Adam Marsland

Adam Marsland is no rookie. On the other end of the line it’s a hot day in Los Angeles and the pop singer/songwriter is busy plotting his upcoming tour, his first real outing since returning to music full-time. He answers questions with a sense of humor, throwing out his credentials – his former label Big Deal, coming up in the same scene as recent Tony award winners the Negro Problem, working with rock and roll Hall of Famers —off the cuff. He’s not exactly modest, but he doesn’t fit the arrogant rocker mold.

He’s a seasoned vet. The pop troubadour’s decade of plugging away as a full-time musician includes time spent first as frontman of Cockeyed Ghost, who in their ‘90s heyday toured with the likes of Third Eye Blind and one-hit-wonders Fastball, and later as a solo act, releasing two pop albums under his own name. But after the release of his 2004 effort You Don’t Know Me, Marsland put his own songwriting career on the back burner in favor of the reliable 9-to-5, trading in 200 live shows a year for the comfort and stability of a desk job.

But it wasn’t meant to be.

Marsland recently released a 20-track best of collection titled Daylight Kissing Night – Adam Marsland’s Greatest Hits. Although Marsland has never had a hit in the traditional sense, the collection serves as a re-introduction to the listening public, and his true re-introduction to music full-time.

SSv staff writer Natalie B. David caught up with Marsland to discuss his return to music, the challenges of DIY marketing, and the insights from revisiting over a decade’s worth of songwriting.

SSv: So you sort-of gave up music, did the 9-5 job thing and then came back to music full-time. When was the moment when you absolutely knew that you couldn’t give up music, that you had to come back to it?

Marsland: Well, I didn’t totally give up music, because I was playing quite a lot, but I definitely de-emphasized it. It had been the focal point of my life for about 10 years and I pretty much stopped writing. I was still playing quite a bit and I had a really good band so I was doing a lot of stuff. We did the Denis Wilson tribute album which was just sort of a way to challenge yourself, so I was playing around, but I think the way it was, I went up to Sacramento and I was hanging out with my ex-girlfriend, who’s a lesbian [laughs], and it was the first time I’d had a chance to sit around and not do very much.

I’d been so busy with work and I was playing at night and I had this stupid illness that had been dogging me for a couple of years that I had an ear infection that the doctors didn’t catch and it spread all over my head and caused some problems that still linger, so I was always overwhelmed. I had forgotten what it was like just to chill [laughs] and not get up and go to work and to live your life at a different pace and do what you really love. I started thinking about what I really needed to live and how much money I had in the bank and the resources I had and I thought, ‘You know what? It’s time to go back.’

I had always kind of planned to go back from the day job, but once you get in the day job mode, you’re sort of in that mode and the way that it was just sort of recedes further and further in your mind. You’re like I’ll do it again some day [laughs] but it was pretty much in Sacramento. That was about nine months before I quit and I just started making plans, started getting the compilation together and getting somebody in the band and getting started playing. And I did it.

It helps when you have some money in the bank. That’s made it a lot easier because the first six months to a year I’m not really trying very hard to make money. I’m just trying to focus on music and heath. It’s been nice and I’ve been getting a lot of work. The album has been doing pretty well, and now the album before that is starting to sell and I’ve been doing stuff with other musicians too, so I’m not breaking even yet, but it’s a prospect. [laughs]. It’s not like I’m going to completely run out of money next month. It helps a lot because I haven’t had to do anything cheesy just yet, but there was an Elvis impersonator I was talking to so… [laughs]

SSv: Well, like you said, the album is doing pretty well and I read that the first pressing more-or-less sold out with any real press coverage.

Marsland: We did it a little backwards. We did kind of a fan thing first just to kind of wake everybody up and we got up to #35 on Amazon with it. Like ‘Woah’. And We went through 19,000 copies in about three weeks. I mean, not every single one of them sold, but they were out of the garage so you had to try and repress more, but it looked pretty good. So now I’m working on a tour which is going to be about two months long, around the country. That’s just kind of the next step and that’s going to be around the official release date in August.

SSv: There’s an official release date? What’s going to be different around that than the album that’s already available?

Marsland: Well, that’s when we’re going to promote it properly. One of the things about coming back to music that I didn’t want to do was I used to always just overwhelm myself all the time, and so it made it difficult to do things properly. There were a certain number of things I knew I wanted to do in terms of just personally reaching out to the people who have been cool to me, so I couldn’t just send out a couple of e-mails and say “Hey, the albums out” and then just focus on publicity and things like that. I was more concerned with making sure that all of my peeps were on board with it. I spent a lot of time before the album came out just figuring out who my audience was and trying to do one-on-one, say “Hey I’ve got this album coming out and I’m going on tour’” before we even did things traditionally, in terms of radio and press.

These days it’s really more about do you have enough of a connection, personally, with your fan base to keep you going because everything is so diffuse with the web and there have not been very many effective labels out there anymore. So that was my first priority. I knew I wanted to focus on that and then, once that had happened go to the standard, go to the people who are going to expand the music outward and that’s the press and radio and blogs and people like that.

