Sometimes, the best music is discovered purely by accident. Like when Adam Gnade randomly requested a MySpace friendship – one listen to his stuff and I was hooked. Usually, I’ll try to avoid the first person and writing things like ‘I was hooked” in articles and reviews, but there’s something so direct and personal about both Adam’s songs and his answers that to deny my presence would seem inappropriate and insincere. Besides, when music really hits you, it’s hard to deny or suppress that impact fully.

Anyway, I got in touch with Adam soon after accepting his friendship on MySpace (as seems to be the way nowadays). We tried to arrange an interview for when he came over here with Youthmovies, but it all fell apart. This was my fault rather than his. But the songs still resonated and the eager desire to communicate with him remained. So, eventually, a few months later, I sent him some questions via email. I’m not a big fan of doing this - email interviews are often difficult, disjointed, disconnected, superficial, but this one seemed to work. There was, it seemed, a connection between interviewer and interviewee and a depth and honesty to Adam’s answers – and that doesn’t happen often with email interviews, when screens and bad typing mask our identities and prevent the personal interaction you get from face to face interviews, and with it the chance to have a real flowing conversation rather than a static and inflexible question and answer session. There’s space for much more, of course – for follow-up questions, for discussion and conversation and exploration, but maybe that’ll come in the future. Because as it is, the answers are perfect.

What was your first encounter with music - listening to it and playing it?
Wow, that’s a great question. I don’t recall the first time I played music, but the first song I can remember hearing was the Pink Floyd song that goes “We don’t need no education.” Is it The Wall? I don’t know. What I remember is sitting on the monkey bars in the playground, way up there above everybody else, kind of isolated and lonely. It was cold and breezy and I was watching all the kids from my preschool class play and have fun. There was this kid running big circles around the swing-set singing those five words over and over. I only remember this because five minutes later he climbed up the monkey bars to talk to me, slipped off, and cracked his skull open on one of the lower metal bars.
That was also the first time I saw a lot of blood and realized that there’s all this extra stuff going on inside us. After they took him away I sat on the ground and stared at his blood drying in the sand for a really long time. I think that was the start of my preoccupation with mortality and my very intense—and very unhealthy—relationship with superstition.

When did you first get the idea of 'talking songs'?
It was while I was writing one of my early records. I wanted to make something different and new-sounding so I—very crudely—drew up plans for this new genre of music I wanted to create. Something with spoken vocals that wasn’t spoken word. Something based around prose writing with a lot of freedom to move in the compositional structure of the music. I also wanted it to deconstruct, free up, and rebuild the music I grew up loving country, gospel, mountain music. All my records have failed in that sense—in that they didn’t create their own genre. Palaces came close. Hopefully this new one I’m working on, Trailerparks, will do the trick.

You write that they're trying to sum up "how America feels." Is there an essence you can distill that feeling down to, or is there just too much going on?
There’s too much to really chisel it down and quantify. Just the same, that’s one of the best parts of America; the sprawling, earthy, tangled-up mess of it all.

There are, to me, elements of the Beats in your songs - the idea of wandering through America searching for something. Were they much of an influence to you? And who else has inspired you lyrically (or prosaically/poetically)? And musically?
I’m not really directly inspired by any bands or writers. I mean, I like a lot of bands and books. I love Neutral Milk Hotel. I love Jana Hunter. I love Saul Bellow’s great book The Adventures of Augie March. But mostly it’s good, solid, singular ideas that get me inspired—ideas you can express with more of an oppositionally binary nature. Is oppositionally a real word?

It also seems that everything you do is part of one continuous, never-ending story/adventure - essentially converging snatches of life written down through streams of consciousness but without a linear narrative. Is this some part of a bigger artistic outlook/approach, or just the way you see you life?
That’s another really great question. Oh, okay, yeah, I guess I don’t have much of an artistic outlook on life. I think people make art too big a part of their life and it gets in the way of actually living. It’s incredibly important but art will never be good unless it’s such a normal part of your life that there’s no faking in it; you just do it, and do it regularly, and don’t give it much thought, like sleeping or eating. I’m sure the Magdalenian cave-painters had no grand concept or plan, but what they did is wonderful.

