“strives to be sincere in every sense, finding the bravery not just to declare his love for his wife but to voice his fears, his weaknesses, his exasperation with life as we live it.”

As we liked the album so much, we were delighted when Adeem accepted our request to talk a little more in-depth about it, and delighted further when we read his responses. I hope, like us, you find his answers interesting and enlightening and maybe inspiring, too.

Hi Adeem, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. How’s life in Tennessee at the moment?

Life is well. Currently most of my time is spent practicing the tao of litter box maintenance and watching The Force Awakens as many times as I can before it leaves the theatre. Tennessee is full of pollen right now so we’re all crying for the same reason which isn’t usual.

First of all, I think we need to ask about the change of name. It’s clear from your piece on the matter that names and identity are very important to you, and that Adeem feels like an unburdening of mystery and/or a return to something more sincerely, capital-Y You. Was Kyle Adem a weight around your neck, or a well-worn skin now shed? Do you feel the switch of name is intrinsic to the album as it turned out?

I feel so uncomfortable to talk about my name. It must sound so trivial and elitist and irksome to most people. Kyle Adem was a proclamation in its own right as well so it’s proper to call it a well-worn skin. The first album I released as Kyle Adem was important to the change I was making. I wanted to make music that was more lighthearted and quirky. I discovered Lou Reed and Tom Waits and was really over trying to make every song I wrote into a sermon’s sister piece. So that album had strangers looking for soulmates at a funeral and a character who dies and starts offering sexual favors to other ghosts in order to make friends in the afterlife. “We are not philosophers in search of the unknown. We are kids who do not want to be alone- and we will find our own fucking way home” as a lyric from that project was kind of my creed during that time. Especially last year, it began to feel more like a barrier to the art that I wanted to create. I feel very over the idea of trying to commit to a brand. I contain multitudes. I don’t know how to package that. It also deals a lot with my relationship with my parents, religion, my inevitable death… All of that felt very linked to my decision to assume the name “Adeem” and the things that it meant for who I want to be in this life. I guess this is a sort of generic Saturn’s return sort of record so there’s birth and death and the introduction of myself as “Adeem” is important to that.

Sincerity in art is something which really interests me, particularly in terms of a reaction against something, irony or mystery or whatever you want to call it (ie. the mask to hide behind born of fear of being seen as naïve). Do you find it difficult to share the songs which are unashamedly You?

Yes and no. I started writing poetry when I was twelve as a way of communicating things I didn’t know how to say. As a teenager, most of my songs were about pain and sadness and I didn’t entirely understand why. I was viewing the world through such a distorted lens and so I think music became my safe space where I could say whatever I wanted and people would interpret it in ways that were personal to them. I could write a song about my questions surrounding religion and people would connect with it on a personal level. If I asked those questions aloud, it was heresy. Same with my parents, my friends, everything. If I sang it, it seemed like people heard it in a way that was palatable. It’s difficult, though. It’s true that to listen to these songs is to hear the essence of who I am as a person in a very vulnerable, honest way so it’s scary to think of being known in this way by strangers. It’s also true, however, that it’s a vague portrait of the ocean inside so there’s a dual fear that people will think they know more than they ever could.

What or who would you list as your biggest influences? Do you consider art forms other than music to have played a role in shaping your sound? Maybe literature or film or visual art?

I was born in eighty eight so my very young years were filled with all of the glory of the 90’s. Garth Brooks was probably the first artist I obsessed over. I poured through his albums and devoured his songs. After that I listened to Savage Garden’s debut album probably over a thousand times. That’s my cleaning-the-house jam. In the early 2000’s I started getting really excited about Johnny Cash and then Chris Carrabba and everything emo. mewithoutYou, David Bazan, and the mountain goats are some of my most formative influences at this stage. I had to stop listening to TMG because I was emulating his writing style too much. I also consider Charles Bukowski, Kahlil Gibran, and Fred Rogers a sort of holy trinity that I spend time praying to depending on whether or not I feel like inspiring someone’s very gentle, beautiful soul or drinking whiskey under a bridge. Film too, yeah. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator inspired the song “Sidewalk” off the new album. I have an EP that I’ll put out next year probably that’s based on an episode of Doctor Who. I also really like Duaiv, a visual artist in Florida who paints these wonderfully eccentric paintings of sailboats that I adore. I own one from my time working on ships. My wife as well is a painter who has inspired me not just with her person but with her art. I have a couple of pieces that are based on paintings she has done.

