In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with singer-songwriter Adam Levine to talk about his new album "Chubby" and what it's like being in a band that's getting a lot of media attention. We talk about how he became self-conscious in front of cameras and how he dealt with the backlash that comes with being a rock and roll star. We also talk about Adam's new music video for the song "Me and My Fish" and why he thinks it's the best song he's ever written. I hope you enjoy this episode, it's a good one! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Music written and produced by Adam Levine. Cover art by Jeff Kaale. Artwork by Matt DesLauriers. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. We are working on transcribing this episode so we can use it as a podcast ad-lib and edit it in the next episode. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you re listening, and we'll make sure to include it in future episodes of the show. Thank you so much for all the amazing work you're listening to this podcast. It really means a lot to us and we really appreciate it. - Thank you for being a lot, Adam and I really appreciate you. XOXO. -- Thank you, Adam, for making this podcast and I appreciate you, Joe Rogans, for being kind and appreciating you, and I'm grateful for your support and support you, I really much more than you're a lot more than that, thank you for letting us know that we can do that. xoxo, Joe Rogan Experience - The JOE Experience Podcast, Adam Rogan, Thank You, Adam Rocha, and the JOE EXPERIENCES, Sarah, and so much more! - EJ & The JOB EXPERIENCE Podcast, and much more. - Thank You for being nice, Joe, Thank you SO MUCH JOE ROGAN Experience, and all the JOB ROGAY! -- THE JOB'S EPISODE, THE JOE'S EXPERY, JOSEPH AND THE PODCAST, AND THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING
00:00:20.000I've been a fan of your work for a long fucking time.
00:00:24.000And it's always weird when you meet someone that you listen to their music or you've seen their stuff and you're like, oh, you're just a normal human being.
00:01:59.000When I'm playing it, nothing bothers me.
00:02:01.000But in front of cameras, I got really self-conscious in front of cameras after Sometime in the middle of our second record, I just noticed that I started to suck on, not to suck on video, but definitely not like that Mr. Jones video.
00:02:13.000You became aware that so many people were watching and criticizing you, or like what was it?
00:02:19.000I think it was that, you know, because at first I just, well, didn't care, and I just thought that there's nowhere in the world I'm more comfortable than here, so I'm fine.
00:02:29.000And then I think on our second album when we got a lot of backlash and you get a little too big and everybody, you annoy the shit out of people.
00:02:35.000Especially in a band because you get a really successful song, they're gonna play it on the radio every five minutes.
00:02:40.000After a while it's like, God, who wouldn't get sick of it, you know?
00:02:43.000And then you get some backlash after that, people say some terrible things.
00:02:47.000And then I started thinking about like, what do I look like on film?
00:02:51.000Then I got really self-conscious, you know?
00:04:13.000Just being compared to a fishmonger's cat.
00:04:15.000The fact that fishmonger is involved at all as a word when they're talking about your concert seems like a bad sign, you know?
00:04:21.000Yeah, there's a thing that happens, right?
00:04:24.000Like when people discover you and they find out about you and you haven't gotten big yet, like especially for bands, I think.
00:04:32.000Where they love the fact that they're the first to tell their friends, you gotta listen to this band, gotta listen to this album, this is awesome.
00:04:41.000But then when you get really big and other people like it, and too many people like it, then you're like, aw man, they were good in the beginning.
00:04:49.000Well, I think that music, unlike almost everything else, It becomes our personal cool, you know?
00:04:57.000I mean, we literally wear it on our shirts.
00:05:01.000We talk about this genre or that genre as being our gang almost.
00:05:05.000And when you're discovering stuff, yeah, it's really cool.
00:05:08.000And then when you have to share it with that guy at the water cooler who likes the fucking worst music.
00:05:13.000You know, that guy who's been coming in for years, and he's just listening to utter shit, and now he loves your band too, and you're like, I don't want to share this with Captain Asshole over there, you know?
00:05:23.000I've never understood that, because why can't people with terrible taste also like great things?
00:05:27.000Like, great things are great no matter what.
00:05:29.000Like, everybody loves The Godfather, right?
00:05:59.000You guys were just getting reviewed by experts.
00:06:04.000You weren't get shit on by the general public yet.
00:06:08.000No, I mean, but that was a good thing for one.
00:06:14.000For me, it had happened when I was kind of already into social media, because I remember moving down to LA after our first album, and that year, while I was writing the second record, discovering that AOL had these message boards.
00:06:29.000This is 95, say, and I realized that AOL had these forums and message boards for all the bands, and it suddenly occurred to me, well, I could just go on there And talk to people.
00:06:39.000Because when I read it, they were worried about, were we ever going to make a second record?
00:07:04.000Kind of community there, you know, way before other social media.
00:07:08.000But it occurred to me because the rest of the time, you can't get to your fans except through, or you couldn't then, except through the radio, the DJs, and the press.
00:07:17.000So, like, you don't really get to give anybody your own words.
00:07:20.000They've got to be filtered through everybody else.
00:07:41.000A classic rock guy driving around in a pickup truck.
00:07:45.000Like going to drive-in movie theaters.
00:07:47.000Because that's this Americana dream vision of like, we all sit around, you know, going to drive-ins and living some dream of a Springsteen song that Springsteen isn't even any part of, you know?
00:07:58.000And I would go on there and I'd be like...
00:08:00.000Have you guys heard the first Justin Timberlake album?
00:09:29.000And then there's always like whatever the publicists have put out and whatever image they're trying to promote for you guys, like whatever.
00:10:40.000I come from a country music background in that a lot of the guys in my band, but it doesn't really mesh much with what is country music now, I don't really think.
00:10:53.000Well, there's a lot of different kinds of country now.
00:10:55.000There's some really good artists that are doing...
00:10:58.000Like Sturgill Simpson type dudes that are doing...
00:14:07.000More like the cellar with Jeff a lot of times.
00:14:12.000I met Bob, I don't know how long ago, right when I first started out because my goddaughter's Her mother was really good friends with Lori Loughlin, so she's my goddaughter's godmother.
00:14:26.000So when I was recording my first album, I met them and so Bob, I knew through her because he was on Full House and they would always come to shows.
00:14:33.000I just stayed friends with him for years and then I met Jeff.
00:14:38.000Bob had me come to the premiere of The Aristocrats, or not the premiere, it was like a screening at the Writers Guild just for all the comedians that were in it.
00:14:47.000It was like me and a couple friends, and then Bob and 50 comedians.
00:14:51.000And Jeff was there, so we met, and he had just made this movie called Patriot Games.
