Categories
FEATURES

Adam Green: Anyone Else But Him

Juno brought worldwide attention to his former band, the Moldy Peaches, but Adam Green isn’t in a cute, folk-pop mood anymore. By Kory Grow

“I was walking down 14th Street the other day and just realized that I was full of shit and that I’ve never done anything close to what I wanted to do in my life,” says New York City resident Adam Green. “Time to take some more acid, I guess.”

Green, who turned 27 in May, has had a lot to consider over the past few years. Since the age of 18, he’s been a professional musician constantly on the verge of mainstream success. Having cofounded quirky, anti-folk ensemble the Moldy Peaches with singer/songwriter Kimya Dawson in 2000, Green launched a concurrent solo career two years later. While the Moldy Peaches enjoyed critics’-darling status, Green’s solo albums, which have traversed folk, country and indie rock, have received mixed reviews at best. Whereas the Moldy Peaches played endearing, if sickeningly cute, tongue-in-cheek ditties like “Who’s Got The Crack,” Green’s solo songs were more mature, aiming for grandiosity. (Not to mention his Tourette-like river of expletive-laced lyrics: “There’s no wrong way to fuck a bitch with no face,” Green sang on his second album, 2003’s Friends Of Mine.) Though Green is accustomed to putting out an album a year, his label, Rough Trade, applied the brakes after 2006’s Jacket Full Of Danger, barring him from releasing an album last year. This is when things began to go awry.

Three months after Jacket Full Of Danger’s release, Green flipped out while on tour in Europe, jumping off the tour bus in the middle of the night in a prescription-drug-induced haze. He had been drinking heavily during the tour, living the rock ‘n’ roll cliché. The incident helped Green realize that he needed to relax his work habits, and with his Rough Trade-imposed vacation underway, he wrote the songs that would become the new Sixes & Sevens. (The British expression “at sixes and sevens” describes a state of total confusion and disarray.) The album is his solo masterwork: a textured paean to the musical excess of Thin White Duke-era Bowie that dabbles in different genres on each song as Green blathers his predictable yet increasingly more charming assembly line of vulgarities. But as he prepared to promote Sixes & Sevens in the months leading up to its release, another wrench was thrown into the machine when the soundtrack to Juno, which prominently features the Moldy Peaches’ “Anyone Else But You,” hit number one on the Billboard album chart. To Green, it seemed as if the world was lagging seven years behind him.

Green is as nuanced and self-contradictory as his musical career. Seated in a Boston Market restaurant in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, he’s alarming the regulars with his loud blurts about sex, drugs and other subjects that are out of place in a family establishment. As he nibbles at a side order of mac and cheese, the only hint of a rock lifestyle is an ink stamp on his hand from a club. He looks like your typical twentysomething New Yorker. His stories about the journey he made to create Sixes & Sevens, however, are anything but ordinary.

“It’s almost like I’m going backwards or something,” laughs Green. “But I do think I learned from the experience of making [my previous solo records]. I think I was able to, without really going for it, still show that I have respect for music as a medium. I think Jacket Full Of Danger is fueled by this incredible streak of nihilism that almost led me to believe that I was Fat Elvis in all ways of life.

“I just had this infatuation with showmanship that got to the point where I was a parody of the drunken backstage performer, ready to go out in my silver costume and take care of business. I don’t know how it got that way. I think just because I was overworked on the concert circuit … I didn’t even know what it was like to live in New York. It was really hard to maintain my relationship with my girlfriend. Things like that. I was drinking really heavily and totally delusional.”

In 2006, Green was prescribed sleep-aid medication Ambien, which he promptly began mixing with Jägermeister. While on tour that summer in Europe, he took the Ambien to help him rest on the numerous flights between cities. The pills, coupled with the alcohol Green consumed, would cause him to black out. He still can’t remember performing in Spain. This behavior continued when the tour hit Belgium, where his drug problem only got worse.