I’m still pretty DIY. I’ve got some people working for me, but I still have to do a lot of the stuff myself and the thing about that is, if you put too much on your plate you can inadvertently piss people off, which I have been guilty of doing. You can really stress yourself out and I didn’t want to turn one stressful situation into another. I wanted to really enjoy this.

SSv: Well, it seems like especially since a lot of your efforts have been pretty DIY oriented, it seems like you’re pretty aware of how to market yourself. Do you think that you’re in the minority there or that a lot more independent artists are aware of that these days?

Marsland: Well, for one thing, it’s always better if you have somebody else speaking on your behalf so you’re not calling people up saying “hey, I’m the shit!” That’s the one downside of DIY, one thing that I never really liked about it. I was talking to someone in the early rounds of promoting and they had googled me and said, “You really have a reputation as a self-promoter,” and I knew they had read something about me from 10 years ago.

But the thing that bums me out a little bit, because I’m fairly active on MySpace, is that I don’t like the way most bands do the MySpace thing because it’s so obnoxious. You just start spamming tens of billions of people, but you get nothing in sales. Looking at them a lot of the time it’s like “I’m a rock star, suck my dick” you know?

SSv: And nobody wants to log into their MySpace and have, like, 15 band requests for some bands they’ve never heard of and probably don’t care about.

Marsland: Exactly. So on my MySpace with my band, up until recently, we never sent any friend requests to anybody. We sent personal invitations to people who we thought would be into it and made people feel special and established something personal. And that’s part of the reason why the album did so well and continues to do well. There’s a certain point where bands don’t get the chance to do that, and I understand that, but I’ve been around long enough to remember from the early days when I was a kid and we just came to L.A. and it was just the metal scene. That’s not my kind of music, but those fans, the people who still come to see them at some crappy club in the Valley, it’s because they established such a bond with the people who came to see them that it was like part of the family.

And so in terms of staying alive, like these metal bands who are still touring the world, It’s not just because “Hey, woo hoo, we’re being nostalgic.” It’s because it meant something to people personally. And that’s the one part of bands promoting themselves that I think is really lacking a lot of the time. I think bands should have a responsibility to offer something to their people, at least respect, and not just expect that they run out and buy my record and send me money and come to my shows and I’m not really going to bother talking to you after the show and whatever.

The Internet is great for reaching people, but it’s not as good for touching people. The best blogs are the ones that have established a sense of community where you feel like a part of something and you get to know people. The Internet is really, really cool but if it’s just kind of a way to… I can remember doing basically what MySpace does 10 years ago when I was with Big Deal and the label was falling apart I was e-mailing random people on AOL and at that point it was very, very uncool to do that. And I got a lot of grief for doing that, but now everybody is doing the same thing but they’re not doing it with tact and that bothers me a little bit. [laughs] So 10 years ago they were too cool to get their hands dirty and talk to anybody, but now they’ll just send you a friend request and then they don’t have to do it. And I realize every band does this, I’m not trying to dis every single band in the world and look like an asshole, but there are some people who are really obnoxious about it and have like 9,000 friends.

SSv: Speaking of MySpace, I read where the songs for the compilation were chosen where you placed something like 50 of them up on MySpace and had some of your fans vote on which ones they would like to see make the cut. How did that work for you?

Marsland: It worked really well. It was better early on because people were more interested, of course, in the beginning. Fifty songs is a lot to pick from but it actually was really good because I’ve been recording since ’96. Although we knew we would focus more on the last eight or nine years of stuff because the early stuff I did was kind of more of an emo thing and it wasn’t gonna mesh.

But what really got it going was when I posted a provisional list of songs. And oh God… [laughs] I was glad that people cared, don’t get me wrong, but it was “Oh, why didn’t you put this song on?” ”Why didn’t you put that song on?” One song we got such a demand for was “Married Yet,” actually, and it was one of the early sort-of emo songs and we listened to the early recordings of it and were just like “No. No. I can’t do that” and we literally booked the studio that week and went in and redid it. Luckily it came out really great. We were actually ready to go to press and we held it so that we could get that song in and bumped something else because people really wanted it. And we thought well, then it really isn’t about me is it? It’s about the people that are going to get it, and it’s a really cool song and a lot of people like it a lot better the way we rerecorded it.

SSv: So when you were going back over basically your entire catalogue, did you have any insights or anything or did you find out anything new about it?

Marsland: I kinda did because here’s the thing: I’ve always had this weird little career problem, well, I don’t want to say career problem, but I’ve always had this weird little thing where I came up as part of what was called a pop scene in L.A. and when I was a part of it it was very calm and very indie and not very retro. I really loved that and I found that when it got to the wider world I had a problem because the really, really hardcore guys into pop music were really into something that was about sonics. How much does it sound like “A Hard Days Night?” How much does it sound like The Raspberries? And I love those bands, but I love The Pixies, too.