00:17:05.000You kind of want to find something that you can bear to people.
00:17:09.000I mean, B-A-R-E. The more you can open something up and let people in.
00:17:17.000And that's kind of the whole thing, I think, when we're trying to make a record.
00:17:20.000You just kind of want to make a world that people can climb into for a while.
00:17:24.000Feel something you know go from here to there with you and yeah, so I know I always just kind of thought that was You know, but sometimes you know, there's there's hope and joy in there too, but yeah, it's about feeling stuff mostly I think That was always kind of what it seemed like it was about because I think I always had trouble uh Feeling things with other people,
00:17:47.000you know, just in normal life, you know?
00:17:50.000But, uh, and I always liked music, and when I would listen to it, I think that's one of the things I loved about it, was that you could get lost in it, and you could feel all this stuff, and they seemed to be able to communicate stuff to me when I was listening to a record.
00:18:03.000You know, and I was, I just couldn't figure out what to do with music when I was a kid, because, you know, I didn't, I just could sing, so I don't know what that means, high school musicals or something, but where's that going?
00:18:16.000As a kid I could always sing, and I liked singing, but I didn't know what to do with singing.
00:18:21.000When I was a freshman in college, my first term, I wrote a song.
00:18:27.000Within the first month and a half I was at school, there was a I was in chemistry class or something and I started kind of thinking of the song in my head and I wrote it down and was humming it to myself and after class I went back to my dorm because there's a lounge with a piano across the hall from my room and I went there like lock the door and sat there all day trying to figure out humming stuff and trying to figure out what note that was and then See if I could find a chord that worked with that note.
00:18:55.000I kind of knew how to make a major and a minor chord, you know, that's all I knew.
00:21:18.000But that's just like cover songs when you're 13 or 14. No, my first band was still a few years away, but I wrote every day from that point on.
00:21:27.000I just was obsessed with like, because all of a sudden, I had this way where I could, all the stuff I'd been feeling and thinking, and like, you know, I had all this stuff that I felt like inside me, but you know, you're not, I felt kind of plain when I was talking to people.
00:23:27.000Well, I've always felt like a band was probably the hardest thing because not only do you have to figure your shit out, But you have to make sure that the other people in the band figure their shit out, too.
00:23:37.000And you all have to be dedicated and professional and show up on time and be disciplined and be creative and also work together.
00:23:46.000So you have to be cooperative and you have to be understanding and you have to figure out the ego dance and who's putting what and where and who's adding spice to the soup.
00:23:59.000I mean, any kind of cooperative artistic thing like that, that is brutal.
00:24:03.000It is really hard, but there's no way it's the hard...
00:24:05.000I mean, to me it's funny, because to me it's always been comedy, because I have friends who do it, and you watch what it takes to be on stage.
00:24:12.000I am not dependent on anybody in the audience to play a show.
00:24:32.000But man, I watch Jeff sometimes, especially lately, because when him and Dave are doing that thing, it doesn't seem like there's any preparation.
00:24:52.000That's terrifying and dependent in a way, because if you have the success of the moment, it builds to the next moment to the next moment in a way that we don't need.
00:25:02.000But as a comedian, man, it is such a tightrope to walk.
00:25:08.000Dealing with heckler everything that goes into that shit is just like I went to an open mic night last night Yeah, it was wild I hadn't been doing open mic night in a while and it was it was interesting to watch because there was maybe Six or seven audience members and maybe 20 comedians in the audience so they're mostly just kind of practicing talking into a microphone and You know just trying to work it out and you're just seeing You're seeing,
00:25:38.000like, single-celled organisms try to divide and become complicated life forms, and you can see, like, the sort of clunkiness to the idea.
00:25:47.000Because, you know, a lot of the folks that were on stage last night probably had only been on stage a couple of times, or maybe it was their first time, and you could see it, you know?
00:29:40.000We were opening for Cracker, and it was this club, and it was upstairs was the club part of it.
00:29:48.000And the stage is one of those ones that's in the corner, like a triangle, like comes across the corner.
00:29:53.000And there's just, the audience is all out, the rest of the club is lengthwise.
00:29:59.000And the stage is in the corner over here.
00:30:01.000And there's no like, the backstage is near the front door.
00:30:04.000And you gotta like, they just kept like a border around the club of people so you could walk and you have to walk around everybody to get up to the stage.
00:30:11.000So we get up there to open the show, and the monitors are busted.
00:30:15.000The tweeter's blown out on the monitors, so it's just like the whole time.
00:30:21.000You can't hear anything, and I'm trying to sing.
00:30:38.000I mean, later on that night, Cracker got on stage and they were pretty good, but they hated it so much that he stuck his guitar through that monitor after a while because he couldn't hear anything.
00:33:06.000You know, I was a little high from the drugs, but I was okay.
00:33:09.000So I put on like a tux, tails, but I couldn't wear the pants because I had this huge bandage on my knees.
00:33:15.000So I just put some shorts on and nice shoes too.
00:33:18.000And I got a cane and I went to the Friars Club to this thing.
00:33:21.000I wanted to be there to support Jeff, you know.
00:33:23.000So he comes, he's up on the dais, it's like in one of the rooms there, not a stage, but he's up on there talking, thanking some people, and he comes down, he got me a chair, it's just a room full of comics, and he got me a chair so I could sit down near the front,
00:33:39.000everyone else was standing, just because I had surgery.
00:33:42.000And he comes down, I want to thank my friend Adam, who came with me, and we went on this trip a little while ago, and he's just a good friend, and he hands me the mic, and For some reason, instead of just saying, you know, congratulations, Jeff, or whatever, I took the mic out of his hand and I walked up on the stage to,
00:33:58.000like, the podium and put it in the mic thing.
00:34:02.000Because, I don't know, some part of me thought, I'm at the Friars Club and I should make a speech for Jeff's thing.
00:34:08.000But by the time I got up there and put the mic in, I realized, what am I doing here?
00:34:14.000I'm like, I don't know what the fuck to do.
00:34:17.000I just, like, sort of looked at them and I said...
00:34:22.000So I peed on my girlfriend earlier today.
00:34:25.000Because it had happened, you know, like when they finished the surgery, they gave me this epidural, and I'm your whole lower half of your body, so I don't know what's going on.
00:34:37.000I'd come out of it and my girlfriend was like, how are you?
00:35:08.000I felt weird and like a weird warmth and I asked her if there was something on there and she's like, yeah, you're peeing yourself probably.
00:35:15.000And she goes, because you're pissing on me right now.
