Adam Gnade

So Phil came out from London and it was good. Him and me river swimming with Rachel, a bonfire with Thad, diner food with Jessie, shootin’ beer cans, walking the fields. Can we write a novelty song in under a minute? Can we play one song on the car stereo 60 times in a row? The answer is a decisive YES. (Discoveries: 1. There’s a pear tree on our land and it’s fruiting like a mofucker. 2. English people don’t like grits but they’re solid with Texas toast. 3. You can’t shoot walnuts off a branch with an air rifle.) If summer’s ending I’m happy with the way we sent it off. Philip Jackson Moriarty Holmes is a champ. Hall of fame forever. Go watch the Joy Division film and see if you can spot him.

-Adam

PS. Here are some photos he took of the land…

1 Farm report: Heard gunshots all day. Somewhere off to the northend past the orchard. And, man, it’s been hot. HOT. It’s hot and it’s still summer but the walnut trees have begun to drop their leaves. The air is full of them. Yellow and brown leaves. Every autumn I can’t help but feel death. And I know the season/life-cycle is an obvious metaphor but whatever. There it is. The dying days of fall. Change. Stillness. Headed to the big sleep of winter. Still, when fall hits this whole valley will be beautiful. I can only imagine the colors. Harvesting green beans right now. Cucumbers too. New red and green bell peppers popping up all over. Dixie the baby goat is leading the sheep and goats around the fields. Which is funny because she’s the size of a breadloaf with legs. She’s better. Healthy. Still medicated. More on that later…

2 Made it through two more chapters in the book rewrites today. Beginning to feel like the three months I gave myself to finish this might’ve been too generous. Writing new songs in the offtime from the book. Nothing for release. Holding onto them and letting them become as good as they can before I show them to anymore. Gonna be my versions of pop songs. Which is obviously nothing like real pop but I’m trying to step it up. Oh, and the new long drive playlist: Fuck Buttons, Godspeed, Roy Acuff, Cash, Haggard, Kitty Wells. Country music and the loud noise epic. Solid gold for the cornfields and riverland.

3 Dialog overhead while looking for cheap wine jugs in Robert’s Liquor: “Dude, I saw her in those short shorts and I was like ‘I’m totally gonna jack off to that when I get home.’”

4 Big congrats to my pal Natalie Judge for making it on Billboard’s Top 30 Under 30 of the music biz. It’s a big deal and she deserves all that and more. Natalie handled a lot of my stuff when I was on Drowned in Sound’s record label. Now she runs Matador’s European division. We’re all proud of you, Judge.

Speaking of UK friends, Phil’s coming from London tomorrow. We’re going to the lake finally. I’m ready for a swim. Me and Thad went down to the Grove and I swam in the creek. Minor league. Floating and mellowing out. I want the real thing. I’m READY

-Adam

PS. Here’s Phil looking insane…

1 The harvest on the farm.

2 I’m going to try.

3 Dr. Pepper in cans. Red wine.

4 Tomato sandwiches.

5 “What a beautiful face I have found in this place that is circling all ‘round sun. What a beautiful dream that could flash on the screen in a blink of an eye and be gone from me.”

6 Bart Schaneman and Andrew Mears. Chad Valley, Foals, Jonquil, Fuck Buttons, and Trophy Wife. Big Cosmos en route.

7 I’ve given myself until November to finish it. Looks like it’ll be more like early October. Need to find a literary agent.

8 Cassette tapes.

9 It’s complicated.

10 It’s great.

-Adam

So it’s 5pm and I’m in London. Grey and raining. The red bricks and stone walls. A thunderstorm. The first thunder I’ve heard on this side of the world. It’s been a good couple weeks. I have two days left and five pounds to my name but there’s a half bottle of red wine and a hot cup of tea on the coffeetable and I feel like I’ve been places. Let’s recap some highlights: The Chad Valley set at the Lex. Two Jonquil sets at Andrew and V’s party in Cripps Barn. Lying on my back on the concrete, wine bottle next to my left shoulder, looking behind me—an upsidedown view of the grassy hill stretching below and then the whole spired, gray city, my friends on the park bench, talking low. The dusk coming down—purple, haunted by mists and torn shreds of clouds, the ghost towers of Alexandra Palace. What about the bats in the sky at Queen’s Wood? Or the witches we came across in the darkness walking back to the clearing—their chanting voices and fire in the middle, red thread in a safety ring around them. Highlights: Yannis’ speech at Andrew and V’s killed it. (“I think we can all agree, Andrew Mears is a prick.”) You can be a hermit all you want but sometimes the party is just what you need.