My thing wasn’t really about trying to recreate something that already happened. I was just incorporating in what I did some of the music that I liked. I like things really at the heart, you know? So that doesn’t really resonate as well with the pop guys and in terms of being in the rock crowd because there were pop sounds, it was kind of the cool kids didn’t want me to sit at their table. And that, it probably took about 10 years for that to drop, but I’d gotten to the point of thinking of myself as this sort of oddball guy that was doing something that wasn’t too easy to get. It was neither fish nor foul, know what I mean?

And so when you have the first thing of the album together and when I listened to it, it was a lot less rock oriented and had a lot less of the rock influenced songs. I listened to it and was like “Oh God. This sounds like Starbucks.” [laughs] It was like the most accessible record you’ve ever heard. I was going wow, this is really cool but really kinda bad too, because I could see a lot of 40-year-old soccer moms buying my record, even though I know they’re not going to.

But I guess I just didn’t think of my music as being that accessible until I heard it in that context, with some of the stuff rerecorded and with different production values. And that was kind of a shock. It wasn’t totally unpleasant because I’m not that much of an elitist, but I guess I’m not that far off the beaten path. I also thought it was a little too wimpy so we did redo it to make it a little bit more of a rock oriented record now.

It’s just to hear my music back like that… it was really good. I thought nobody can say this sucks. They might say it’s not their thing, but I thought it was pretty good. So it gave me a little confidence coming back to it. Seeing yeah, I’m all right. [laughs]

SSv: Well, hey, that’s always good.

Marsland: Yeah. I think music for me has been a journey of finding myself. I know that’s the corniest fucking thing you’ve ever heard, but I don’t come from a socially well-adjusted background. You know? I come from a brainiac, Asperger’sey kind of family. If I had never become a musician, I don’t think I ever would’ve learned how to communicate with people. It’s always a little hard for me to tell how what I’m doing is coming across to people. Whenever a new album comes out, and people think it’s really good, I’m kind of relieved, you know? When I hear my own stuff and I can listen to it as a third person and think “Ok. This is good.”

SSv: Well, one of the obvious themes, and it’s obvious even in the title Daylight Kissing Night is that dichotomy of light and darkness, and it’s a theme that a lot of songwriters play with, but why do you think it’s such a successful dynamic for songwriting?

Marsland: Well, I can only say for what resonates for me, but a beautiful melody is a beautiful melody. And dissonance has its place and I understand dissonant music and I’ve done a little bit of it, but if you want to touch the soul… We all sort of grew up listening to lullabies and show tunes and whatnot and there’s something primal in us that responds to a real beautiful melody. But if that’s all there is, then you’ve got elevator music and that’s not so cool. So you kind of engage the heart in places by putting a really nice melody and putting some poignancy to the writing and, for myself, I always really try to weigh some truths.

One of the nicest things that someone said to me was Gwynne Kahn, who’s an old L.A scenester here, and she always said that my music, she liked it because I would say things that no one else would say. And if I’m really bummed about something that’s maybe embarrassing, I’ll admit it rather than pussyfoot around it and be cool or address it in some other way. And people that I admire, like Johnny Cash, was really good at that. He wouldn’t make a big histrionic deal about it. He would just say it. Like with the song Ginna Ling, which is a pretty heavy song, it was set up to sound like a happy-go-lucky pop tune about this guy who has this crush on a girl and you don’t realize until the middle of the song that he’s really grieving because she died.

I remember when we were cutting the vocals for that, I constantly redid it, about 15 times because I didn’t want to make this big statement when you get to the part where you say that she died. I just wanted it to be said because it would have more shock value that way. The more you kind of dress it up, the more you take away from the real emotion, you know? So I guess, for me, the approach that I try to take is to get rid of the bullshit at all costs. You may dress up how you say it so it seems better and not so cliché, but don’t try to hide how you’re really feeling.

“How Can You Stand It” is, to me, a pretty desperate song and it’s about getting up at night and walking around afraid that you’re getting old and all your friends are going away, but you know, that was how I was feeling. [laughs] And I hope that someone else feels that way and they can get something out of it. And that’s another thing. If you’re so far up your own ass that nobody knows what you’re talking about, then you’ve probably failed.

SSv: So I guess as a final question, after the tour, what’s up for you after that?

Marsland: Well, I’m gonna proceed on two tracks. I’ve got a new studio album half recorded and I’ve just been working on that in drags while everything else has been going on. We plan to have that out in February of ‘09 and do a tour behind that. And I’m also doing a lot of work out here as a sideman playing with other people which is really, really cool. I’ve been playing with some guys who are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and working with some older guys and just doing pure music, which is really, really great. So I’m really enjoying that too, because you just show up and play and meet some new people and expand your world. So I’m hoping I’ll be able to do both. Do my own thing and then play with other people and bounce back and forth between the two and just keep playing music for the rest of my life.

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