00:35:17.000And I was like, so I'm standing there in the Friars Club and I just said, so I peed on my girlfriend earlier today and the place just breaks up and I was just, I guess that's one more thing she's got in common with my mom.
00:36:38.000Yeah, because I've been there with friends of mine who are comics, and I've bantered with them, played piano, like, in that little keyboard, you know, in the cellar, with Jeff and with Bob sometimes, just done that shit with them, and, uh...
00:36:49.000It's always terrifying, but that one moment, I wasn't even with them.
00:36:53.000I just did it, and it was the greatest thing.
00:36:56.000To this day, I don't know if there's a performing moment that I feel prouder of than that one, even though it was completely accidental.
00:37:04.000Because it was so terrifying and unsupported.
00:37:53.000Every time Jeff wants me to go play with him and do that sort of stuff, first of all, because I can't play piano very well, so I end up just picking four chords and playing them in a circle.
00:38:00.000It's not like Mayer's up there with him who can actually play, you know?
00:40:39.000And then he would come on the road with us for a while and we would like...
00:40:43.000Trained with the whole band in the mornings usually, and then he and I, after soundcheck, we would do like 10 rounds, you know, wherever we were at the gig, and just exercise in the afternoon.
00:40:53.000So we'd do it for a while, but like early on when we were doing this, you know, he was doing some stuff where like, I was just working defensive stuff, and he threw like a low hook at me, and I did this thing, you know, I blocked it with my arm, and he's like, what was that?
00:41:07.000And I was like, I don't know, it's a...
00:41:31.000He goes, I think that's a Taekwondo block, but that's, you know, like, I think it works in Taekwondo because of the nature of the rules, but, like, you don't want to do that boxing.
00:43:23.000It also happens when people get hit in the legs a lot and they get in pain.
00:43:26.000Like when a low kick starts coming, they try to stop it with their arm just because it hurts so much, and then someone sets them up and pretends to throw a low kick.
00:43:34.000There's a thing called a question mark kick.
00:46:27.000He choked out Chael Sonnen in the fifth round of a fight where he was losing.
00:46:31.000He was getting the shit kicked out of him in that fight.
00:46:33.000Well, he went into that fight, apparently, legend has it, with a broken rib.
00:46:38.000He had a fucked up rib going into that fight, so he couldn't really move properly, couldn't defend against takedowns, but still figured out a way to win.
00:46:45.000Boy, Chael Sonnen was just pounding him, and he finally, it looked like he was done.
00:46:50.000He had him on the ground, he was on top of him, and all of a sudden his legs just went...
00:46:55.000Yeah, well, Chell was a beast, but Anderson figured it out.
00:47:00.000I mean, that's a guy like him who could do everything.
00:47:03.000He can strike, he can submit you, and because he has all these skills, like, even when he's losing, he still could pull it out of his ass out of nowhere.
00:50:31.000He's like one guy that when I met him, I was so excited he knew who I was.
00:50:37.000I met him at one of his World Karate Championship tournaments, his World Kick-Bot, I forget, World Combat League, that's what it was called.
00:54:02.000Like, I used to take my godson to school when I was still making my first album, so I hadn't even made it yet.
00:54:07.000I had met Bruce because we played this Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing, and his son went to the same school.
00:54:11.000They were kids, you know, young kids, eight-something then, four, maybe younger, and so I would see him every day at school, and he would always come up and talk to me and say hi, and I just couldn't make sentences, couldn't think of anything to say.
00:54:55.000If Bruce Springsteen could be himself and Obama could be himself, and you could just put a camera on it and just let them shoot the shit, I think it'd be amazing.
00:55:09.000But I can't imagine that if they're doing something and they're recording it, that they're not acutely aware of how many people are paying attention.
00:55:19.000And acutely aware of, like, getting the right message across and saying things...
00:55:26.000Like, part of podcasting is being irresponsible.
00:55:29.000Like, you're just talking shit, you know, and you don't even exactly know what you're going to say.
00:55:35.000Like, right now, I have no idea what the next word out of my mouth is.
00:55:49.000But if you're a president, I mean, you're a distinguished statesman, one of the greatest presidents we've ever had, and one of the most historically important presidents we've ever had, first African-American president we've ever had, and one of the all-time greatest speakers ever,
00:56:07.000And then you're hanging out with Bruce Springsteen, who's also this, like, Incredibly well-spoken, brilliant songwriter, iconic American musician, hero.
00:56:19.000And the two of them together, there's so much, the weight of the eyes upon them is so heavy, I would imagine it would be very difficult to just shoot the shit.
00:56:28.000But if you could get them, like a little buzzed, Just a couple of shots of tequila.
00:58:12.000A couple songs people would know, but basically we just picked all songs by friends of ours that were really good songs, but the shit no one knew.
00:58:19.000And then we have a festival called Underwater Sunshine, too, where we just do, like, it's independent artists.
00:58:23.000It's totally free for a couple days in New York, usually.
00:59:35.000It's the amazing thing about what Jeff's done in the last decade or so, is making this thing not personal, to turn the roasting into something that's back like what it used to be when we watched Dean Martin when we were kids.
00:59:49.000It's funny, it's insulting, it's not about getting the world to think you're a piece of shit.
00:59:54.000It's about, I'm making up a joke about how you're a piece of shit right now.
00:59:57.000And he's done it without anybody really Somehow he just makes it work without causing a huge uproar.
01:00:27.000Like if someone shits on your clothes or shits on your face or shits on your head or shits on whatever it is, it's like we're all laughing along with it.
01:00:36.000It's like it's an honor to get roasted by Jeff Ross or any really good roaster.
01:02:26.000Bunch of days in a row at least one like a hundred people come up to me a day But one of them was like hey, are you that guy from County Coors?
01:02:36.000I mean because you suck and there's so many good bands in the Bay Area It's wild that a band as shitty as you would be so successful to your face.
01:02:43.000Yeah, I was just like It happened like four or five days in a row I mean it was dwarfed by the amount of people that were coming up just loving the band but still it was like it started to feel like If there's going to be one of these every day, is one of them going to have a gun?
01:04:37.000She rented me this old, like, she had this fucking place.
01:04:40.000It was like a little cottage in Laurel Canyon.
01:04:43.000And it turned out it was built by the cowboy star, Tom Mix, in the 20s.
01:04:48.000And then it was David Niven's, like, in-town fuckpad.
01:04:51.000And he named it Rogues Retreat when there was a little sign up there after this TV show he was on called The Rogues in, like, the 60s.
01:04:57.000And then, I don't know, I I don't know what it was after that, but she owned it, and I stayed there.
