Intro:
At 27, resident Tennessean Adam McIntyre has lived a lot of Life so far. Two albums into a burgeoning solo career, McIntyre finds himself at a place of self-assessment and exciting possibility. The earnest pop musician shares his thoughts on his new album, Nothing Means Anything, and the whole spectrum of emotions & labors that go into creating one of 2005's most important pop statements.

E.C.: When you began Nothing Means Anything, were you acutely aware of this being the ‘sophomore’ effort – given what that implies (e.g. the need to avoid the slump, the need to establish, to go beyond the debut of 2003’s Rockstars & Superheroes)?

Adam McIntyre: (whistles) Man. It was actually quite the opposite. I began work on it the day after Rockstars came out. Rockstars took so long; something like two or maybe three years, and some songs dated back five years so I realized I’d trapped myself. While I was proud of it to a decent extent, I was also painfully aware that I’d just acquainted the record buyers with something of an anthology of my sketches in learning how to write real songs. As I’ve said before, it was something like being sixteen and having your parents bring out your crayon drawings from when you were seven and showing them to everybody. I felt like “yeah this IS good… for a 22-year-old.” I was 25 and had just gone through a divorce and all these life changes and personal revelations I wrote about on the new record. I grew up. At the same time, I was feeling this overload of creativity so no… I never felt the sophomore thing come up. Rockstars wasn’t really intended to be my first album anyway; it was really something so I could book shows at clubs, THEN do my first record. Everything went to plan except the booking shows part, because I immediately got to work on the new one!

E.C.: I guess as a tag to that previous question, were in a particular mood/mindset when you commenced work for Nothing Means Anything? I ask because obviously the work as a whole conveys a concept/storyline/narrative structure, but sometimes that’s happenstance.

Adam McIntyre: I felt like I had a story to tell for the first time ever, as a songwriter. Going way back to Superhype (my first “serious” band), I’d had an idea to release four EPs and have them season-themed. You know, like record a summer EP during the summer to capture that vibe and release it the following summer… and maybe have references to seasonal things like the corresponding holidays, and do one for each season. Maybe even tell a story on each one… then maybe have the whole thing make up one big story. The year-lag thing seemed like a good idea, since it takes about a year for indie folks to release anything, or maybe I just have consistently bad luck. I was always thinking about crap like that, even though I knew nobody’d buy it. I just wanted to do it. I had big plans for the artwork and everything, and how it would all come together in the end. When I met Jimmy Ether at Headphone Treats and he had an almost identical plan (the Ether Family’s “How To Get Lost” series), I realized that I’d probably found a home for my project. I still didn’t really have anything good to write about at that point, and after Rockstars came out, I suddenly did. Whether I did justice to that story or not is up to the listeners, I suppose. I’m sorry, that was wordy!

E.C.: Obviously you demo your songs – as opposed to hashing them out in the studio – but do you find that there’s a degree of ‘spontaneity’ that presents itself even when you’re setting these songs into their finished state?

Adam McIntyre: Spontaneity was sort of the name of the game. You’ll hear little mistakes here and there all over the record, and that was partially to keep the spontaneous feel of the tracks flowing. It was sometimes all I could do to simply match the immediacy of the demo, but Jimmy Ether did a good job of making sure I wasn’t just phoning it in. “Half Dead” still cracks me up. We felt this strange vibe the whole time like we were in the middle of something we’d remember for the rest of our lives, so I guess there’s your answer. There was no demo for the title track, so that was incredibly nerve-wracking having to sort of feel that one out with someone’s eyes on me. I tend to write and record in total isolation for some reason… I think music should be all about interaction live but when it comes to “creating”, I’m still kinda weird. The demos were my comfort zone and a point of reference, but from now on I think I’ll make the demos a bit more bare-bones. I couldn’t remember what we’d recorded and what we hadn’t, since I’d just done the whole thing once already!

E.C.: Now is a good a time as any to introduce your producer, label president, and friend into the picture: Mr. Jimmy Ether, a.k.a. Ryan Williams of Headphone Treats Records. How exactly did a Tennessean and a Georgian happen to get together?

