Green, Adam

views updated

Adam Green

Singer, songwriter

Singer-songwriter Adam Green first gained minor fame among indie-rock fans for his darkly mischievous lyrics as one half of the anti-folk duo the Moldy Peaches. Green continued to play to a small but select fan base as a solo recording artist after 2002, but in 2007 reunited briefly with Kimya Dawson, the other Peach, when a duet they had written and recorded several years earlier appeared on the soundtrack to the box-office hit film Juno as the movie's best-known song. "Anyone Else But You" became Green's first mainstream hit after releasing dozens of other songs over the course of his career, but it maintained his quirky, signature style. "I want to write the next ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’," he told Rolling Stone's Christina Saraceno. "I always wanted to write songs that are melodic and easy to sing. I guess I'm trying to write that kind of escapist stuff. A lot of times I'll think about a weird memory, or earliest thoughts or childhood fantasies and it'll end up in my songs somehow."

Green was born on May 28, 1981, in Mount Kisco, New York, and grew up in nearby Bedford. Both are located in the affluent, bucolic setting of Westchester County, just north of New York City, but the idyllic suburbs bred in Green an early unease. "I feel like I was a pretty pathetic character throughout my childhood," he told Saraceno in the Rolling Stone interview. As an adolescent, he began frequenting the handful of record stores in the area, where he made like-minded friends who introduced him to a wide range of music, from Hank Williams to Black Flag. One of those friends was 20-year-old Kimya Dawson; they met when Green was 13 and working at a Bedford pizza place near her job. With the seven-year age difference, Green explained that Dawson functioned as "sort of my babysitter," he told Larry Katz in the Boston Herald. "She knew about different bands that were playing, and my parents would give her money to take me to see concerts."

In 1998, Green headed off to Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, but spent just one semester there before dropping out. He joined Dawson, who was living in Washington State at the time, where they played their first set as the Moldy Peaches in order to raise funds to pay an overdue electric bill. By 2000 the pair were both in New York City and began to find success with shows at a venue on the Lower East Side called the Sidewalk Café, which was already the hub of a new musical subgenre dubbed "anti-folk." Beck and Ani DiFranco are some of the anti-folk movement's most notable former members. Green and Dawson gained early notoriety as much for their comically profane lyrics as for the Robin Hood costume Green sported onstage at times, which was complemented by Dawson in a bunny suit.

Green and Dawson self-released their first LP, X-Ray Vision, but their first for Rough Trade had the unfortunate release date of September 11, 2001. The album featured 19 tracks, including audience favorites "Steak for Chicken" and "Who's Got the Crack," as well as "Anyone Else But You," the future Juno hit. Asked about it later, Green recalled that he began writing that song one day as he was walking in New York City, "and I had in my head a Skip Spence song," he told Laura Barton, a journalist with London's Guardian newspaper, referring to the late singer-songwriter who was once the drummer for the Jefferson Airplane. "I couldn't remember all the words so I started replacing them with lines I was making up…. and then I think me and Kimya were writing songs on my couch the next week, and I brought up that idea, and we wrote a bunch of lines, piecing around a lot of ideas from our notebooks. We finished the song in Tompkins Square Park on a bench."

In 2002, Green and Dawson decided to put the Peaches on indefinite hiatus, and later that year he released his first solo record, Garfield, on Rough Trade. He gained a wider following thanks to a slot as an opening act for Rough Trade label-mates the Strokes, one of the most dramatic rock success stories of that year, and returned to New York City to record his next work, Friends of Mine. Released in the summer of 2003, Green scored some good reviews, including one by Rolling Stone's Christian Hoard who asserted the LP "shows off his promise as a songwriter…and Green's surprisingly polished crooning."

