money to drive across the country and buy all the things they did left me puzzled.) The similarity to so many authors I enjoy and the vague feeling of familiarity with the characters is what kept me interested enough to finish what I started, which is more than I can say for some of the books I've been assigned to read for grad school. –Kurt Morris
FEMINIST REVIEW Adam Gnade's debut novel, Hymn California, is a dizzying recollection of seamlessly aimless cross county wanderings. The summations of this work gives glimpses into humankind's most integral information: we're animals so don't be afraid to act on your instincts.
The overall story is reminiscent of a slightly less drug induced Kerouac, fueled by an avid admiration for alcohol. If you are in need for the long lost whimsy of youth and need some inspiration for your next cross country road trip, you just might find it in this book.
Amid love, confusion, and thousands of miles driven, the haunt of the main character's hometown seems ever-present. No matter how hard the protagonist tries, the call of California rules him. Tempestuous and unsatisfied, his Greyhound travels and driving for days on end, is something every American teen dreams of. If you're of the traveling spirit, it's easy to find solace in this character's madness.
Gnade's ability to capture the essence of the weary road warrior is poetic and plentiful with personal glances into this subculture. His stream of consciousness writing can be a bit longwinded at times, but it pays off in the end. I can't wait to see what the author has in store next. Review by A. Mariel Westermeyer
SAN DIEGO CITYBEAT Toward the end of Adam Gnade's Hymn California, the narrator poses a question that illuminates the dark and less-traveled road his characters deliberately have chosen. Where would you be, he wonders inwardly about a lost-soul friend who soothes the "rawness of living" with a needle in his vein, if you had taken the other road? "Would you be working an office job in the honeycombs of industrial valley buildings which look like ant farms from the street at night?"
That imagery is meant to elicit a shudder in those who get it. Such readers will praise Gnade's debut novel as a jubilant paean to the unfettered life many of us long for but are infinitely too chicken to pursue, an existence outside of fluorescent-lit cubicles and the sanity of steady paychecks.
Hymn California is a story both romanticized and smeared with blood and shit. The narrator, James, a contemporary take on the vagabond archetype seen in American literature from Huck Finn to Kerouac, leaves his San Diego home with no particular destination in mind. America for James becomes long, lonely stretches of highway and cricket-soundtracked summer evenings looking out over Midwestern cornfields. He drinks beer with bands in basements, crashes on couches, rides the Greyhound and starves until someone hands him a sandwich and a six-pack. Sometimes he's with Frankie, his girlish young love, and sometimes he's utterly alone. He suffers and has the time of his life.
Before I continue, an important disclosure: I've known Gnade, a former local writer now living in Portland, for nearly a decade, during which time we've been friends, neighbors, conspirators and colleagues. When I'd resigned myself to a career of mouse-clicking, he encouraged me to write. And years later, when he quit his job as editor of San Diego's now-defunct weekly paper Fahrenheit and announced he was going to roam the country, the news sent me reeling with envy and awe. Who has the balls to do that?
Gnade did, and I'd occasionally get an e-mail or postcard about it. As I was reading his book, I was struck by how familiar it all sounded. I had to ask my old buddy where fiction ended and autobiography began.
"Everything is as it happened," Gnade replied. "The only things I changed are peoples' names. I call it 'fiction' because I don't feel like I can call something 'memoir' when it happened just, y'know, six months ago."
Hymn California, he says, is about his reaction to death—he's been personally affected by it to an eerie degree. "The parts that don't seem like they're about death are periods of denying and forgetting that it's there. It ends with no resolution about mortality; there's no answers, just questions."
Sometimes those questions are stated too literally, a weakness in his writing. But his strengths—a loose and colorful vernacular and characters who feel like people you've known, or maybe secretly wanted to know—make up for it.
Gnade's response to death was trying to outrun that "fucking growling THING over your shoulder." But as he was fleeing, he inadvertently began a chase, too, of life—agonizing, beautiful life on the road less traveled. As the poet Robert Frost wrote: "And that has made all the difference." --AnnaMaria Stephens
POWELL'S BOOKS This book is not only for the twenty something's who wonder how they can live out their ideals in the 21st century. It speaks especially to the boomers of the world who lived the lies of consumerism, dedication to one job, suburbia and just now are beginning to realize the meaninglessness of it all compared to the spirit within them originally trying to find it's own bliss.
POWELL'S BOOKS Adam Gnade captures the existential crises of creative twenty-somethings everywhere and will break your heart with his beautiful, meandering, and philosophical prose. If you've ever felt like the world should be something more, gotten in your car without knowing where you'd end up, or lost sleep wondering how you could survive in the 21st century by doing what you love, this book should sleep on your bedside table for the next week or so.