Says Green, “At some point—and I don’t have a memory of this—I wrote a note to my band saying I wasn’t gonna tour anymore and some stuff about how I was planning to move to Los Angeles.” He laughs. “And I just walked off the bus in my pajamas in the middle of the night and let them drive away. They didn’t know I was gone. I found myself sort of scurrying through the woods looking for a bus station, which there wasn’t any. Just had no money or anything. I ended up finding some kids on the highway who drove me for seven hours to Lyon, France. So in a way, that was a sign to me that I must be burned out on touring. At first I was crying, thinking I’d try to kill myself, then I realized that I was just, like, stupid on Ambien.” He laughs that same laugh and says he threw out the sleep aid when he got home.

Strangely, about 45 minutes later, Green will contradict the poignancy of the entire story, saying it wasn’t really a moment of truth. It was merely something that happened. This comes after he explains that he doesn’t have narrative songs and that his work is based on simple ideas rather than intricate stories.

“Some people have tales, but that’s just not how it’s gone for me,” he says. “Even things as bizarre as that sleepwalking incident don’t actually trigger in me any lesson learned. And I draw no conclusion from it, really, other than it was really weird.”

Green eventually snapped out of his drug funk. He’s now apprehensive about returning to the stage for fear of relapsing. Musically, it changed him as well. The three albums prior to Sixes & Sevens showcased his rejection of indie-rock and folk ideologies. When he was writing Friends Of Mine, he felt embarrassed by the music he heard in his head compared to what he felt he should be writing. It was an act of self-defiance to pen that album’s ragtime pieces and torch songs. On Jacket Full Of Danger’s “Novotel,” with its lush strings, bouncy pianos and baritone speak-sing narrative, he wondered if he’d accidentally stumbled on some new genre.

“I thought I was, like, a beautiful man on that record,” says Green, poker-faced about the vulgarity to come. “It was a very macho style. And I did feel that girls’ clitorises would bloom and orgasm when I hit certain low frequencies. That was a nice thought to have in mind when I was making it.”

He’s careful to say that all this wasn’t meant to be as reactionary as it sounds, but instead that it was an exploration in music. “It occurred to me that I had to kill the indie-rock impulse in myself entirely,” he says. “I can’t say that when we were doing the Moldy Peaches and doing, like, ‘Who’s Got The Crack’ that we were doing anything incredibly original. I thought we were just having fun. So I don’t really know when I’m doing something that’s gonna mean something to people or not. It just happens.”

After everything that transpired in the wake of Jacket Full Of Danger, Rough Trade told Green he needed to slow down. Rather than be unhappy, Green took it as a much-needed break. He’d write when he felt like it. As usual, the songs he penned were a mix of autobiography and stories his friends told him. “Sticky Ricki,” almost Zappa-like in its atonal orchestral arrangement, is the story of a squatter fond of leaving, ahem, sticky substances around her host’s house. “Broadcast Beach” plays like a bouncy ‘70s AM-radio tune and contains a sore thumb of a line: “Hepatitis caught me off my guard.” Green claims the song is about his own hypochondria and the Internet taking over the everyman’s life. When he was finished writing, Green had 20 songs, with only two cracking the three-minute mark. He thought it would make for a perfect LP-sized collection.

Initially, he wanted to spend 100 days in the studio, perfecting his songs, but it was soon clear this wasn’t economically feasible. After weighing his studio options, Green decided to work with longtime producer Dan Myers at an out-of-session school for autistic children in rural Dover, N.J. The location was suggested by Myers’ wife, who works there. While recording, Green did everything he could to sully the institutional atmosphere of the school, drinking liquor and smoking cigars. It was the most fun he’d had making an album. To achieve the wide variety of styles on Sixes & Sevens, Green enlisted the help of string arranger David Campbell (Beck’s father, who’s worked with artists ranging from Leonard Cohen to Kelly Clarkson), a Brooklyn gospel choir (on lead single “Morning After Midnight”) and various friends and former bandmates from the Moldy Peaches.