Overseas, Friends of Mine debuted in the number-two spot on the German independent charts, and the European music press liked to point out Green's unusual connection to one of the greatest literary names of the twentieth century: his great-grandmother, Felice Bauer, was once engaged to the writer Franz Kafka. Their relationship endured mostly via correspondence between 1912 and 1917, when Kafka then took up with a friend of Bauer's; Bauer and her family subsequently fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and came to America. Kafka's biographers have written extensively on the relationship, and the voluminous correspondence has also been published separately as Letters to Felice.

Green found his own bit of notoriety with the song "Jessica," a whimsical diatribe against the pop singer Jessica Simpson that appeared on Friends of Mine. He had written it more than a year before, not really knowing who the pop singer was at the time, but finding himself entranced by a magazine cover she graced. Its lyrics include the lines "where has your love gone? It's not in your music" and "your fraudulent smile." Green's song was released just before Simpson and husband Nick Lachey debuted in an MTV reality series Newlyweds, and was seized upon as indie-music's retort to the manufactured celebrity of the pair. "I've heard through people that she's heard it," Green told Katz, the Boston Herald writer. "I don't know how I'd take it if somebody wrote such a thing about me. But if I ever met her, I'd be nice to her. I haven't seen her show because I don't get MTV, but I did see her on Jay Leno. I was actually sort of charmed by her."

Green's third solo release was Gemstones, followed by Jacket Full of Danger in 2006, which earned slightly better reviews than the much-maligned Gemstones. As with his previous records, Jacket featured short songs and lots of them-the LP's 15 songs clocked in at just under 30 minutes for the CD, and took Green nine days to record. Writing in the Sun, a London tabloid, reviewer Simon Cosyns claimed Green's latest "exudes hooks, confidence and marks the flowering of an extraordinary talent."

Dawson, meanwhile, was involved in her own solo releases and soundtrack work for various films. One of them was Juno, a sweet but unsentimental tale of a pregnant teenager, played by Ellen Page, and her dilemma. In the movie, Page and co-star Michael Cera (George-Michael from the cult-favorite Fox series Arrested Development) sing the duet together, and the movie's success propelled the soundtrack to the number one on Billboard chart not long after the film's December of 2007 release. Green and Dawson reunited to perform the song publicly in a promotional push, and even appeared on the ABC morning talk show The View in a bizarre stage set-up that mimicked the curbfront scene in Juno. Green described that event as "displacing," he said in the interview with Barton. "I think both me and Kimya-aside from getting to meet [View co-host] Whoopi Goldberg-would rather have been home eating lunch."

For the Record …

Born on May 28, 1981, in Mount Kisco, NY. Education: Attended Emerson College, 1998.

Formed the Moldy Peaches with Kimya Dawson in Port Townsend, Washington, 2000; signed with Rough Trade Records; released first solo LP, Garfield, 2002.

Addresses: Record company—Rough Trade Records, c/o Beggars Group Records, 17-19 Alma Rd., London SW18 1AA, England. Web site—Adam Green Official Web site: http://www.adamgreen.net/.

Green's next solo release was Sixes & Sevens, which was 48 minutes of 20 cabaret-influenced songs, including "Morning After Midnight" and "Drowning Head First," a duet with girlfriend Loribeth Capella. Of the 2008 record, Village Voice writer Lex Benaim claimed it "should help his reputation evolve" from the association with the Juno soundtrack. "The record is simultaneously stranger and more coherent than any of his previous albums," Benaim continued, "and the pan-flute playing on "You Get So Lucky" is one of the funniest moments in music this year." An article in the New York Observer mentioned that Green had been spending time in Nashville, and as a result "most tunes circle around Nashville's great contributions to the realms of country, blues and gospel, all in a laid-back, classic vernacular that wouldn't be out of place on the Leon Redbone or Bonnie Raitt album," its reviewer noted. "If that sounds like a tall order for the gawky, scrappy poet of the streets, it is, but then again why not? In a way the cadences of Mr. Green's lyrics are no less rollicking than these more staid precursors, and if at times they seem out of place, his presence somehow does not."