Adam McIntyre: There are many rest stops along the road from Nashville to Atlanta, so… heh. No, but we knew each other online but there was clearly this aloof “oh yeah, I know what you’re talking about” thing going on that musicians do at first. Us awful, big-headed musicians, anyway… and when we finally met at an album release show in Atlanta, where we were thrown into a makeshift band together we realized that we had more in common than favorite songwriters and albums. I don’t mean that we had an instant connection as musicians on stage – we couldn’t even hear each other – it was more like once the music crap was out of the way we realized that as people we were incredibly similar. He’s a few years older than I am and chances are that if I phone him up with some stupid idea, he’s done it. In the studio it means that we work together seamlessly and without tension because we have such a similar approach. He’s definitely a long lost brother from a different mother. So the personalities and musical similarities compliment each other. I trust him.

E.C.: Jimmy Ether has growing vitae of recording/production credits, as well as his own band The Ether Family Presents. How do his musical sensibilities mesh with your own? Meaning, if you’re going to spend x-number of hours in a studio together, you had better have some deeper aesthetic understandings beyond jokes.

Adam McIntyre: We respect each other. Long before I ever considered working with him, “Ego Trip part one” was my favorite album of the year. Since once you know somebody, you start to separate their achievements from them as a person, I sometimes forget (and subsequently remember) that this is the guy… you know? He’s a monster songwriter, just a monster. When my first marriage was breaking down, “Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” (the album before the “lost” series began) was kind of my … well, that’s sort of what “Your Only Friend” was about. Coming home and popping in this record that makes you feel less alone in what you’re going through; that record was it. So maybe in the back of my mind that leads me to trust him a bit more. But at the same time, he never suggested anything for the album’s production, arranging or performing that seemed strange to me at all… and we did some pretty strange things!

E.C.: How long did the entire recording process take at The Ether Family Lounge? I seem to remember reading that it had been a real Olympic-style dash within a period of a few days. And if so, what was it like to put everything down within such a tight window?

Adam McIntyre: I went down there in the spring of 2004, and that was quite strange to leave my pregnant wife behind to do that, to record “basic tracks”. I wound up doing drums and I think a guide acoustic track for every song in four or five days – that was all we could spare. I know that doesn’t sound too impressive but for a 17-song record’s drum tracks to be recorded by someone who wasn’t playing a lot of drums at the time, it was harrowing. My son was born shortly afterward and Jimmy basically forced me to take six months off, which was disappointing to not continue the mad dash but… I couldn’t have done it any other way. I knew having a baby would change things but obviously he knew much better than I did. Then last fall I went down to Atlanta for a week with the whole family and finished everything. I felt so tired at the end of every day, because we’d go 10 or 12 hours – minimum. But neither of us are very keen on taking breaks in the studio so it was work, work, work and we loved it. I love that studio, too. It’s just kind of chilly down there – my hands kept going numb.

E.C.: You’ve expressed an overriding feeling about Nothing Means Anything in the aftermath, in the press release, which I thought compelling: “I wanted the listener to know what it felt like that beautiful spring when my girlfriend and I left the windows open, the candles burning and there was always a bottle of wine open – love was new again.” That’s a fantastic summation! But now curiosity forces me to ask you what it was like to break every feeling down for each song. See, what struck me upon a recent listening was how you had really analyzed each step of a loving relationship, while coming out of a bleak one perhaps. Awkwardness, elation, uncertainty, some certainty, the I-hope-I’m-not-dreaming-this feeling, and so forth. This was no mean feat as you stay consistent to this ‘mission’ (whereas even Brian Wilson copped out and did a sea shanty on Pet Sounds). What was it like having to go into a studio and sustain and/or evoke or re-evoke/recreate the mood and mindset of these songs? And additionally, what was it like to have to sort of ‘bear your soul’ to a guy behind a mixing board?