01:05:02.000I wrote most of our second record in that place before I bought a place.
01:05:05.000But yeah, man, the Viper Room, for a couple years there, I bartended all the time because it was just less crowded on that side of the bar.
01:05:13.000My friends all worked there, so I would be there anyways hanging out with them.
01:05:16.000So you bartended while you were a rock star?
01:05:23.000Because when I was back there and I'd be hanging out with Shannon, smoking a cigarette, drinking beers behind the bar, you know, in the downstairs bar there, the little one.
01:05:30.000And I don't know, at one point, I'd help her out with stuff.
01:05:33.000And at one point, she's like, I go to the bathroom, there's nobody else.
01:05:35.000Will you just, you know, mind the bar?
01:06:06.000It's kind of a cool way to interact with people, too, because there is a barrier, and it is less crowded over there, and it's probably kind of fun.
01:06:12.000Yeah, and you talk to them if you want to.
01:06:15.000If you don't want to, you've got to get a beer for someone else.
01:06:25.000The Left Bank would have been like in Paris in the 20s.
01:06:27.000I mean, it was like Allen Ginsberg coming in and William Burroughs, the Hughes Brothers, all these different filmmakers, you know, musicians, Tom Petty.
01:09:07.000It's a culture of more art and a lot of really intelligent people.
01:09:13.000I lived there when I was a kid from age 7 to 11. And I remember thinking, it was like a very good place to be at the time.
01:09:21.000It was a very fortunate place to be at that age of my life, because I was around a lot of eclectic people, a lot of interesting, weird people.
01:09:30.000You know, we lived in the center of it all.
01:09:33.000We were right down the street from Lombard Street.
01:09:35.000So it was like, yeah, and it was during the Vietnam War, you know, so it was like, It was all weirdos and hippies, and my stepfather was a hippie, so it all fit in.
01:09:45.000And then we moved from there to Florida afterwards, and the contrast was so stark that it made me go, wow, I was really lucky to live there.
01:10:28.000They'd be more into going to an antique store or something.
01:10:30.000And that's a thing that I... The thing that I came to not like about LA after a number of years was their worship of fame, being famous just for being famous.
01:10:43.000And their sort of circular worship of fame.
01:10:45.000But what I loved about it was that that all really exists and it's annoying as fuck.
01:10:50.000But it exists around a bunch of people who are out there doing stuff too.
01:13:00.000You know, it's like 1970. This is about five to ten years ago.
01:13:04.000And I managed to, like, I remembered the street names and where they were on the streets from when I was six, seven, eight years old, you know.
01:13:11.000I found both houses, which was fucking freaky.
01:14:04.000Randomly, like a year or two later, I'm doing a gig at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, and I'm eating with one of my high school buddies at a restaurant, and this lady comes up to me and she goes, I live in the house where you grew up.
01:14:39.000Pieced together that weird, blurry slideshow of a memory, and then you see the actual place vividly, and everything looks so much smaller than you remember.
01:15:32.000I remember being big enough that I had to climb down onto a mailbox and then jump down to the street.
01:15:36.000But it's not a lot bigger than a mailbox.
01:15:38.000So I'm not sure why that would have worked.
01:15:41.000But, you know, it's like I was six, you know, and I was a small kid.
01:15:45.000So it was weird finding that because everything changes, you know.
01:15:50.000The thing we were talking about when we were talking about going to LA and the showbiz culture and the culture of fame and all that stuff is there.
01:15:58.000I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine about LA. The real thing that gets tainted is not necessarily the people that just happen to be famous, the artists that are doing things.
01:17:11.000And then they want to meet people who are famous and then become friends with those people so they can get and hang out with famous people.
01:17:25.000There's a shallowness to it, but yet some of the most interesting, creative, and deep people live amongst that shallowness.
01:17:34.000So you have all these really intense artists that are surrounded by all these very strange people that are trying to figure out how they can get on the cover of Rolling Stone.
01:17:47.000But it's interesting because what you were talking about, it was one of the things that turned me off when I finally left because You're right.
01:17:55.000Everybody, even people who do impressive things and are successful, only want to talk to you in conversation about the movie producer they had a meeting with last week.
01:18:04.000You can be a very successful lawyer in finance.
01:18:08.000You can be doing something very impressive in another field, and they aren't going to talk to you about being a doctor.
01:18:14.000They just want to talk to you about the meeting they had for a pitch idea.
01:18:17.000But I do think there's a flip side to that, too, that I did find kind of magical about being there, which is that So much of culture is about, I was born here, I grew up here, around all these same people, and we're all gonna do this thing here,
01:18:35.000And there's a certain amount to which LA is about, like, it's a bunch of people who all decided they didn't want to do what everyone else in their high school did.
01:18:44.000Whether it's to be a poet or a sculptor or a painter or a musician or an actor or a model.
01:18:52.000But it's still like, I don't want to stay here and just do this thing.
01:19:15.000I felt like I had that in common with all those people.
01:19:17.000But then there's a side of it you're talking about where, A, you lose what you came there for originally and it just becomes about chasing fame and success as opposed to doing anything for it.
01:19:29.000And that got really annoying right after the millennium when the A lot of the reality TV stuff started to become bigger and bigger.
01:20:31.000But we became friends, this is like 1980, 87, 88, something like that.
01:20:36.000And so we've been friends ever since then.
01:20:38.000So I would go in New York and I would visit her and her boyfriend and we'd go see plays all the time and I thought, I was really liking life in New York.
01:20:46.000And me and Billy Crudup, who was then her boyfriend, We went to see this play called Private Lives.
01:20:53.000It's a Noel Coward play, and it starred Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan.
01:20:57.000And after the play, Billy took me backstage, and we ended up going out that night with Alan, having some drinks, and hanging out for the rest of the evening with Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan.
01:21:09.000The whole experience, and I felt, it felt, I don't know, a lot more grown up, kind of.
01:21:16.000I don't know, I just felt like I'd been having conversations with people from the real world, and now I was having a conversation with Alan Rickman and Lindsey Duncan, and I really liked it, and I thought,
01:21:31.000I think I gotta get out of LA. I think I would like to have these conversations more.
01:21:38.000I realized how much I liked going to the theater, just because it was closer to what I do, going on stage and doing it live every night.
01:21:49.000I wanted to get the hell out of LA. And I had really appreciated it up until about the millennium.
01:21:55.000I had appreciated all the people that were creative and how much variety of it there was.
01:22:03.000But something happened after the millennium where I just got really burnt out on it.