One of my big highlights was finding out it’s legal to walk around London drinking wine out of the bottle. Did a lot of that. A lot of time at the Lagertown house with Woody, Sim, Mike, Phil, Jim, and Tom. A lot of train rides. How ‘bout the kickass dinner table after the ceremony with insane Fi, insane Buffy, Jimmy Foals, Jack, Ichy, and the good Tom Katsumi? What about Best Kebab in Crouch? Or Falafel in Soho? One of my big highlights was the firepit by the wheat fields where Buffy sang for us and danced and was so drunk and happy she couldn’t stop. I liked talking to Andrew’s dad about Hemingway, swimming, and Africa. I liked watching Graeme dance with the burning paper hat in the middle of the night while we all wore alabaster-white animal masks and the darkness swam around us.

A big, big highlight was swimming in the Hampstead Pond with Mike and seeing the forest wall and vines closing in, the water as jade green as the trees, the vastness of blue sky, the silence. Then there was Cleopatra’s sarcophagus at the British Museum. (I saw that and thought, “My god, there she is. What a troublemaker. And only 17. She must’ve been fun.”) Or the goddamn Rosetta Stone? Kind of important, right? I liked opening for Calvin Johnson. We played acoustic to a packed room and everyone quiet, everyone drinking their BYOBs and being nice. (Big thanks to Upset the Rhythm for helping with that one. Huge thanks to Phil Holmes and Al English who are superbuffalo in the midst of lame bison.) Tomorrow I go to Oxford and play a show with Fixers and see all my OXX friends before leaving the country again. Hopefully Hollie will give me the Oxford tattoo—two parallel black lines on the left wrist, inch long, cut prison-style. The tattoo of all our friends, a secret society and cult.

I’ve toured all over this country so many times, one end to the next. But this time I really saw it. When you tour a lot people say, Oh, it must be so cool seeing all those places. Well, you don’t. You see the inside of the bus and then you see the inside of the club and you soundcheck for 1,800 hours and then you play and then it’s back to the bus. None of that is bad of course, and I feel lucky to do it. Still, this time I saw it. I saw a lot and I’m going to push the whole time I’m here to build some memories. I want to prove you can live well and see the world even if you’re broke. I want to tell people you can make a living with noncommercial art and you can fill your life with good things if you only push hard enough and live smart. Want the best life for yourself? It’s there—go get it. You can live any way you want if you’re fast and strong enough. Go be a savage and get hurt a million times and throw yourself to the wind and drink blood and make mistakes. The wins are worth all the bust-ups.

Okay, there, that’s all. It’s raining harder now. Water running down the glass. I need to go turn on the kettle and pour another cup of tea. Hello from London. Hello from Crouch End, Shandytown, flat 17A. It’s better than good here.

Love,

-Adam

1. So Bart’s about three months ahead of me. His book is DONE. Fucking done, man. Get ready, motherfuckers. You can read about it here.

2. Added about five pages to my most difficult-to-make-perfect chapter today. Which puts me on page 110 of 172 in rewrites and edits. Been spending days on ideas, weeks on a page. The next few chapters will go fast. Sat in the barn all day today with the big door open and hashed it out. 105 degrees. Fuck. If I can get through the next chapter tomorrow it’ll be smooth sailing until the last 20 pages which are do or fucking DIE. Oh yeah, the book’s about love and lust and it’s a mean bastard (with a big heart).

3. Reading a biography on Faulkner. It’s making me hate him. Liars. I don’t like liars. I wouldn’t stick with it if his books weren’t so hot-white-good. On As I Lay Dying as well. Quarter way through. Pretty good. It’s no Wild Palms or Sanctuary, though. I like the fastmovers.

4. I feel so good about the book right now. It’s so much bigger and better than Hymn California. So much more expansive and exciting. I’ve been trying to tell this story all my life. I can’t believe I’m actually doing it now. Fuck.

5. This shit is so exciting I can’t stand it.

-Adam

ADAM GNADE “WE MUST COME HOME AGAIN” (DEMO) FROM FARMHOUSES TO TOUR VANS This one’s from the limited-run rarities CD I had on the final UK date last week. It’s just a demo but I feel like it’s probably as true as it’ll get. As far as the lyrics go I vacillate between swearing by everything I said and turning my back on it. Which is to say I have no answers. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m not looking for them. I’m looking every fucking minute of every fucking day. I want to break through and see the truth, the hard wiring inside the machine, the great cloudless sky and the words streamed in and sprawled out across it. Every day, every minute…

-Adam

1 This short essay Bart wrote about Bukowski is so fucking spot on. So perfect. He nailed it. Nailed it to the goddamn wall. If you do any kind of work you believe in you need to read this.

2 Back in the country and about to begin work on the book again. It’s not so hot anymore and the days are shorter but they feel longer. Longer than a pier out to sea and longer than a cracking vein of lightning over those hills. This thing is almost done. I can feel it coming through. Everything is settling and the sand is becoming stone. If you read Bart’s essay above you’ll see what we do, how we roll.

3 Fuck the assholes who talk shit on you. Fuck all naysayers. Move through life like you’re armed and dangerous. Like you’re a goddamn pipebomb.