Adam McIntyre: At times, nauseating. What the press release doesn’t say is that I had to do some rewrites based on Jimmy’s um… I’m not sure how to put it. Musically, he liked it but he wanted me to stop holding back on the lyrics. So each night for two weeks, I’d sit down with a glass of wine and I’d write… not even lyrics, but just memories. I went back through my journal and found some pretty disturbing discrepancies between what I remembered going on and what I was actually writing down. I don’t think I even mentioned it the day she moved out, just that I wasn’t feeling well. The initial writing process was that I had a chart for each season. I wasn’t really controlling what aspects of the relationships I was writing about, but I was making notes that quotas were being filled and to remember to stay away from certain topics from then on. General themes started to happen, like wishing for things to be like they were. Everybody wants that sometimes but I used to really dwell on it, especially when I didn’t understand how things had gone from being so wonderful to so terrible in just a couple years. Eventually you have to take responsibility for your present and future and stop worrying about reliving the past, and I had to complete that idea on the record. So it wasn’t really a “MUST WRITE SONG ABOUT THIS” sort of writing assignment – the songs came innocently and absentmindedly, but deep down I knew that I was working to complete a larger project and during the rewriting process, I tidied up any loose ends. I breathed a sigh of relief when Jimmy was very happy with my second batch of lyrics. One song got dumped altogether and I simply replaced it with a similar sentiment made up of some ideas that were floating around until I realized that I should probably stop writing “fall” songs. I wrote the lyrics one night as I finished the rewrites, when I was really on top of my game as a lyricist and I could not come up with music that wasn’t absolutely derivative of a band called Swan Dive. Luckily, I can call up a guy that actually co-writes a good deal of the Swan Dive material, Mister Patrick Buchanan. Pat has been an amazing mentor to me and the fact that he was willing to give a shot at writing music to my lyrics had me walking on a cloud for days. I still can’t think about it without kind of freaking out a bit. But what he wrote was so musically perfect and unfortunately just as musically foreign to me that I had to call him up and get a guitar lesson over the phone. So that was my co-write on the record!

E.C.: Fans of your previous work Rockstars & Superheroes are going to discover – to my ears – a sort of ‘reborn’ version of you. Is there anything in this new album that you feels somehow tests or challenges your earlier listeners?

Adam McIntyre: There was definitely a rebirth between the two records, very much so. I needed the new album to reflect that and I hope that almost all of it will be challenging. I don’t really want this to be the record people instantly like after one listen. Or I didn’t need that. What I did need was to sort of stop pussyfooting around the issue – just take the mask off and show people the real me. Or start trying. I didn’t want to do some contrived “this is showcasing a certain side of me” record where you’ve got a country ballad followed by a real rocker and then a gentle acoustic song to show how sensitive and versatile I am. People are not static, two-dimensional characters. I came from this background of being really deep into blues when I was a teenager, and then when I was 20 I discovered The Kinks, and I always liked the classic stuff like Zeppelin and The Beatles… but I also love the Flaming Lips and Wilco… why should I deny any of that? It’s all part of who I am. Originality these days is in how you reinterpret your influences and hopefully when they’re diverse enough, people stop talking about them. I wanted the owners of Rockstars to be jarred from the first verse until the last laugh… pleasantly. I remember being a late teen and picking up someone’s second album skeptically… because I wasn’t sure if I was in the mood for them anymore. From the first song, I had to look at the album cover several times to make sure it was the same guy. He had evolved and has continued to with every album. He’ll lose fans and make new ones, each wave more like-minded than the last. I’d rather be like that guy than someone who gets pigeonholed into doing one thing. If I have done my job at the end of the day, I haven’t put up a false front of who I am and I’ve let people in. It’s important to create something that people can look at and think “wow, ok, I thought I was alone until I saw that.” You can’t do that by sticking to some cookie-cutter genre description. You have to be yourself.

E.C.: Obviously the recognition of a harmonious marriage and the awe-inspiring arrival of your baby son have had an influence on your direction. This might seem like a softball question, but it’s not and I still think the answer is worth hearing for any cynics. There’s an old adage that goes “The enemy of art is the pram in the hall” (Cyril Connolly). What say you?

