happy thanksgiving

the holiday season is fast approaching. actually, it's here, but i'm still catching up, so i'm a couple days behind. In honor of those holidays, the spirit of giving, and the love of music I'd like to announce my participation in this charitable, musical endeavor.

Flannelgraph records has organized a compilation of exclusive, instrumental holiday music, of which all of the proceeds will be donated to charities chosen by the artists. I have a brand new song on the comp and the charity i'll be donating to is Bloomington's own Stepping Stones.

I've become somewhat familiar with Stepping Stones in my tenure as a Bloomington government employee. Stepping Stones provides temporary transitional housing for young people in my area who are dealing with homelessness. The staff is very enthusiastic and realistic and I believe their work has a lot of potential to make a huge difference in the lives of folks who would otherwise be faced with hopelessness. I'm excited to support their cause, and i really would appreciate your help in raising some dough for them. Check out the song, check out the other charities, and please throw a few bucks at us if you can spare before you head out for Black Friday shopping.

-edit-
my track is #2, "Oak Park Lanes", by the way

collecting dust

In 2005, during some down-time, I recorded an EP's worth of improvised, experimental guitar jams. After sitting on them for a while I released those tunes in a limited edition of 100 3" cd-rs under the name "Mike Adams & His Dust Collectors", the idea being that i didn't really know what to do with such music so it usually ended up lying in a drawer for a rainy day. Up above here is my first attempt at a full-length "Dust Collectors" album. Once again, it's been finished for quite a while, but I'm just now getting around to making them available to all interested parties. No physical version of this music exists, mainly because, once again, i'm kinda stumped and strapped for time in that department.

My main goal with this stuff is to stretch a little bit, artistically. Most of my time with music is spent writing and recording in the "indie-pop" genre and this stuff is just an exercise in what my mind can come up with outside of those (pesky) parameters. I consider working on this more like a sketchbook than a finished piece, but often times i find that the feeling of discovery that goes along with this music is a little more rewarding. Well, maybe not more rewarding, but rewarding in a different way than i'm used to. Like how your mom used to have some big, curly, poofy hair-do the whole time you were a kid, but now she just got it cut into a short, jagged uneven kate-plus-8 kind of thing. it's just as bad, but it's also different and feels like it has some new energy.

One thing i've really wanted to be able to do since i started working on music like this, in this way, was to try to marry this method with my comfortable methods of writing more pop oriented songs. I think the closest i've come to that so far is with "Oscillate Wisely", which is coming out in January.

Hopefully, as i keep looking for inspiration down these kind of improvisational paths, i'll be able to keep it loose while i also steer it gently toward the more rigid songwriting side of things and bring the two modes of discovery together.

Skeletons in the Cloner

Mike Adams, "Skeletons In The Cloner" (acoustic version) 9/26/10 from Flannelgraph Records on Vimeo.

here's a video of me playing live at this year's celebration of Bluesanct's 15th anniversary. (shot by Jared Cheek) This song, Skeletons In The Cloner, will be on a new record called Oscillate Wisely which is being co-released by Flannelgraph / St. Ives Records on January 25. It's a very different version than the one on the record.

Five Man Walk

deep breath

Helium from Torlando Hakes on Vimeo.

earlier this year i had the pleasure of working with my good, and very creative, friend torlando on this short piece. he wrote, directed, and animated the thing (with his partner, william) and i was responsible for the music. i had a real blast coming up with this tune, although we both agreed that it was a bit of a miss, in the end. i mainly blame that on the amount of time we had with everything. all of this was done on an extreme time budget, for the two of them, and for me. i wrote the music based only on my understanding of the plot line and a few stills that torlando sent to me via e-mail. i think we had two meetings to discuss what the music should be like before i really started working. i also did one revision from the original version i submitted before their deadline approached and we were left with what we had. the main shortfall is that i feel like i didn't quite capture the spirit of the images and the story with the music. i let it get a little too dramatic, and it came off feeling a little too sinister. i'm happy with the music overall, i just think it didn't quite get us to our goal when paired with the video. hopefully next time we'll have a little more time to develop things and let them evolve together. also, i'll hopefully be able to consort with my usual collaborators on our next project together, which i think is the best way for me to work in a situation like this. music for visual media requires much more of a balance of emotion than music that stands alone. you aren't required to paint nearly as much of the picture aurally (duh) and i think two heads are definitely better than one for getting there.

Do You Love Me?

another relic from the annals of my childhood mind. i especially love the rack-focus during the steel solo, and the curtsey at the end.

Home Stretch

Two accomplishments of note for me this week. First is that the bulk of the tracking for Bro. Stephen's new record "Baptist Girls" is finished. This record seems to have come in spurts, beginning last Fall in Warsaw, then some tracking done this Spring in Bloomington and now, thanks to the lovely and very talented Cheyenne Mize, finished up in the dog days of Summer. It's been a long time coming, and it will still be quite a while before this record sees the light of day, but believe me it's worth the wait. Next we'll move on to decide where the mixing is going to happen and who's going to do it. I've had a good time working on Scott's songs. They make for a really strong melodic structure to get creative around. And, most of them are short, so there's never any threat of belaboring anything. It's a nice and easy way to work. Loads of fun.



Second accomplishment this week (which actually had very little to with me) is that the mastering for my solo record is complete. This record has been about a year-and-a-half in the making. We did the mastering this week with Eric Day at Sleepwalk Recording here in Bloomington. Adam and Eric really impressed me with the amount of life they breathed into these songs and the amount of TLC they spent mixing and mastering this thing. I couldn't be happier with the results or more grateful for these two bums. Treat your friends nice, they probably deserve it. This record should be coming out relatively soon.

And finally in the sad news (for me) category I'm sorry to say that my good friend Adam Jessup, who engineered the first Bro. Steve session, and entirely mixed Oscillate Wisely, just left Indiana today for the great state of Texas. He's become a great friend of mine over the last 2 1/2 years that we've briefly known each other and I'm heartbroken to see him go. I've relied heavily on him professionally and creatively and he'll be sorely missed. I'm sure we'll work together again, but for now, best of luck to Adam and Stephanie.