4 We can always be better.

-Adam Gnade

So I’m back from England. A little battered, prison-tattooed, scarred-up but no worse for the wear. There’s a lot to tell you and I don’t have time for that now but what I will say is this: The people I know out there are some of the best. There’s nothing I hate more than a boring fucking person and if there’s one thing they give me it’s the good trouble times. If you have friends like that, count yourself lucky. There’s not much better than being around worthwhile folks. Here’s to being marked for life with good friends…

-Adam

CLICK HERE TO ORDER TRAILERPARKS WITH PAYPAL, CREDIT CARD, OR DEBIT.

ABOUT TRAILERPARKS: Adam Gnade’s third full-length album is a study in darkness and—like a final flicker of light that blooms unexpectedly into a sunny day—a fight for the good life. It’s also his “lost” album.

Says Gnade, “After Try Harder Records did that tiny run of CDs for tour I had second thoughts about the record and decided it would never be released officially. What I wanted Trailerparks to be was something people could take comfort in but what came out of it was a really dark, haunted piece of music. Just recently, I heard the whole thing again and realized I was wrong; it’s not all rosy but it has a big heart and that big heart is full of hope.”

With equal nods to John Fahey, Henry Flynt, and Jackie-O Motherfucker, Trailerparks’ 10 tracks are a long and sprawling rustic folk soundscape full of spooky, headphones-friendly noise interludes and breathy micro-drones amidst full-band songs and dark-toned solo pieces. The tracks ambitiously follow the course of one year in the life of its characters, each track taking on a month or a series of months.

Produced by Thaddeus Christian, it’s a record packed with lyrics, stories of rainy, troubled nights stuck in crumbling mansions, drugged-out kids in clubs, and lonely sun-drenched highways. Says Gnade about the record, “The lyrics are dark, but there’s hope in the end. The plotline curves towards the light midway through, when the characters—who are the same characters from the rest of my songs and from my book Hymn California—find adventures and try to shake off the doom they’ve been living with all spring and winter.”

Trailerparks is out now on Punch Drunk Press!

TRAILERPARKS

1. “November - You’re Just a Skull on a Body, Baby”
2. “December, January - Ruin and Strange Worship”
3. “February, March, April - It’s Frances, She’s Singing”
4. “May - Let Go and Let’s Go”
5. “June - Who Wants Rest?”
6. “July - My Flesh is Clean!”
7. “August - Miracle Whip”
8. “September - Shit’s Just Busted”
9. “October - This is our Last Halloween”
10. “November - On Mt. Soledad I’ll Ditch My Blues”

I’ve got a couple of those rare tracks CDs left. Email my label (duke@adamgnade.com) if you want one.

-Adam

So if you’re going to be at my show in Oxford tomorrow I’ll have a little limited run rarities CD on the merch table. (That’s all I’ll have on the merch table besides about 10 copies of Trailerparks; I didn’t bring anything else out here.) The CD itself will be released to the rest of the world late this year or next but those of you at the show can grab one early. Here’s what you’ll find on it…

1. And On Bad Days We Were Sawn Asunder (Full band)

2. We Live Nowhere and Know No One (Full band, original recording)

3. Hymn California (full band, unreleased demo)

4. Silver Sunrise and Twin Tractors in Farm Fields (full band, unreleased demo)

5. Lanterns, Rakes, and Shovels (demo)

6. We Must Come Home Again (demo 2010)

7. And Feel the Air Go Still (collaboration with Ohioan)

8. We Slept All Week in Lansing (noise jam)

9. Farmhouses (live in Portland kitchen, 2009)

10. We’re Gonna be Healthy/We’re Gonna be Kind (with Ohioan)

11. We’re Sick of It (demo)

12. Corbel Canyon (with Ohioan)

13. Prince of the Confederacy (early three song EP, released by DeathBombArc on cassette)

14. Palaces/We Live Nowhere and Know No One (solo, live at the Brudenelle, 2010, Leeds)

I’ve got two songs on the Shit Is Fucked/Shit Is Great—End Times Mixtape with good folks like Peter and the Wolf, Gowns, Castanets, and Defiance, Ohio. You can download it for free right here. -Adam

Adam Gnade “Providence” Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/wh94paqodofe3fp

Peter and the Wolf “The Fall” Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/7tu8846sxanls28

 Defiance, Ohio “Floodwaters” Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/xej8qvc60m8e3ii

Gowns “When it Burned” Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/dpqmihpmo11ufbx

Castanets vs Ero “After the Dub Fall” Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/45bt68bmxn2coyr

Adam Gnade “Farmhouses” Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/hu7xsno57zwpac7

Beck “Fourteen Rivers, Fourteen Floods” Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/5eoaqslrrpf6nz2

Castanets “Savage” Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/file/0nzr6kgwqftuk9a