You live in Portland, which was one of my favourite places when I traveled across America a couple of years ago. Yet it's quite unlike anywhere else in the States I've been to. Is it, then, more of a refuge from the places you write about?
It’s like in The Odyssey, the Lotus Eaters. It’s easy to get stuck and never leave. I’m moving away in a few days, actually. Going back to Virginia.

There are a lot of names that crop up more than once in your songs (and also in your book) - are they real people, figments of your imagination or a combination of both?
It’s all real, the people, places, stories. I call my book-writing “fiction” but I guess it’s what you’d classify as “autobiographical fiction” since I change the names. Autobiographical fiction is kind of a funny paradoxical phrase … like “functioning alcoholic.”

What can you tell us about your novel Hymn California? And what's the relationship, if there is one, between your written output and your recorded output?

The relationship is everything; the songs and the book-writing are basically the same thing. The characters are all the same. The plots from the songs are continued in the book—as well as in the novella I released last year. I’ve never told anyone this before, but it’s all part of one long storyline I call ‘We Live Nowhere and Know No One.’ Hymn California is about being in trouble and yielding to superstition and death obsessions. It’s also a road story. People are saying “American magic realism” a lot about it—which I’m finally getting used to.

I read that you burned the previous (unpublished) novels you'd written. Did you not want to preserve them just for reference? It seems to me that anything anyone creates is worth keeping, just to look back on years later as a reminder.
Sure, yeah, I can see the plus sides of holding onto them to look back on one day but I don’t like having stuff. Makes me feel heavy. I like to purge it all every once and a while; give everything away and destroy things to feel that unique kind of lightness when you’re suddenly back to square one.

What's your ultimate artistic goal?
I don’t have a goal anymore. I’m just taking it as it comes.

I remember reading (I don't remember where) about your severe depression in the past. How did this affect you at the time - and how does having been through that affect the way you are now, and how you live your life?
When I’m bad off, I can’t do anything. I’m just a total cripple off in my head, living in, I dunno, living in a nightmare I can’t wake up from. That’s what my first real record, Run Hide Retreat Surrender, was about—trying to overcome it and not blow my brains out or cut my wrists open. I hope it doesn’t come back, but I’m sure it will. It always does.

You've been disparaging about poets in the past. Why? I feel like I get more substance from prose. And while I don’t write poetry, there are a couple poets I read. (And I did spend years reading the stuff trying to find good things.) I especially like Han-Shan who wrote his Cold Mountain poems sometime around the 9th century on the walls of caves in China. But really, I’ll give anything a chance if it’s honest and from the heart.

And how the heck do you remember all your words when performing?! Do you have a favorite memorizing technique?
The only way I’ve been able to get it done is by sheer repetition, a lot of shows. For a while it gave me horrible stage fright and I’d drink myself halfway into a coma before I went on stage. Had some bad, violent shows for a while.

How does Portland compare to San Diego?
Portland’s fairytale land. Easy life, deep woods, great rivers, fragrant air. A witchy, dark place. San Diego’s Mexico. I mean, it’s on the US/Mexico border but my neighborhood Golden Hill is, for all intents and purposes, Mexico. Growing up, I lived on both sides of the border. Have you seen the movie Frida? That’s what my early life was like.

How much do you write each day?
I haven’t written anything substantial for a couple weeks now, which is not like me. I never really write anything not tied to a project … a record, a book, so when I’m writing I like to do eight or ten hours at least. But I’ve been in a weird place lately. I find myself just laying in bed, staring at the wall and thinking. Wandering around the streets, thinking. Lying in the bath, thinking. I can’t read right now because every time I do I just get lost in thought and before I know it my book is on the floor and I’ve spent the last two hours working something out in my head. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m either about to go dark again or I’m about to come to some big breakthrough and everything will suddenly make sense. Hopefully it’s the latter. I’m actually really worried about it.

Words by: Mischa Pearlman