Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

LANDy – “BFF!”

Actor, director and now musician Adam Goldberg began his musical project LANDy after several years of playing and recording music with his friends Steven Drozd (Flaming Lips) and Aaron Espinoza (Earlimart). His debut record Eros and Omissions combines a unique lyrical sensibility (darkness and despair abound) with some remarkable production work that draws from a good selection of baroque pop and psychedelic rock. It is refreshing to hear someone speak excitedly and passionately about his work, and Goldberg does exactly that in regards to his particular (musical) viewpoint, songwriting process and musical ambitions.

EM: Describe how you came up with the band name “LANDy.”

I can only really say that while I was in Oklahoma recording with Steven Drozd that we began referring to my dog The Sheriff as such. Beyond that I’m afraid it’s a threat to national security. Or at least to ADT.

EM: Have you always played music? When and how did you decide you wanted to record an album?

It began in earnest (I suppose this is how things generally begin, but I like that turn of phrase) as far back as 1993 when I first started writing and recording songs. I just did it because I enjoyed it (insofar as that emotion applies to me), but it was around 2002, around the time I met these guys from the band, The Black Pine, that I felt my songwriting was developing at least to the extent that it felt more like myself or I felt comfortable with it or I could listen to something I recorded a year or two later and still feel it was relevant.

At various points over the last six years I definitely felt like I was either making some kind of a demo or in the case of the sessions with Steven Drozd in Trent Bell’s “proper” studio in Oklahoma perhaps even an album. But since I just continued to record and mix and mix and record—sometimes with The Black Pine at their home studio, sometimes with my MBox and friends, sometimes by myself—without really knowing to what end I basically just ended up accruing this sort of overwhelming mass of material that was recorded in so many contexts with so many people I was at a loss as to what I should make of it… Use some of it? All of it? Use them as references and start over?

In the end I just hauled over all the drives and dumped them on Aaron Espinoza with whom I re-recorded some of the tracks, recorded two new songs, “BFF!” and “Just A Thought” (the latter the only intentional “this is to open the record” type thing), and we began mixing and remixing. We did this over the course of just a few weeks but it’s safe to assume that in that short time I managed to infect Aaron with the manic obsession cum anxiety it took me years to cultivate.

EM: Tell us about particular records or artists you had in mind while working on the album.

There are definitely bands I’ve wanted to be but I’m fairly limited by whatever is sprung from my crudely self-taught musicianship. That said, I’m quite sure lots and lots over the years snuck in there through osmosis. Soundwise sometimes I’d say let’s get that dead drum sound from Plastic Ono, etc., and specifically I can recall that before recording the outro to “I’ll Be Around” I remember specifically referencing the outro to Elliott Smith’s “Everything Reminds Me of Her” (particularly the drum thing, which we ended up perverting in a way that was different enough I think) and ["I Believe in Jack"] is decidedly a response to Lennon’s “God.” And it’s possible that that a contemporaneous obsession with The Divine Comedy influenced the orchestration on “BFF!”.

EM: Describe the working and recording process with Steven Drozd and Aaron Espinoza. What roles did they play in putting together the record?

Oh, I think I addressed it all a bit in [the previous questions], but Aaron is a super-talented musician and engineer. And his understanding of what I was trying to accomplish—in addition to just a clean-up job—on songs like “BFF!” and his ability to translate that with this drum sound and that string sound was uncanny. I can’t wait to record a record from the ground up with him (from the hospital where he alas has been residing since our collaboration). Steven is a joke, it’s just stupid how talented a musician he is. We played all the instruments on the tracks we recorded together but he is able to take fairly simple progressions and elevate them to a totally different level, not to mention his 23-part harmonies are a sight to see and hear. We cut our teeth on my film I Love Your Work. I had written and/or recorded much of the score but he would come in, a day here, a day there, and oftentimes turn these little demos I had made into a full-fledged score in a matter of hours. Fun times.

EM: Your on-screen persona differs markedly from your other creative work. How has working on your art, photography and music differed from making films?

The music, directing, etc., seem to reflect a similar mood; it is the most literal reflection of what I hear, feel and hallucinate. For better or worse it’s who “I am.” The acting reflects what I am capable of reflecting given my limitations and the material I am given. A totally different muscle. Well, more of muscle, period. Wow, someone sounds like a pretentious A-hole!

EM: So much of your record deals with despair and fragility. Why do these themes resonate most for you?

I really really wish I was one of those people who can say I’m going to write a song about Iraq (I tried) or write a movie about this or that but I’m only stricken by a desire to write either when I’m in a very specific mood and/or when I’m playing music or writing themes of a fairly uniform nature [that] seem to perpetually reveal themselves. Some truly objectively awful things took place over the past few years, not the least of which was the death of one of my dearest friends in the world, to whom the album is dedicated, and though there is a song that is inspired by this, I was not nor have I been able to do my feelings or him justice. So I wrote it, “Anniversary,” from his wife’s point of view. Breakups, dog death… So, yes, things happened, occurred, but in general the themes that have always moved me, since I was a kid, were those that dealt with some form of loss, nostalgia, mortality, pettiness, anger, the inability to reconcile the present and the past, dreams from reality, simulucrum, etc… You know, I’m Goth.

EM: Much of the instrumentation on the record is richly layered and lush. Describe the process in which you put together the sounds and lyrics of a song.

When I first started trying to write songs I think I wrote the lyrics like poems, which I used to sort of write, and realized that my musical ability, such as it was and still is in many ways, was not up to the task. Lately it seems either I end up using what started as placeholder lyrics that I sing as I’m writing the song—playing the guitar or piano—into a tape recorder (“I’ll Be a Around” is an example of this) while other times I’ll have a melody that just so happens to concur with a song idea and I’ll write most of the lyrics as I’m working out the song, then maybe finish the lyrics—once the structure is in place—in my journal or something in bed later.

Maybe “BFF!” is a good example (since it’s one of the more recent and I can remember)… I had this one part I kept playing on the piano, the verse part, then this other part, the intro/bridge thing, that seemed like completely different songs to me. In fact I thought’d I’d hold onto the intro thing as a film score (but the problem is you have to write a film first)… but eventually combined them and started singing some kind of nonsense words over them and had about half a song. A few days later something I needed to get off my chest seemed to work lyrically rather nicely with what I had. I demoed it immediately at home, playing nearly everything with one of those orchestras in a box Roland Juno-Ds, and basically it was all worked out so that a year later I could take it to Aaron in the studio and we had a pretty clear game plan. I don’t know how to speak violin but I could play the demo which had some specific violin parts, as well as pads, for the lovely LANDy violinists, Roxanne and Merritt, and then we could extrapolate from there.

I love layering. Not big in the soloing department (by default) so lots of layering.

EM: Tell us about current and future projects, including any upcoming tours across the country.

I’m pretty devoted to LANDy for a while. I put together a band that consists of many of the people who played on the record and we’re just now I think capturing something that is evocative of the record’s feel. None of us are ringers so it’s a process but there is a rough-hewn ambition I think that reflects some of the same that is on record (am I reviewing LANDy?). We played a couple of gigs, booking some local ones around town, trying to get comfortable, etc. I get really anxious doing this stuff live, but I think I need to see it through. World tour, not sure. I’m big in Turkey, I think. No joke. I genuinely like to get to a place where we could globe-trot and feel really comfortable… But I have to address pretty bad flying issues and increasingly impinged nerves which I have only recently discovered might be attributed to a bilateral accessory rib on my cervical spine.

***
Eros and Omissions arrives in stores on June 23. For more info on LANDy, visit http://landytheband.com/.

via Abe Ahn, 10 June 2009 10:24am | |