01:22:08.000I think you nailed it with the comment about the reality shows, because that clearly changed the culture of the city, because now people realize you didn't really have to be talented.
01:22:43.000It's not about someone who's just trying to create great music or someone who's trying to make good movies or whatever it is you're trying to do.
01:22:49.000It's now become a culture of attention and fame.
01:24:00.000Well, you aren't wrong that, like, the way in early 2000s kids would flock to the front of MTV to maybe get a glimpse at some music video star.
01:24:10.000They're standing out in front of Saddle Ranch, not going there.
01:24:12.000They're just, like, taking their phones to take pictures with them.
01:24:15.000That's the weirdest thing to me, because I remember that at TRL. You know, all that crowd in front of TRL on Broadway.
01:24:51.000But the very first time we were on TRL, everyone was really nice, but I felt weird and old and out of place and like over the hill already.
01:25:00.000And I don't think it existed for our first couple albums, but it was sometime around the third that I was like...
01:25:15.000When you first made it, what was it like to go from just being a guy in a band to all of a sudden, holy shit, it's the guy from Counting Crows.
01:25:31.000That was fucking weird for me because I was really shy, you know, and I had, you know, I have dissociative disorder, which is not dissociative identity disorder.
01:25:42.000Well, dissociative disorder is like, it's that you don't quite, it's hard to describe it, you don't quite connect with the world and you feel a little bit like you're at the back of your head watching things as they happen.
01:26:45.000Did you feel like fame exacerbated your issues?
01:26:48.000Well, yeah, because I was very anxious and very shy and all of a sudden and very awkward in company with people and then all of a sudden everyone in the world is coming up to me and it felt like It felt like claustrophobic, like the world is just pressing on you all the time.
01:27:05.000You know, I remember when we got offered the cover of Rolling Stone and I told my manager I wanted to think about it.
01:27:11.000You know for a day because you know and of course you're never gonna say no to the cover of Rolling Stone It is if you want to have a career and you get off the cover of Rolling Stone You should fucking do it because that's that's a career maker right there You know, but I also I mean it's not like this nowadays because there are no newsstands really or very few but remember like Having your picture on the cover of a magazine like that meant that you were like omnipresent You're everywhere on every street corner everyone your face was everywhere so like any sort of anonymity is is gone I mean,
01:28:49.000He said, well, he's been out in the lobby for the last hour on the payphone calling everyone he knows, I guess, because he's been on the phone the whole time.
01:30:24.000But because the only formulation that worked for me, weirdly enough, was the chewable one, which comes in, like, two milligram package of pills, I had to take the chewable kind.
01:30:34.000Because sometimes the formulations are different, you know, in the different kinds of ways they package up drugs.
01:30:38.000And so something in the other version didn't work for me, so I had to keep taking the chewable one.
01:30:42.000So at one point, I was taking, like...
01:30:54.000All the liquid in your mouth just gets sucked out, and it becomes this paste.
01:30:58.000You're trying to chew these fucking pills.
01:31:00.000That's sort of the slightly sweet orange flavor of chewable pills.
01:31:06.000She reminded me of this morning, and I just thought, oh my God, I forgot all about that.
01:31:12.000Every morning, taking like 25 of these pills and chewing them up and just the fucking paste in my mouth for just this horrible, on top of everything else that's going on, you have this experience every morning, this trauma-inducing paste-in-your-mouth experience.
01:31:28.000I called it happy paste, but it was just so fucking gross on top of everything else.
01:31:34.000And you must have had to have cases of that stuff if you're eating so much every morning.
01:32:02.000The way, you know, there can be slight differences between generic versions and regular versions of drugs, where, like, just the formulation's a little different.
01:34:47.000The fame, the pressure, the criticism, the craziness?
01:34:50.000But maybe that's why Stage Fright wasn't an issue by the time it came around, because I had been through other stuff.
01:34:55.000Like, I mean, in my first band, as an adult, you know, so I was like 25, 26 maybe, for the first three gigs, I woke up each morning, I remember this, like, our first one was at a street fair in Berkeley, the Solano Stroll,
01:35:10.000second one was at a club called The Omni, and the third one was at a club called The Hill.
01:35:41.000Someone suggested that ginger is really good when you lose your voice because that just burns the shit out of your vocal cords and clears anything off them.
01:35:47.000So I got those big ginger roots, you know, and I'd take it on stage with a knife.
01:35:51.000And I would shave the fucking skin off the ginger root.
01:35:55.000Cut off a little piece, like a stick of gum sized piece, put it in your mouth and chew, swallow the ginger juice that comes out of it, which burns your vocal cords clean of anything.
01:36:06.000It works for about a minute or two, and then you've got to swallow some more or you don't want to swallow that root, so you've got to throw that and shave a new piece.
01:36:13.000Did you tell the audience what was going on?
01:36:46.000We're just going to send some crazy vibes down to those vocal cords and paralyze the fuck out of them.
01:36:51.000Little do they know, but it's not that we're not gonna have to do this.
01:36:54.000It's that we're now gonna send him on stage with a knife and some ginger root.
01:37:00.000He's gonna be singing all the songs and I'm already like an idiot.
01:37:03.000I'm so nervous about not playing piano and singing.
01:37:05.000I'm standing up in front of everybody because I came to rehearsal one day.
01:37:09.000I was the piano player and singer in my band, you know, and I came to rehearsal one day and there's this other guy there and he's playing piano and he's really, really good.
01:39:33.000Any new melody, anything I wanted to sing, any feeling I wanted to put into it, it was all art.
01:39:40.000It was all creativity, and there's nothing wrong about any of it.
01:39:43.000I mean, you don't want to sing off-key all day long, but basically, you could just express yourself, and that was all By doing it, that's what you're there for.
01:39:53.000You're there to express yourself anyway, so anything you do is just a part of that.
01:40:02.000Whatever I did was the right thing to do, because that's what we were doing anyways.
01:40:05.000By doing it, I make it the right thing to do.
01:40:07.000So is it safe to say that the anxiety and the mental issues and all that stuff, it almost became tolerable because the art was so satisfying?
01:40:21.000I think it made it a lot better, especially finding songs.
01:40:25.000Finding the whole idea of songwriting, for one thing, gave me a place to put all that stuff.
01:40:30.000That didn't fix the rest of the day, but I'd never had any place to put it before I wrote a song.
01:40:42.000It's not that—it doesn't process it and get it all out of you.
01:40:45.000But if you have to choose between a day where you just feel shitty and a day where you feel shitty but you write a song, take the song.