ASTHMATIC KITTY RECORDS At Asthmatic Kitty we believe that music and literature go hand in hand. Our good friend Adam Gnade (a frequent contributor to ye old side bar) thinks so too! That's why we wanted to let you know about his book, Hymn California. Adam's first book, which is being released via Rhode Island's Dutchmoney Books, is a novel that has just as much to do with music as it does prose. "The only way I could pull off doing both was to integrate them as much as possible; immerse the songs in the books and the books in the songs."
Hymn California is not for the weak of heart. It is an intense ride through death, drugs, depression and the sweaty underbelly of this beast America. Yet despite this darkness, there are glimmers of hope and beauty. It's pages voyage through childhood's innocence and safety to the freedom of living on the most ragged edges of our culture. It's simultaneously full of truths and fairy tales, strange cities, suppressing suburbs, and all of the spaces and places between, with the songs to carry you.
Adam's music will continue as well. Gnade is currently working on his full-length record, Trailerparks, which will be released with Try Harder Records in Late 2008. His past works include the Collaborative EP with Youthmovies, "Honey Slides," and the limited edition 60-page novella Seasons Loving Nothing. Adam's next tour will be in the UK and Europe in November with Youthmovies.
CREATIVE COMMONS Adam Gnade, a musician based in Portland, OR, recently published his first book, Hymn California, through CC-friendly distribution group CASH Music (blogged earlier here and here). Released under a CC BY-NC-ND license, the book is being serialized online in PDF form, one chapter a month over the next year along with a piece of music by Gnade.
Hymn California's characters witness a strange wide-sweeping, panoramic America unfolding before them, while its 200 pages examine having an abusive relationship with a place (California) rather than a person. It shows displaced characters scattered across the continent, burdened by fear and homesickness while fighting to live unencumbered by bourgeois ideology. Death stalks at every intersection and on every riverbank. Lives sway in the delirium of wartime. Says Gnade, 'A friend of mine asked me if I was trying to write 'American magic realism' with the book and I didn't really have an answer for him. If it is, it was an accident'.
You can get more info on ordering the book in primary physical form here - one recently found its way into the CC offices and we are comfortable attesting to its stunning nature. Outside of purchasing the book itself, CASH suggest you support Gnade by seeing him live or by leaving a small donation at his CASH music page. Similarly, you can read an excerpt from the novel at Drowned in Sound.
ZOMBIE ATTACK "This is a confession. This is an admittance of ignorance, and who wants to cop to that? I will give you no answers — because I have none — but I'm going to talk. At you. To you. About you. And by talking about you and about me, maybe some of this goofball world-dream nightmare nonsense will make sense. Or maybe it won't. It's a slippery thing to guess at — no hard and fast rules, nothing but questions and incalculables, big and daunting like great thunderheads moving like boxcars to rain down on us." --Adam Gnade, Chapter 16, Hymn California
Adam Gnade is not a poet. Nor would it seem right to characterise him as a spoken word artist. His music is of his own genre: 'talking songs', where he 'talks' prose lyrics over musical backdrops covering a huge range of styles from folk to psych-rock. As well as being a musician, Adam is also a writer and has recently released his excellent debut novel 'Hymn California' (from which the above quote is taken), as well as two novella- the now out of print 'Seasons Loving Nothing' and the soon to be released 'The Darkness to the West'.
His songs and writing share common characters and plots, but more than this they share a common vitality and feeling that make his work stand far above that of so many others. The music (and indeed the writing) feels important, as music should do but so rarely does. Albums 'Run Hide Retreat Surrender' and 'We Are Ghosts and Bones Down Dry Stone Walled Wells' feel raw and uncensored in their emotion and as though they are acting as vehicles of catharsis. Similarly, the rest of Adam's body of work has this feeling of authenticity, without anything being at all held back or sensationalised: there's everything here from the previously mentioned catharsis to the rousing "pep talks" of songs like 'Cousin Be Strong' and 'We Live Nowhere and Know No One'.
Those two tracks are to me the embodiment of all that is great about Adam Gnade: coming from a dark place, they build to stirring calls into action for making changes to whatever needs to be done to help you live: "We're afraid we've been down to long to change/but as survivors we transcend/as fighters we climb higher/Cousin be strong."
I've been agonising over what else I could add to make this feature a better length, and I've been coming up blank... in truth, there's not much more that I can say about Adam Gnade with my limited journalistic skills that will give you a real idea of what his music and writing is really about. Adam's words will say immeasurably more than mine ever will, so go find yourself some of his music and listen, then you'll see what I mean.