Adam McIntyre: You know, folks with kids do generally say the same things about life because all the things we whiny “oh my work is so profound” guys bitch about becomes largely unimportant. I remember being enraged about the City Paper at one point, and writing them these hilarious letters to get them to please cancel my subscription. Now I wonder why I bothered! It wasn’t funny; it was a waste of time to even worry about it. That’s kind of my metaphor for what happens to musicians with kids. The BS tolerance goes way down. But for me, production has slowed down just a bit because I can no longer work late at night because being a parent is like having low-grade narcolepsy, I can only concentrate when Paul is taking naps (he takes two a day) and because I can’t get out quite as much. It doesn’t matter to me because I’m still pretty productive, and the job I’m doing to raise a well-adjusted child in a loving environment is far more important than penning some lyrics about how much hot love I’m gonna make to you, woman.

E.C.: Returning to the album, I’m quite taken by the sheer number of songs that have stylistic variances to them. That is, “Fireworks” is quite a jump from something like “Half Dead”. Did you find yourself deliberately going about this or no?

Adam McIntyre: That goes way back to the four EP idea, where I was thinking “what would spring sound like?” The music has to capture a vibe. For fireworks, it was freshly rained-on grass, picking raspberries and enjoying the feeling of being in love while literally watching the fireworks on the 4th of July. That kind of intimacy doesn’t happen to the sound of bashing drums and amps on ten… or eleven. Plus, “Half Dead” is the sound of a fight. Generally, autumn and spring were supposed to be acoustic, while winter and summer were supposed to be heavier. Of course, there are transitions and exceptions, but spring is mostly the woodwinds and acoustic side. Summer has warmer production than winter, which is mostly cold until the em… “rebirth” segment heralded by the intro to “Feel This Way Again”. Golly, that’s pretentious! But true, I’m sorry.

E.C.: For those who haven’t fully explored the album yet, care to give a teaser as to what the title means? I realize that’s kind of a postmodern question there…

Adam McIntyre: It’s certainly meant to be ironic. It’s a bit of a question posed early in the record and then answered at the end that of COURSE there must be meaning in the things that happen to us. I hope so, anyway. What would my therapist want me to say?! Literally, it was that what I was going through didn’t seem to have any effect on my soon-to-be ex. Everything was really shitty and nobody seemed to care or be able to help me. Then I got very sick and in the middle of the illness, I had a few epiphanies and my outlook on life totally changed. From that moment on, a series of amazing things happened and my life completely turned around. Everything that was taken away from me was given back tenfold. That’s the point of the record, anyway – that things do get better when you’re about to lose all hope.

E.C.: You’re apparently getting back on the ‘gig’ horse. In the aftermath of creating such a deeply emotionally-rooted record, do you find it difficult to return to ‘that other world’? I ask because it’s one thing to set a valentine into stone for your wife for all-time, if you will, and another to be conveying that valentine in a live setting.

Adam McIntyre: I think all records are like that, though. Naively! Yeah songs can and probably should mean a lot to their writers. Yes performing them a ton of times can potentially cheapen them. But that’s sort of the gig. If you can’t keep things fresh live, why are you doing them at all? I’m just thankful to finally have two records’ worth (and a little more) of material to choose from to plan out the setlist.

E.C.: What does the post-release of Nothing Means Anything hold for you in the immediate future? Is your mind still dwelling within the world of those songs, or are you already putting some distance between them? (I’m speaking of the Artistic statement itself, not necessarily the feelings conveyed therein.)

Adam McIntyre: When production halts for one project and it comes to fruition, I immediately turn to the next thing. Last time it was to try to redeem myself. Today it’s simply to see who I am now, and how much weirder I’ve gotten, I guess! Plus, these songs are officially about to be two years old. Time flies. So I’m working on an EP that will hopefully be out this fall, come hell or tired old cliché. It will have a DEVO cover on it (dude, I grew up on DEVO and was made fun of mercilessly for it) and an assortment of songs about paradoxes from my life lately. I learned that Heather was pregnant at the precise moment I learned that Elliott Smith was dead. I became a father just in time to lose my own. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out, but I’m going to try to make this EP diverse and enjoyable… and probably more uptempo but I make no guarantees. I hope to make people wonder “um… is this the same guy?” yet again. If I don’t, I’m not reflecting all the changes I’ve been through and should be beaten savagely for it.