01:40:52.000You accomplish something that day, and that's what we're supposed to be— You know, life is supposed to be about accomplishing things, making things, doing things, so take the day where you do something, and then, you know what, try and do it again tomorrow, because it is better.
01:41:25.000It means that while you were going through all that shit, you didn't just put your head in your hands and lay there.
01:41:31.000You went ahead and made something, and you can take that with you for the rest of your days.
01:41:35.000That song goes along with you, the sense of accomplishment, all the feelings of like...
01:41:41.000Because I think that's the hardest thing about mental illness, is you know it's not what everybody's going through, you know it's harder than it needs to be, and there are people who are going through stuff, I mean, as I know now, they have their own difficulties, but it just seemed like it was harder, and there are times where you just want to go, I don't want to carry this today,
01:42:03.000Is that also exacerbated by a heavy tour schedule?
01:42:06.000I would imagine there's days that you just need to slow down and take breaks.
01:42:12.000And when you're out there, bang, bang, bang, show after show after show, I would imagine there's very little of that time where you get to sit by yourself in a movie theater and just chill.
01:42:22.000Well, you know, like in anything in the arts, there's a lot of sitting around.
01:42:25.000You know, there's always going to be time, you know...
01:42:31.000There's something to that, right, where if you have a bunch of shows in a row, like even if you have the whole day off, that show is looming.
01:42:49.000I even have a set list, you know, so I know a path through the next two hours.
01:42:53.000That wasn't the problem, except, you know, I wasn't—my voice is kind of weird.
01:42:57.000It can do a lot of great shit, but it's not particularly durable, and I sing really hard.
01:43:02.000So it was not the best at recovering, and early on a big part of it was learning— There are limitations to how many days in a row I can do without paying for it.
01:43:12.000Even if you just do one three in a row for me, I'll be paying for it and recovering from it for the rest of the tour.
01:43:53.000That's why when I scraped my knee up that one time on tour, it eventually got really infected.
01:43:59.000And also why it stayed infected, because they'd give me all the antibiotics for it, and the antibiotics kick the shit out of the infection, but you also have that prednisone in there, which keeps bringing it back and keeping it alive so it would come back over.
01:44:35.000That's why things like ibuprofen are called non-steroidal anti-inflammatories.
01:44:39.000Right, but the way that steroids work and why they work so much better, I think, than Advil is because they create cell growth that goes faster, which is why if you have a virus...
01:44:51.000Steroid side effects may increase the risk of staph infections.
01:44:55.000New research suggests that long-term use of powerful immune systems suppressing steroids such as prednisone, hydrocortisone, and dexamethasone may increase risk of life-threatening staph blood infections by a factor of six.
01:45:33.000I mean, it's a great drug for fixing your vocal cords.
01:45:36.000Do they have to give you IV antibiotics for your knee?
01:45:39.000Little bits, like, not IV, but they give you a shot of it, and then they give you the antibiotics to take home with you, because my knee turned into a fucking balloon.
01:46:56.000The biggest people who are still at risk for getting COVID after being vaccinated are people who had autoimmune disorders or are on medications for things like that.
01:47:20.000When you hear about people that are taking different medications to deal with anxiety or depression, the frustrating thing for many of my friends that have been on these kind of medications is trying to find the right one and trying to get it dialed in.
01:47:33.000And then dealing with all the stuff that's happening while you're trying to dial it in.
01:47:39.000A lot of side effects for that medication.
01:47:41.000Well, a lot of them were medications that weren't, you know, we don't really know.
01:47:45.000That's the other thing that's kind of, it can really kill your Your hope when you're dealing with mental illness is that we don't understand how it works the way we understand how other parts of the body work.
01:47:56.000We don't understand the brain and a lot of these medications they realize they work for mental things because they were medications for something else and then it just happened to have this effect so it's good but it has a bunch of side effects.
01:48:08.000It was originally designed for something else.
01:48:10.000We don't know exactly how to tune it in.
01:48:12.000I mean just the fact that like People who are ADD and really hyper, you give them speed, basically, and it makes them calm down.
01:48:38.000You know, those drugs, because your brain, we just don't understand the brain that well lately.
01:48:42.000Did you ever try meditating or like breathing exercises or exercise?
01:48:49.000Did you ever try any of those things to deal with?
01:48:51.000Yeah, I think exercise is really good.
01:48:54.000The breathing also obviously really helped.
01:48:56.000Meditation, I had a lot of problems with because I felt like It almost felt like I was relaxing all the barriers and structures I had in there to keep this shit under control.
01:49:07.000Everything that I had to hold it together, when I would relax into the meditation, it felt like it was like...
01:49:14.000I don't know if it's actually what it does or just a way I was conceiving of it.
01:49:20.000In my mind, I was picturing like I was letting stuff loose.
01:49:22.000It's so crazy how many really creative people struggle with mental illness.
01:49:30.000I imagine it has something to do with you spend a lot of years keeping things to yourself, not communicating with other people as well as other people do.
01:51:28.000So you've got directors, executive producers, you've got camera directors, you've got people who are sound guys, you've got all these people.
01:51:36.000You have people that are assistants, you have people that are PAs, you have people that are on the set that are They're interns, so they're getting college credits to be on the set, and they're taking notes and talking shit, and then occasionally there's problems, because some PA said something stupid to an intern,
01:51:55.000and now you have to have HR. You have HR? You have human resources at your podcast?
01:52:07.000Like, you used to have just a conversation, where it was you and your buddy, and there was some fucking YouTube video, and you had a couple of cameras running.
01:52:14.000And now, because it became successful, you changed what the whole thing is, and now you've got people breathing down your neck, and you've got a bunch of people telling you what to do.
01:52:24.000I've been doing this thing, you know, I got, you know, about a month into the quarantine, I started, I went to my girlfriend and I said, I'm really worried that I'll just wake up a year from now and I won't have done anything.
01:52:36.000I'm going to start, I'm going to learn to cook everything.
01:52:37.000You know, so I just started like, I've always liked cooking, but I started really, Researching it and trying to make all kinds of shit for her and for our few friends that we were seeing.
01:52:47.000And then it seemed kind of cool after a while to be doing this, so I started making little videos and just putting them up on our Instagram stories.
01:52:53.000And now I'm sort of filming them myself.
01:53:34.000But I've been really trying, you know?
01:53:36.000And then I've been trying to show people how to cook stuff that, you know, some of it's as simple as just, look, maybe you don't know how to make grilled cheese.
01:54:09.000And then, you know, I talked to my manager, Mark, and a bunch of people came to him and said, we want to put together a show for Adam, like a cooking show.