OREGON LIVE.COM Adam Gnade is a musician and a writer. According to him, songs and fiction-writing 'are kinda the same thing. They share characters and themes: the fiction continuing plotlines left open by the songs.' Hymn California his first novel, features James, an alienated young man who's been irrevocably affected by growing up in San Diego. James writes songs, travels the country, tries to cope with violence and death. Even as James lands in Portland, he knows he can never escape the push and pull of the surreal place of his birth. 'California,' Gnade writes, 'you've split our lip so bad you could stick a nickel in it. ... But we always come back. We'll always come back.' Gnade lives in Portland.
AMAZON A breath of fresh air in todays literature. Definitely worth a read if you are the type that enjoys Kerouac'ian wanderings and Bukowski'esque excess. Nice to come across some new literature that still evokes these types of feelings. Meandering and seemingly directionless at times; I give it a high score due to it's ability to stir up that feeling of wanderlust that I attribute to reading Kerouac, Fante, Miller and a few other faded authors that sit upon my bookshelf. If a book makes me start googling plane tickets...I know it was worth it.
Feels good to support young artists in their endeavors. Buy the book so this guy can work on his next book or CD. Then when you see that cardboard Amazon box on your doorstep...pop open a bottle of rot-gut wine and fill a mason jar...or a cracked coffee mug full of the stuff. Read late into the night until the birds start chirping, until the sound of freshly rolled newspapers slap the concrete outside. Drink until your teeth and tongue are stained purple then dream of earlier times of worn out, hand me down sneakers and unknown tomorrows. I was definitely pleased with my purchase.
PORTLAND MERCURY Adam Gnade reads from his first novel, Hymn California. His predilection for obscure noise bands aside, Adam's a great writer--Erik Henriksen called his novel a work of "strangeness, newness, and beauty." He's appearing with Fuck Up author Arthur Nersesian, who will be reading from The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx, the second book in a trilogy that describes an alternate history of New York City.
WILLAMETTE WEEK In his first published book, Hymn California (released in June—he reads at Powell's this Tuesday), he describes locales from his hometown of San Diego ("It was a rich earthy sunset, a mild late-summer dusk as bright as fire, the kind of sunset you take for granted living in San Diego.") to Jacksonville, Fla. ("along the freeway are hurricaned tree limbs, cracked and limp in sweltering heat"), and Portland ("porches where boys sit and say nothing in plaid cowboy shirts, sneakers, and jeans, or girls in '40s dresses with pale faces and glassy eyes"). Gnade covers much of the country in Hymn California, his characters—ghosts of ex-girlfriends, travel companions and family members—often along for the ride. "I change the names, but it's all true," he says.
Gnade's music—where he sets his freewheeling travelogues and daydreams to acoustic guitar and whatever else is in his vicinity—unfolds on the same large scale and with the same set of characters. The speak-sing style he has crafted for himself ("I try to sing them but it comes out as talking," he writes in the book. "Everyone sings different. I'm not singing at all.") sounds more natural in his recent work than it did when he began about four years ago. "Obviously there are other bands that have talking vocals, but I never liked them. I fucking hate spoken word, I don't like poetry. But I really wanted the vocals to be talked," he says. "So the first few records are really weird, and I think now they're just starting to be what I wanted them to be."
Lunches at the burrito cart don't necessarily make great source material for songs or novels. So, for Gnade, keeping his stories interesting usually means hitting the road—an itch that first attacked him at a young age. In the book, he describes it thusly: "I try to write about American life but I don't know America…I take out maps and trace lines and say names that feel magic: Cross Plain, Elbow Lake, Greenville, Sioux City, Detroit, Chicago." Gnade says that when he left his hometown of San Diego, he did "about a dozen" cross-country trips in two years. "I had this theory of movement as medicine," Gnade says. "But you can't run away from your problems. No matter where you go, you gotta face yourself."
REVIEWS OF ADAM GNADE'S LIVE SHOWS
SAFE CONCERTS A complete change of pace bringing a very different ambience followed as the mega loud thrashing rock sounds gave way to the more gentle tones of a rather spaced out and seemingly disconnected Adam Gnade, despite that he seemed totally at ease with himself, the audience and the world in general, all viewed, commented and sung about perfectly from the bottom of a very large bottle of vodka! Despite struggling with sound issues Gnade got it sorted after the first song or two and then sat on his stool looking rather like a throwback to a time when music was less sophisticated and more experimental, connecting well with those that had turned out, at one with Youthmovies the poetic Gnade has worked with them before, and they are quite a good fit.
