The story of Adam Marsland is the story of America. From humble beginnings as a teenager playing gigs at county fairs, to a successful-yet-tumultuous career in the 1990s, he is Exhibit Number One of how artistry does not necessarily equal laboring in obscurity. But success has not come without a price- and how staggering it is. Dropped from two major record labels in the ‘90s and early 2000s, he has endured personal tragedy and professional setbacks on the road to becoming a Horatio Alger story of his own, including a significant spot on Amazon’s Top 20 as well as touring with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys.
He also bears a striking resemblance to Billy Bob Thornton, though he coyly denies it. What a tease!
In a rather in depth interview, Marsland talks about his life as a celebrity doppelganger, his career as a former member of the Not So Mainstream Media, his love of Tom Servo and Crow and, oh yeah, his latest album Go West.
John Winn: Just an off the ball question, I checked out some photos of you online, and I don’t know if you’ve gotten this, if people have asked you this, but you look like a dead ringer for Billy Bob Thornton.
Adam Marsland: [Laughs.] With or without the beard?
JW: Without the beard. I think you had like, peroxide blonde hair or dirty blonde hair…
AM: I’ve never been told that. I usually hear Tom Holtz.
JW: Wow. Did they ever say you look like Ben Folds? Because you kind of look like him also.
AM: Well, no, but I’ve been told I sound like him.
JW: I understand you once worked as a newspaper editor before becoming a musician. What was that like?
AM: Well, they were country newspapers, so it was less reporting-driven than knowing your community. I think it taught me not to make casual judgments and to look at things in more depth, because I learned when I reported on things and wrote about things, I learned there were a lot of perspectives to consider. I think that affected my writing a lot as a songwriter, because I don’t like to take the obvious position, I like to think through an issue and come up with a different way of writing about it. So it was very influential on my worldview.
JW: Go West is your first album, your first original album in five years- and a concept album to boot. Was it a challenge coming up with so much material?
AM: No. It was a challenge getting it started. It took me a while to get back into the swing of writing. Once I did, the stuff just came faster and faster and faster. That’s how I ended up with a double album. It wasn’t originally going to be a double album [sigh]. The concept didn’t work as a sequel… It was too much to cram into too little space. So it was just a matter of warming up to writing again.
JW: You mentioned Ben Folds before. Your style has been compared to him and the band Kraftwork. Do you agree with that assessment?
AM: Kraftwork is a stretch, except for a couple of songs. I get compared to Elvis Costello a lot, which is fair, and also Joe Jackson, which is probably closer to what I really am.
JW: You’re also a noted Beach Boys fan. Does it feel weird now that you’ve collaborated with them, Dennis Wilson and others?
AM: Well, I’ve learned that it is one thing to be a fan and another thing when they’re real people. You should- I’m not, you know, in anybody’s inner circle, I’m just somebody who’s rockin’ with them. But you do realize they are real people and need to treat them that way. It’s easy to think of entertainers as abstractions, but there are real people there that have been affected by their circumstances and when you work with them in any capacity, even the small ones I have, you need to respect them and treat them as real people.
JW: Do you sometimes find it difficult though to keep the fan boy thing under control?
AM: No. I think it’s because I’m really- when I’m working with people like that- I’m very intensely focused on getting it right. It’s taking all that concentration to get my own part right and keep an eye on the other musicians to make sure they’re playing right. So I don’t really have a lot of time to geek out too much. You’re just expected to do your job. There is a time and a place to be a fan boy, when I’m not in the room. I do remember when we did the Carl Wilson Foundation show and Brian Wilson was in the audience the whole time, and I was unnerved for about a minute, but I put it out of my mind.
JW: Was it just awkward?
AM: I think it was because I was the music director, the key person in the band, and if I screwed up the whole thing was going to fall apart…
JW: And you didn’t want to do it in front of him.
AM: You know, you don’t just want to blow that. So I let myself get distracted for about a minute and then I stopped thinking and remembered what I was there to do. It’s all part of being a professional musician. I think I was more nervous when I was playing with the Wrecking Crew guys. Because I was on their turf, and it wasn’t- and I felt no real right to be there.
But you know, I think having had that experience and trying to see how they did what they did, it gave me a lot of confidence in my own abilities, ‘cause I kind of understood the kind of qualities you had to have, and part of that is not getting nervous and not psyching yourself out… But there is a certain kind of pressure you come over that is really healthy. Which amounts to, you don’t have a million takes to get something done. In fact I was on the road with my touring band and I decided to record an album, and we went into the studio and in a nine hour session, knocked out an entire album, and I couldn’t have done that if I didn’t work with that kind of people under that kind of pressure. Because you learn that, if you engage it, you can do anything. It’s just that kind of pressure.