01:54:17.000And my thought was like, look, I really like what I'm doing.
01:56:51.000I don't love going on TV shows, and I don't know that I love having a TV show.
01:56:55.000That's a whole different thing from cooking, having a TV show.
01:56:58.000Then you've got some greasy producer that's like, Adam, we're going to do this again, but this time, you know, I'm not feeling you're having a good time.
01:57:22.000Well, I'm going to have a little more fame.
01:57:23.000If this record does really well, it'd be great.
01:57:25.000It's like a band where it could be magic or it could be fucking hell.
01:57:29.000It could be the lead singer and the guitar player hate each other and they only do the gig and then they talk shit about each other afterwards.
01:57:34.000Or it could be like a brotherhood where they love each other and it's great.
01:57:45.000And you can get really unlucky, and sometimes some really successful shows are really unlucky collaborations, where the people are good at what they do, but the stress of working with these cocksuckers, they fucking hate the other people.
01:57:58.000And I know people that work on television shows, and they'll have a drink afterwards and go, fuck man, my executive producer is such a twat, I can't handle this dude, all he wants to do is blah blah blah blah blah, and you're like, oh, I thought you were on TV, I thought everything was great.
01:59:23.000You're dealing with so many different people and so many different issues, and to do something creative, it's so hard to do it with a lot of other people's input.
01:59:31.000Yeah, and that's the nice thing about our creative thing.
01:59:33.000It's me and six of my best friends and a producer, and it's all there.
01:59:38.000It's not like, I mean, I've worked on movie stuff.
01:59:41.000It's like a lot of levels of people and a lot more money, and it's a huge hassle, the executive levels.
01:59:47.000Like you're saying, that is the biggest problem.
01:59:49.000It's like all these people who have to justify their job.
01:59:59.000And sometimes it gets in the way of creativity because they're like, the way you're doing it, I just don't think this is the best way for our image and our brand.
02:00:55.000We had a lot of songs, you know, and...
02:00:58.000So when it got out, when we finally got a manager and a lawyer and that got out and the rec companies got these demos, it was like they came to see us.
02:01:06.000There were two weekends in like 91 or 92, January of 92 maybe, where we played these shows on two consecutive weekends.
02:01:13.000And between the two weekends, every rec company in the world came to see us play.
02:01:17.000The only people that didn't offer us deals were like people in the same company.
02:01:20.000So like, you know, Columbia and Epic were both part of Sony.
02:04:01.000The problem with Porsche, they have a real situation where their 911 is essentially a poor design in comparison to the Boxster.
02:04:11.000The Boxster and the Cayman are a better design in terms of weight distribution because it's a mid-engine car where the engine is right behind the driver and then the axle is behind the engine.
02:04:22.000So the balance of weight is beautiful.
02:06:38.000I guess in a way, when I look at it overall, I shouldn't be surprised because if there's one thing that we've never really valued as a culture, I mean, humanity has never really valued the arts.
02:06:51.000We understand that a painting is going to be worth $7 million or something.
02:06:54.000But in general, it's just like something we want to be entertained with.
02:06:58.000We'll spend money on new tires or a VCR, but if we can get away with it, we don't want to spend money on records.
02:07:07.000That's the kind of thing where if we could get away with taking it, we would.
02:07:12.000Partially, this is the fault of the record companies at the time.
02:07:17.000If you're going to tell me that a record is worth a certain amount of money, and then you're going to tell me that a CD is worth the same amount of money, and I'm going to take both of those home with me, and now you're going to tell me that a group of ones and zeros that equals that CD Is worth the same amount of money as the CD,
02:07:35.000When they went to putting out digital music, and iTunes came around and let them sell it on the store there, you know, it should have been $5 for a record, not $15.
02:07:45.000But they didn't want to cripple the physical record sales.
02:08:11.000We don't have to build physical, which is true.
02:08:14.000The hardest thing about being an independent record company, because I had a couple independent record companies, was...
02:08:20.000Pressing up the CDs and then getting trucks to take them to mom-and-pop CD stores where you'd get three in there and if you were lucky enough to have the guys who own the store love you they'd play it in the store and then someone would buy them but then they're gone because they only had three and you got to get more out there because now they don't have it at all that was distribution was the hardest thing and that's gone with all sudden you just got to load it up it's easy They should have made it a $5 thing and been like,
02:08:45.000okay, now you're getting something that has no body to it.
02:08:48.000We're not going to make you pay $15 for that.
02:08:51.000And they should have done that and they didn't because they panicked.
02:08:55.000And so after a while, people felt a little insulted by being told that now they should buy the same thing that they used to take home with them.
02:09:03.000They should buy it for the same amount of money now that it doesn't exist at all.
02:09:07.000And so when Napster came around and everyone could suddenly just steal it, I think they were like, well, fuck these guys.
02:09:13.000And I don't think they were saying fuck you to the artists, really.
02:09:15.000I think they were mostly saying fuck you to the record companies.
02:09:18.000But when the artists protested, they said fuck you to the artists, too.
02:09:21.000That's the part that really bothered me about Napster.
02:09:23.000Not that they were taking the stuff, but that when someone like Lars Ulrich from Metallica came out and stood up and said what everybody already knew was true.
02:09:37.000Yeah, but see, the thing is, the comparison between that and a VCR and tires is not valid, because you can't just duplicate a VCR and tires instantaneously on a computer.
02:09:50.000But you could duplicate these recordings.
02:09:54.000Once they were in digital form, you could just duplicate it over and over again and send them to people.
02:09:59.000There's no issue whatsoever doing that.
02:10:02.000People always felt like it's not costing you any money because someone had to buy it originally.
02:10:07.000It's costing you if I won't buy it and then I download it instead, but maybe I was never going to buy it in the first place.
02:10:47.000That's the thing about art is it can be kind of ephemeral.
02:10:49.000You're buying something that sort of exists as an idea.
02:10:52.000But the difference is you could print up a book yourself and sell it, but the author deserves probably to get the money more than you do because it was his thoughts that went into it.
02:11:04.000And the books, because it's happened to books too, is that it just, it was easy to duplicate.
02:11:08.000But you are stealing because we know that within a year, record sales had dropped, well not a year, probably within about three years record sales had dropped by 50%.
02:11:33.000So wasn't it just a harbinger of things to come?
02:11:35.000I mean, it wasn't necessarily stealing as much as it was an introduction to a completely new way of distributing music and the fact that it was digital.
02:11:45.000They had to find new ways in order to profit because this thing of like buying physical copies It's not valid anymore.