AUDIOSCRIBBLER In a venue for which the term “intimate” could have been invented, Adam Gnade initially cuts an unobtrusive figure, as he begins speaking into his microphone, off-stage and in the midst of the audience.
Gradually, however, this slight figure draws us in with the sheer intensity with which he is speaking. From Portland via California, his tales are of itinerant kids amidst the vastness of the American landscape. These are expanded in his tour CD ‘Trailerparks’, which chronicle a year in the life, and encompass his concerns and philosophies: “I’m an American, but don’t let me die like one”.
It is perhaps unsurprising that there is a novelistic feel to his songs, as the versatile Gnade has indeed published a novel, ‘Hymn California’, earlier this year. And on a cold November night in Edinburgh, when he says “let’s put our shit in storage, darling” it seems the most natural thing in the world to want to follow him. The intensity of his performance ramps up throughout his set, which is over all too soon. A true original.
Oxford’s Youthmovies take the same approach of performing in the midst of the audience. Although this is no doubt a practical response to the logistics involved in getting all five band members onto the diminutive stage, it has the effect of continuing the feeling of intimacy built up during Gnade’s set. Opener “If you’d seen a battlefield” is typical of their songs, with its delicate melody sliced through by sheer walls of post-rock. And this is what marks them out as such an exciting prospect: with a diverse range of styles and influences, any attempt at categorisation is doomed. Ambitious and serious, their sound is almost too much for the size of the venue; it feels as if it is circling around, searching out a chink in the walls through which to escape. As their set builds to a screeching crescendo, with band members shouting off-mic, they are joined on- (and indeed off-) stage once again by Gnade, adding his voice, and some of the pent-up energy generated during his own set, to the mix.
DROWNED IN SOUND Never having the need to electrify his banjo before, Adam Gnade struggles to be satisfied with the overall mix of this being on stage bit of performing, and leaps into the audience which swarms around him instantly as he lands. He continues his set of stripped chords and sing-speak-yowling mix of folk narrative deliveries, leaving the crowd speechless.
THE BEST LINE FIT Initially though, I’m mesmerised by Adam Gnade. I’d heard some of his songs via the ubiquitous Myspace page previously, but they didn’t really prepare me for his brutal and honest live performance. Playing only a banjo throughout, it was refreshingly simple. His haunting lyrics channeling everything Steinbeck, but placing it firmly in the now. Wondering from the stage and into the, very sparse, crowd with no amplification, his quivering vocals and closed eye-stance made it look like he was in some kind of trance, dragging these songs out of the very bottom of his heart. “Bruce had it right, but Johnny had it wrong, we're not born to lose, we're born to run” was one of the many lyrical gems from his set, lyrics that both trouble and reassure the listener. His heartfelt tales of modern America were rich, open and raw but his short and sharp set was over all too soon.
THE FLY Over lilting guitars and undulating rhythms he talks himself through (dis)illusions of America and what it means to live, breathe and travel through, across and around its fifty states, usually on the brink of poverty and with the dead stomach aches that come from being hungry for too long too often.
Yet his music and words are a celebration of that peripatetic, wandering way of life, one that (so rightly) places feeling over fashion, creativity over commerce and convention. It’s pure, live for the moment expression, necessary carpe diem which doesn’t just reflect the thoughts of Gnade himself, but which encapsulates the world – the torn, rough, rugged, travelled, mythologised and eulogised America that sprawls out before him, vast and endless with opportunity and disappointment and broken, washed-out dreams.
So perhaps it’s because he’s away from home, on a small stage in King’s Cross, that Gnade can’t quite find his rhythm. He appears onstage diminutive and shy, a rabbit in the spotlight. He is clearly uncomfortable – perhaps, as it’s the first day of the tour, he is simply not warmed up – yet that unease only serves to add to the fragility of his unique talking songs (as he calls them). Playing a four string guitar with all the soul of the Deep South, fragments of his world are momentarily brought to life in central London – names and places that only he knows but which seem so familiar, so real, so close.
He ends up off stage - sitting on the edge of it, in fact – gently picking his guitar and incanting his stories while the audience closes in. And in the stillness between words and notes, you can almost hear the history of his country unravel as he and his friends traipse across and through it, mourning and celebrating life by drinking red wine by the bottle as the sun comes up once more.