Your mini-essay reads as something organic, a gloriously natural non-PR led piece of the kind which seems to be dropping out of view in the modern music scene. Do you feel artists could do more in their use of the internet as a means of direct, intimate conversation, as opposed to the mass marketing, product-selling tool it seems to have become?

Oh, I don’t know. I think part of it probably comes from my general dissatisfaction with capitalism and consumer culture as a whole. I’ve read a lot of blogs about social media marketing strategy and branding and it’s all great stuff but it feels disingenuous to me- probably because I don’t see myself as a “professional musician.” I see my approach as a weakness more than anything. When I was younger and I still believed life was a story about me, I was much more prone to these marketing strategies. Now that I am older, I wonder how many more songs from white guys with acoustic guitars do we really need? There are people who like what I do and have a visceral reaction to it. I like to stumble organically into those people because they usually have some similar trajectory of life as I do. Anyone is capable of writing the music that I write but I was sad enough to do it. It seems weird to try and sell that reality as a commodity. I don’t aspire to be a musician. I aspire to journey- to eat fresh fruit and ride my bicycle in every state. I aspire to breathe ocean air and to taste Hannah’s mouth in the cool spring mornings. I aspire to sleep in and drink tea. Music is a thing that I do to re-center my soul and also to make new friends. I hope it supports a quality of life that enables my aspirations but little else and I can’t tell yet if there is a market for brash sincerity. I’ll get back to you.

At the end of the piece you hint at ‘lots of kickass projects’ which will be coming in the future. Can you give us any more details, or are they all Top Secret for the time being?

I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do next. I’m probably going to take a little bit of time off in the fall and work on a definitive “next-art-thing.” I’m starting to write a lot more prose and I’ve been painting and sketching and working on some new conceptual EP’s that are literary pieces- vague storylines with interesting characters. I am leaning towards releasing this series of four EP’s named after birds. They deal with the emotional connection that songs have to specific memories in our life and the lasting impact they can have on the way we ascribe narrative to our experiences.

Finally, could you name four or five acts you think we should be listening too? They can be brand new or old classics, whatever you think will make our days a little brighter (or darker)?

Oh, hell yes. One of my favorite EP’s right now is by a band called Blond Bones. Otherwise I’ve been listening to a lot of Jason Isbell, Childish Gambino, Joey English, and Gaslight Anthem. I think all of those will probably accomplish both brightening and darkening of days!

You can buy Kyle Adem is Dead from the Adeem the Artist Bandcamp page, or via iTunes. Don’t forget to read our review too.

Photo by Hannah Bingham

The post Interview: Adeem the Artist appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeem wrote an excellent piece which shone a light on the whole change, highlighting just how much weight the metamorphosis carries for him. It’s clear from the first listen to the new album that something major has taken place, the writing and delivery imbued with a sense of sincerity beyond anything on his music to date. The opening track ‘Good Evening’ serves as the introduction to this new/real Adeem, although it feels like a two-way thing, like he is as eager to meet you as you are him. As we described in the previous post:

“[Good Evening is] forged from that peculiar kind of earnestness which makes you feel comfortable, the sense that someone is willing to listen… ‘This is me,’ Adeem is saying. ‘Now who are you?'”

‘Impossible’ is a song about the beauty and strength that can be found in fragility, sounding like a cross between Small Houses and Great American Desert, while ‘Cincinnati’ channels Gregory Alan Isakov in its sad tale of Midwestern life, a world where things don’t work out as expected, as if tipping towards some larger tragedy. ‘Quiet Songs’ is a creeping heartbreaker not loud in terms of instrumentation but deafening in its words, the lyrics standing stark against an echoing silence. In much the same way as Noah Gundersen, Adeem the Artist manages to sound at once tender and enraged, seized by the words coming from his throat as if in frenzy. The song charts the progression of a person who knows they are different, starting from their birth into a conservative family where guns came before any clear sense of identity, and following them through school (“everybody knew I was a dark kind of kid”) and the rest of life. In an effort to regain (and then communicate) a sense of self, they turn to anger (“I was older when I learned that you gotta yell / and summon some hell /if you want to be heard”) before tragedy lets the façade drop enough for their true, earnest self to poke through.

