Indie Artist, Adam Green

On the surface, Adam Green looks like a normal twenty-four year old guy. Dressed in comfortable clothes, you can often see him lugging a backpack around and writing in a notebook or talking into a recorder. But what’s on his exterior is not what has gotten him such notoriety. It is the words that he writes on those pages, and the words he speaks into that recorder. It is those words that he turns into songs, that set him apart from everyone else. It is true; Adam Green is a true gem.

Born in Bedford New York in 1981, Green was the youngest son of a psychiatrist and a professor at Columbia University. At school, he was the nerdy kid, the math geek. But at home, his passion was music. At age twelve, he began recording some of his own self-written songs onto four-track tapes. These songs told stories of his less-than-stellar childhood. Recording these songs was just the beginning of his journey in the music business.

When he was a teenager, he became interested in the supernatural, especially that of Satanism. He met Ryan Gentles when he was just nineteen-years-old. Gentles was a volunteer minister who took interest in Green’s music, and ultimately took Green under his wing. Gentles asked Geoff Travis, owner of Rough Trade Records, for funding for a satanic boy/girl band. Travis was more than willing to fork out some money, as he had already been having some success with The Strokes.

With the funding from Travis, Gentles teamed Green up with Kimya Dawson, who also had similar musical interests, to make up the Moldy Peaches. Gentles decided to bring in a few other people to the band to add more texture. While Green and Dawson are the main ingredients of the Moldy Peaches, Steven Mertens, Toby Goodshank, Strictly Beats, and Jack Dishel also play their own roles in the band. The Moldy Peaches are a self-proclaimed, anti-folk band, which Green explains as being, “just a community of songwriters that we hang out with. We just call it anti-folk. It’s not like it all sounds the same or anything, it’s just a community. A cultural consciousness.” The first single, “Who’s Got The Crack,” hit the top of the UK indie charts, and they have traveled with such bands as Babyshambles and Tenacious D.

In 2002, Green released a compilation of previously recorded songs on Sanctuary Records. The songs on “Garfield,” as he titled it, were the ones that he recorded onto four-track tapes as a teenager. However, Green creates songs from the current happenings in his life, and those songs had been recorded so long ago that he was not feeling them. He’d lost his enthusiasm for them. So, in 2003, he released his second solo effort, his first proper studio, solo record called “Friends of Mine.” It included the popular song, “Jessica,” a song capturing his true feelings about pop star, Jessica Simpson, with lines such as, “your love life precedes you, your son-in-law feeds you injections of Cortizone.”

His third solo project came only two years later in the form of, “Gemstones,” an album that only took nine days to record. He did not have a lot of money to spend on studio time, so he did it as quickly as he could, and used no overdubs. He did not want it to be too artsy, just “melodic and easy listening.” He also describes it as having, “grotesque imagery,” which fits his “lyrically eclectic” style.

Also released in January of 2005, was a book, a hodgepodge collection of his writings. The book, entitled, “Magazine,” contains poems, journal writings, one-liners, and epigrams, all from Green’s personal collection. This book might be credited to that notebook and recorder that he carries around with him everywhere, as most of the writings in the book came from those very things. The book, published in Germany, is bilingual, and may only be purchased through the German publisher, but has already sold over 10,000 copies.

In 2005, he also began recording his fourth solo album, “Jacket Full of Danger.” He even worked at Starbucks for a short time period while recording in hopes that he would get the inspiration to finish it. And finish it, he did, but not before getting fired from the well-known coffee shop. But in spite of that, the album dropped in April of 2006 exclusively on iTunes. The album is not available in stores. The first single off of the record, “Nat King Cole,” is now being played on Germany’s Total Request Live.

At age twenty-four, this sing/songwriter has no plans of stopping any time soon. He wants to start working on his next project. His goal is to do one record every year. “Anything less is lazy,” he says.