SUBBA CULCHA It’s not often that you can say that the reason you were primarily drawn to a gig was for the support act. At Barfly tonight a small but loyal crowd are here to greet Oxford’s up and comers Youthmovies. A group founded by Andrew Mears an original member of Foals. Yet I’m quite intrigued by Oregon via San Diego’s Adam Gnade who I discovered randomly on MySpace. He shuffles onto the stage clutching a bottle of red wine and a guitar that says holy shit. Wearing a ripped t-shirt and a baseball cap he has the look of a young Iggy Pop and sounds not unlike Conor Oberst. At first there are technical difficulties but soon he gets into his stride and as I suspected engages the audience with his homespun charm. Essentially he’s a poet with a book Hymn California, on sale tonight. He orates zealously over acoustic guitar strums telling enticing stories that warrant more scrutiny. Surreal imagery is thrown into the ring immediately. We hear of grandmother chopping up snakes in the backyard and ponies called Lucifer. Apparently ‘Bruce had it right but Johnny had it wrong. We were not born to lose, we were born to run.’ Obviously homesick, Gnade announces that he lives in the woods ‘but not so much.’ He has been informed he has a new housemate which is a chicken named Malice, after a local stripper. By this point we would expect nothing less! He then plays a song that becomes an immediate favourite ‘5 o’clock in America,’ which plays like sets from a film. Then he thanks the audience for being nice as sometimes his sets have ended in a donnybrook (fight). There is something quite charming and refreshing about Gnade’s free flowing poetry full of characters that you want to explore further. It’s an affecting performance that corresponds with that of Youthmovies with whom the singer has toured twice.
As a newcomer tonight to both acts I prefer the simple staging of Gnade who lets his music do the talking. Youthmovies go from astonishing to dreary in the space of a song. Incessant changes of tempo make their work ultimately confusing. Still I shall ignore the bravado and explore their album as ultimately they seem like an interesting prospect too.
BRUM LIVE So, there’s only 12 people actually watching him but Adam Gnade really doesn’t seem fazed by it. He just dishes out his lo-fi Moldy Peaches folk, picking away at his 4-string guitar and throwing in a Johnny Cash ‘When The Man Comes Around’ interlude hand-in-hand with his mid-west Americana musings. It’s a much more attractive proposition being offered out (jokingly?) by him than it is braving the cold on a miserable Remembrance Day. His story-telling style and the bare arrangement of all his songs recall early White Stripes before Jack White realised his wildest guitar fantasies and hung up his acoustic. With his stripped-down indie cool and endearing stage presence you just feel that the director of ‘Juno 2′ could well be knocking his door in the future…
MERSEY BLOGS There was no such flights of feet when Adam Gnade made his entrance to the stage looking like he'd just been ejected from a passing freight train; all ripped t-shirt, battered pumps and truckers hat and eyes that hadn't seen sleep in weeks.
No Gnade specialises in the sort of leg twiddling (this is the correct technical phrase) usually associated with school children desperate for the toilet but too afraid to ask.
Fittingly, his music was of the tortured type too. Think Bright Eyes stripped to the barest of bare, with the mere hint of finger-picking and the occasional thrum.
More a storyteller - his novel Hymn California is on sale at the merch stand - Gnade loving crafts romanticism with bleak humour which while almost bereft of melody is engrossing the more you give yourself to his words.
WORDS ARE BLUNT INSTRUMENTS Went to see Youthmovies earlier. They were pretty good, I guess. The support act was a guy called Adam Gnade, who sounded a bit like the way Jack Kerouac probably would have done if he'd written songs instead of books. Music can give words a poignancy they otherwise lack. "Bruce had it right but Johnny had it wrong, we're not born to lose, we're born to run" probably sounds a bit silly to you the reader, but it made me a bit tingly earlier. I was all "that's RIGHT! i WAS born to run! i am a coldhearted globeroaming motherfucker with no emotional attachments to anything! if i wanted, i could go to london or bratislava or portland, oregon TOMORROW" etc etc etc. Which clearly is silly, but such were the poignancy of the words at the time.
ROCKFOOD ZINE Adam Gnade is an eccentric character. Strutting on to the stage like some kind of punk cowboy, with just his banjo and a bottle of vodka, he epitomizes simplicity and all things Americana--including his simple country songs. To be described as simple, however, is actually rather inaccurate. To pervade such introspective and at times, deeply angry lyrics with a strong political stance into a single instrument is remarkable and makes for an enthralling set.
LASTFM I heard great things about this American poet, and from start to finish he took me on a journey through his hometown, hopes and fears, the joys of others and sorrows of neighbours, and an intricate misunderstood love life. With his stylized banjo picking and original folk vocals I was pleasantly surprised as I thought I would be. Here was a man who had got his priorities right, tell the truth, lay it out for all to see, it may not be the prettiest music, but it was raw and honest, and if it wasn't your cup of tea like it was mine, then you could no doubt respect that.
