ADAM GREEN PLAYS IN BETWEEN
BY LEN SOUSA
An Interview with Adam Green of The Moldy Peaches
With the unaffected look of a Strokes outcast, New York’s Adam Green brings his hipster anti-glam swagger to songs that bridge the gap between zany folk and Elvis Presley jumpsuit anthems. A former singer for the Moldy Peaches (the band is on hiatus), Green has been performing music since he learned to play the tuba at age 8 and started the Peaches when he was only 12. Since 2002, he has recorded a series of 15-track solo albums—the latest of which, Jacket Full Of Danger, was released this past July.
Green’s amusing lyrics lean on the surreal and tend to include a dose of pharmaceutical imagery as well as dropping celebrity names like Johnny Depp and Jessica Simpson. In “Novotel,” his lyrics show a clever, if somewhat difficult-to-decipher wordplay: “Fellas in umbrellas in the middle of the night / whatcha gonna do when the Mennonites bite? / Lock lips in the teddy boy’s Chevrolet / Touch tips and you’re punk’d in the alley way.”
This isn’t to say his words are entirely incidental. Green says it often takes him weeks to come up with a single two-minute song. “I work on them for a while and by the time they get to be over two minutes long, I’ve probably spent about two weeks on them and I’m just kinda bored.”
Green seems bent on perfecting the two-minute pop song with only one track on his last three albums going over the 3-minute mark (“We’re Not Supposed To Be Lovers” clocks in at 3:08). “I have a paranoia [that] I don’t want people to get bored listening to songs. There’s something nice about short songs. If you like them, you can just listen to them again on loop.” He adds, “It’s weird when a song starts to feel like it has a filler part to it. I really just don’t want any filler on any of my records and that’s why my records are really lean, they’re like 30 minutes long each.”
His process for songwriting is also unconventional. Though his songs are backed by acoustic guitar, and more recently a string section, Green writes them without any instruments. “I write them by walking around with a recorder. It’s all vocal melody driven.” He claims it allows him the freedom to have space between the vocals and the backing chords. “It’s freed me a lot from the verse-chorus-verse structure of a song. It’s amazing how you can make a song have six different sections and it’s only two minutes long. But I guess it’s because I’m not really planning on any of the songs being hits and that frees me up.”
Though, strangely, Green has become a hit. In Germany. When asked if he has any idea why that is, he’s perplexed. “It’s hard to say because I’m not from there. There was initially an interest [in my music] and then I toured there extensively—so there was a spark and I made it into a fire.” He laughs, but says he isn’t sure just where that first spark came from. The only problem with being overseas is getting lost in translation. While most Europeans are hip enough to speak English (and several other languages), interviews are sometimes conducted in two languages at once. “It’s not so bad, but it’s not the way I like to have a conversation.”
“I never thought it was out of the question that I could be a lot less obscure in America if certain media channels were open to my music. There have been a lot of doors that haven’t really opened for me in America that have opened for me in Europe.” He muses on the notion without an ounce of bitterness and says American audiences are simply more interested in hip-hop, R&B, and pop music. “I really like it myself,” he admits.
Green says he’ll continue to write his unique brand of burlesque rock but hopes to try some new recording techniques in the future and clarifies his goal as a songwriter. “One of the things that really annoys me is the idea that I couldn’t release every song I wrote—or that I’d have to shelve anything. Because I certainly don’t want to be, ten years from now, recording albums full of old songs I wrote.”
Originally Published:
Skope Magazine (Mar/Apr 2007)