“And I got scared when you were dying
it changed the melody for me
between the stones we threw to keep ourselves from crying
and the soft moments composed of unsung harmonies

I didn’t think that things would be perfect
I just thought you would listen
I just thought you would hear”

‘Good Ship Jesus’ has a mean country twang, the talk of devils and saviours foreshadowing the references to racism and discrimination by authorities which form the final verse, while ‘Waiting’ is altogether warmer and more hopeful, a bona fide love song tracing the possibilities for development and betterment within a relationship and opening up the possibility of fate or true love or some similar phenomenon. ‘Asphalt’ is a Dylan-esque folk song about falling head over heels, ‘We Learnt To Cry’ a slow, cathartic number in which suffering is the binding force of a relationship, and ‘Sidewalk’ is a frenetic folk song which borders on performance poetry or rap, the words streaming out as if from a man given three minutes to clear his heart or mind or both. From this, ‘We Belong Here’ emerges with a gentle intimacy, the couple here linked not be some grand understanding of life or love but rather a common confusion, a willingness not only to face strange, unknowable questions together but to accept this company as enough.

“We belong here inside the mystery of facing one another
here inside this endless, burning collage of color
here inside the searching, and the hurting, and the wonder.

We belong”

‘Midway Motel’ is an electrified Americana number carved out of small town nostalgia, where time passes like a desert wind or else a lightning flash, childhood dreams lost to the fierce grip of obligations and expectations, and the closing track, ‘Goodbye’, is equal parts compassionate and fierce. Part love song, part demand for answers, the song finds Adeem seized by love and fear and that all-too-human dissatisfaction, the inability to accept that life amounts to no more than growing and working and shrinking slowly towards your grave.

“Life can be hard
when you aren’t quite sure who you are
or where you’re going.

Sitting alone in my car,
I felt my heart explode into an epitaph.

Is this the plan of a perfect God?
Breeding and depleting and then falling apart
well, all I hear is the sound of goodbye.
Don’t say goodbye”

The word ‘sincere’ is often taken as synonymous for affectionate or sentimental. While it might be true that, deep down, us humans are often feeble, dewy-eyed creatures pretending otherwise, true sincerity involves a whole lot more than confessing love. We also hide things like depression, discontentment and fear of death, decidedly un-saccharine facets of the human condition we’d rather forget, feelings which can eat us up and void whatever love we might be holding. With Kyle Adem is Dead, Adeem the Artist strives to be sincere in every sense, finding the bravery not just to declare his love for his wife but to voice his fears, his weaknesses, his exasperation with life as we live it. With everything on the table, no lingering mysteries or secrets withheld, there is nothing left to corrupt the good things. Because, after all, Kyle Adem is dead.

Kyle Adem is Dead is out on Friday. Keep an eye on the Adeem the Artist Bandcamp page to buy it, or snag it from iTunes.

Artwork by Hannah Bingham

The post Adeem the Artist – Kyle Adem is Dead appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“I’ve decided recently that what I want to do is be very sincere with my art. I always wanted to be vague and mysterious; I thought that the space was important. Now, I feel differently; I want to tell you my name, which I’ve since changed the spelling to Adeem, and you tell me your name. Then we’re friends, and we get coffee, or beer, or food together- like before when my hope was to patch together a family of strangers.

The truth is there is organically such a broad universe dividing us from one another and I just don’t think that it needs any added mystery. So hey, I’m Adeem”.

So far only one track has been unveiled from Kyle Adem is Dead, but it goes a long way in showing the direction Adeem has taken his sound. ‘Good Evening’ sees sparse guitars allowing Adeem’s voice to fill the track, expanding outwards so that it fills your chest too. His words are disarmingly sincere, not melodramatic or overly sentimental but instead forged from that peculiar kind of earnestness which makes you feel comfortable, the sense that someone is willing to listen. Even without the back-story, ‘Good Evening’ sounds like an introduction “This is me,” Adeem is saying. “Now who are you?”

“Good evening
you’re a fine looking group
and your faces make expressions
​that decide which songs I’m going to do”

In this dark inner observatory
it’s a fine night for sharing songs and stories
like this one time when I was still young
I mean- I’m still young now
but I was younger when this happened…
I sang a song that was quite similar to this one”

Kyle Adem is Dead is to be released on the 8th April, so expect a full review closer to that date.

The post Adeem the Artist announces new album, Kyle Adem is Dead appeared first on Various Small Flames.