When Green turned in the album, Rough Trade told him that 20 songs was too long and he’d have to cut four of them. Green went along with it for a bit, then wrote a letter to label president Geoff Travis, saying he’d eventually have to do interviews to promote his album and he wouldn’t be able to talk about it properly if it wasn’t what he wanted to do. Travis, who declined comment to MAGNET concerning his discussions with Green, eventually backed off.

“Working with them for seven years, I just give them the record,” says Green. “I’ve never played it for them; I always just gave them the finished one, and they put it out. I expected that this time as well … But then this Juno thing happened, and now they’re behind me.”

Juno, with all of its success, is a tender subject for Green. Although he’s a fan of the movie, his only contribution to it was granting its producers the rights to use the Moldy Peaches song “Anyone Else But You” in the film. It was Juno star Ellen Page who suggested her character would listen to the Moldy Peaches.

“It’s hinging on novelty, but at the core of it, it is so beautiful,” Page recently told Barbara Walters after the latter said she just didn’t “get” the Moldy Peaches. “It is so honest, and it just hits me on a level that I can’t deny.”

Although the soundtrack, which features a handful of other songs by Moldy Peaches partner Dawson, topped the charts, “Anyone Else But You” hasn’t received any notable airplay.

“All I’m saying is, I don’t know what that means for MAGNET and indie people, but it just seems like it’s not that hopeful,” says Green. “It must be payola. It has to be, right?”

Even the attention that’s been directed toward the Moldy Peaches has been bittersweet for Green, who’s now focused on his solo career. “It’s seven years too late, and in truth, we probably are not going to re-form the Moldy Peaches for some long time,” he says. “Could be 20 years. Or never. So in that way, I do feel like it’s displacing to me. Certainly, recording Sixes & Sevens, I never thought I was going to talk about Juno so many times.”

Nevertheless, Green made appearances with Dawson to support the soundtrack, most notably on daytime talk show The View. While trying to enjoy his success, he jumped at the chance to plug Sixes & Sevens when co-host Whoopi Goldberg pointed out that the Moldy Peaches weren’t recording together anymore. The attention Dawson has gotten for her post-Peaches work is an especially touchy topic for Green. On a tangent complaining about how former Village Voice music editor Robert Christgau “fucking hates” him (Christgau called 2002’s Garfield “bratty for its own sake”), Green seems to have forgotten that the Dean of American Rock Critics had awarded the Moldy Peaches’ self-titled 2001 release an A-minus grade.

“Oh yeah,” laughs Green. “He took Kimya’s side.”

Asked if he and Dawson are still close friends, Green says, “Um … I can’t even really talk about it. It hurts. But yeah, we’re most certainly not enemies … I’ve known her since I was 12 years old, so I’ve known her for 15 years. There’s just … We’ve had a lot of experiences together.” He laughs, and an awkward silence ensues. “But her music is amazing. Kimya’s music is great.” (Dawson declined to participate in this story.)

Green, it seems, is simply trying to understand where he is musically and in life. In between complaints about never getting radio airplay, he begins an aside about the virtues of Lou Reed’s “Coney Island Baby.”

“That’s what I would strive for every day of my life, to have something be that good just once,” says Green. “There are moments where I feel like I’ve done things in that vein. And then I’ve turned the corner in my mind and realized that it’s just wide open and I haven’t done anything close to what I ever wanted to do yet. And it’s horrifying.”

Still, Green is able to laugh as he gets up to throw away his empty mac-and-cheese bowl. As he walks out onto 23rd Street, he seems in better spirits. Optimistic, even.

“I’m nervous to start doing concerts again,” he says, reflecting on the last two years. “I’m optimistic about it. I don’t know why. It’s not based on previous experience. I have reason to think it’s gonna go well this time. I think it will.”