JW: In an interview with I think Pens Eye View, you criticized the music scene for being “political.” Do you feel that your honesty sometimes get in the way of your ambitions sometimes?
AM: [Laughs]. Probably, it probably does. But everybody has to have something that sets them apart, and you know, if I’m sometimes outspoken, or sometimes say things that are perceived as being too honest, there are some people who will be offended by that and some that will have a positive reaction, and you just have to be who you are. On a broader level, I actually respect anybody that gets out there and performs regularly, even if I don’t like the music very much. Because I respect people who care for what they’re doing and are trying really hard. When I talk about politics, it’s… A lot of things happen in music that are based solely on politics and not on what is good art.
JW: The corner office, that kind of thing.
AM: I understand the logic to it. But it saddens me, because it gets to the point where it gets in the way of good music. You know, because you can’t hurt somebody’s feeling by saying “This vocal part isn’t cutting it” or whatever. And that’s a bummer because, everybody benefits if you’re all trying to make the best music you can, and nobody is getting their egos bruised. It doesn’t make me angry so much as it makes me sad.
JW: Who do you blame for a lot of that? The industry itself, the music press, you know, the reviewers?
AM: I think it is human nature. There are certain ways of getting ahead in the world, and talent isn’t the only one. In fact, talent alone isn’t going to get you anywhere. You have to get along with certain people, and you have to fit in with whatever situation you’re in, and taken too far that can become too political. But politics in itself is not a bad thing it’s just the art of getting along with people.
Everybody has to get along in any collaborative situation. I just don’t like it when it trumps a good outcome, when it gets in the way of making good music. But it doesn’t have to, I mean if you have a good working situation and everybody is comfortable with it and have a good way to communicate and have dialogue, then politics is a good thing. It’s all in how you use it.
JW: What’s your opinion of the whole hipster scene? Do you feel it’s overrated?
AM: [Laughs]. It’s like anything else. I think there’s a value in being current in what’s new and what’s good, and if you don’t pay any attention to that, it’s just going to expire you, and if it’s about fitting in…
[Silence]
[Dropped call, number redialed.]
AM: I lost you there.
JW: I lost you too. Where were we, about the hipsters?
AM: I was just saying, if you base what you like on what everybody else likes, it’s kind of silly isn’t it? You can’t really develop your individuality in that context real well. A little hipster is fine, but if it’s preventing evaluating anything on its own merits, I don’t think it is real good.
JW: So you think it’s shallow?
AM: What’s that?
JW: You think the hipster scene is shallow.
AM: Well, for its own sake it’s shallow. I think it’s good to have an aesthetic you like, and I think it’s good to know who you are and where you fit in. That’s fine. But when you start basing your own identity on somebody else’s identity of what’s cool, that’s where you start to lose me. And when you start basically liking a band because everybody is [unintelligible], you really lose me there. I can’t get behind that.
JW: In addition to music, you’re also a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000…
AM: [Laughs]. Yes, that’s true.
JW: Do you have any favorite episodes?
AM: Pod People.
JW: Pod People?
AM: Yes.
JW: What about Manos, the Hands of Fate?
AM: [Laughs]. Manos is just a disgusting movie, it’s really hard to watch even being made fun of. I actually- I’m a defender of the Sci-Fi era of MST3K, which a lot of people don’t really like. But I actually find them to be consistently funnier than the Comedy Central ones, which were really more inspired, but also more inconsistent. Oh, I got another one, Starfighters, with [future Congressman] Bob Dornan in it. That was really, really, really good.
JW: So you’re more of a Mike guy than a Joel guy.
AM: They both have their strengths. I mean, the stuff that happened between the movies was better. I think in the later days, the movies themselves got better, but the in-between skits weren’t as good, that’s how I feel.
JW: So it was like a trade off.
AM: Yeah, yeah. That’s a- they got different strengths. I watched some of the same scenes [unintelligible] and they were really boring before Tom Murphy.
JW: Do you have any favorite quotes?
AM: Oh, “Byte me!” and “You blank I’m bitter!”
JW: [Snickers]. That was nice talking with you. Just one final question: where do you go from here?
AM: I hate to sound so cynical, but cynical is the wrong word—I hate to sound so mercenary. But I am really focused right now on making a living, that and music, and having gotten Go West done and out there, I am going to do a lot more touring on my own, because it’s cheaper and I’ll probably do session work and we have this album we recorded in a day that we recorded a couple of weeks ago that’s coming out next year called Hello, Cleveland. Kind of doing a lot of music stuff and cobble together a living doing this or that and going to go where people want me to go and make a living at it.
JW: Well, wish you the best of luck, Adam.
AM: Look forward to reading the article.
–Interview by John Winn