02:11:53.000Like, some people still do it because they love vinyl, and some people do it because they're nostalgic and they like to have CDs.
02:11:59.000But the reality is, most people are just getting digital.
02:12:06.000It's the same thing that caused the problem in the beginning, was the record companies, who were being so greedy, made it very easy to feel like it was okay to take it.
02:12:14.000Because I don't disagree with that, because you were getting ripped off as a consumer.
02:12:17.000If you want to tell me that something is the same amount of money when it doesn't exist as when it does, fuck you.
02:12:22.000But also, what happened eventually was when they came up with Spotify, the record companies went to Spotify and said, pay us a lump sum, and we'll give you all of our music.
02:12:34.000That's not trickling down to us in any way like it used to with record sales.
02:12:37.000It only does if you own the music, right?
02:12:39.000Right, but I mean- Like it's your music.
02:12:41.000Even so, you're still getting kind of screwed.
02:12:44.000Very few people own their own music for one thing.
02:12:46.000Record companies are never giving that up.
02:12:48.000And you can get it now kind of reverting to you in a shorter amount of years, but that was nothing that was available back then.
02:13:31.000And there's some valid reasons to do it.
02:13:34.000And we're getting it all back in a few years.
02:13:35.000But you didn't have any leverage back then.
02:13:37.000Do you remember that Courtney Love article that she wrote, I think it was in Spin Magazine, where she sort of laid out all the financial problems with record deals?
02:14:34.000Well, it was just kind of like, let me get this straight.
02:14:37.000You are going to give me a piece of...
02:14:42.000Of the part of our industry that is completely disappearing and worthless now, and in exchange, you'd like me to give you several pieces of the only things that still make money.
02:15:52.000But there were a lot of things, when the internet came along and changed all that, a lot of things got crazy in the record companies, because they panicked at the fact that the internet all of a sudden, instead of being this really wild thing that connected everyone in the world for free, basically, which is what it really does,
02:16:07.000you should be able to make a positive use of something that does that.
02:16:11.000I mean, it really is quite the tool, as we've realized in years since then.
02:16:16.000But all they could see was that it was like this drain that was slowly sucking all their money away.
02:16:20.000So they saw Napster and what Napster was doing and they associated the whole internet with that.
02:16:26.000I remember a year or two after that it all happened, we were doing a record It might have been Saturday nights and Sunday mornings.
02:16:35.000So it was a few years later, and ABC comes along, and they want us to be on Good Morning America.
02:16:41.000They love the record, and they want to feature our singles playing on the front page of ABC.com, which was a big website then, for a week and a half leading up to the release.
02:16:52.000They're going to basically put our videos and everything on the front page of ABC.com playing for anybody...
02:16:59.000That's like way better than, it's great, you know?
02:17:02.000Universal's response was, okay, well how much are you gonna pay us to let us use the video?
02:17:07.000They're like nothing and they said well, then you can't use it So we lost all that promo it happened like just just about like this is a few years ago when we released Some wonder wonderland our last record.
02:17:18.000So it's like 2014 We were playing festivals in Europe.
02:17:21.000We're touring we're playing pink pop in Holland's the biggest festival in Holland It's one of the oldest festivals in Europe and it's the sixth time we've played it we've at that point us and Pearl Jam have played that festival more than any other band at that point so They come to us before the show, like early that afternoon,
02:17:37.000and they told us that the national radio station, whatever, like the BBC in Holland, and the national TV station would like to broadcast our entire set live.
02:17:48.000So, national TV, you're set on radio and television when you play.
02:19:18.000How many people are listening to the radio?
02:19:20.000Well, don't forget this about streaming, is that a lot of people on their way to work and stuff, it doesn't have to be terrestrial radio, it could be satellite radio.
02:21:11.000It seems like a radio show or a podcast has far more promotional power.
02:21:18.000If there was a podcast that's dedicated to breaking music, Like a podcast on a streaming service like Spotify that has deals to distribute stuff and says, you know, we're just gonna play the coolest shit.
02:21:29.000Like, you decide, hey, it's me, Adam, I got a fucking great show, and I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna break great songs, and like, that would be so much more valuable than any other form of promotion.
02:21:41.000And if you could attach it to an internet entity, Like some sort of Instagram page that they had set up with a lot of followers or people new.
02:21:50.000They'd go there and cool music would be broke there.
02:21:53.000I mean, you'd cut them completely out of this food chain.
02:21:57.000Because I don't understand the position where they could get a 360 degree deal.
02:22:01.000The 360 deal is like so bonkers to me that you would get live touring?
02:22:46.000Since we've been independent, Working with record companies is pretty much a pleasure because we get the right situation where we can get them to do what we want them to do without getting ripped off and they do some great work.
02:22:57.000My experiences since becoming independent with record companies have been nothing but positive.
02:23:02.000They've done great jobs for us, but the other in the old days, but don't forget like music for me as a fan, okay, is way better than it's ever been before because it's so easy for bands to make music.
02:23:16.000And so inexpensive that they can all do it.
02:23:18.000And that means there's way more bands making way more great music.
02:23:21.000Bands can stay together for longer so they actually get really, really good.
02:24:31.000All that stuff that had been pent up inside me all those years, that finally got released when I was making, writing songs, still, no one was hearing those songs, and, like, the knowledge that people would, that I'd at least get a shot, I was on Geffen, my label mates.
02:24:48.000Geffen was different from any place else, for sure, but it was a little bit like the Viper Room.
02:26:27.000The record came out in the fall of 93, and we blew up in the spring of 94. We didn't feel it yet, but we played Saturday Night Live in January of 94. We weren't even in the top 200. I'm not sure why they put us on.
02:26:45.000But the record jumped 40 spots a week for five or six weeks.
02:26:49.000After we played around here on Saturday Night Live, the record literally jumped 40-plus spots every week for five weeks and landed us at Lake.
02:26:58.00013 for a couple weeks, then six for three weeks, and then we were two for two years.
02:27:34.000And then we were like, We had a really good week with something, and it seemed like it was going to go up again, and then The Lion King came out, and it was just like, man, we're never going to see number one.
02:27:42.000That must have felt like a real genius move, though, to get royalties, to get less money up front, and then to get royalties like, Goddamn that, Adam.
02:27:51.000When that second or third check came in, the one that was like the big one, I was like, fuck.
02:29:58.000Why did you decide to start an indie record company?
02:30:01.000I had a lot of friends who I thought were really good and I just didn't think they had good...
02:30:06.000I thought record companies were really bad situations and I thought they pushed them to do things that weren't really great for their band musically and I thought I could make really cool records with these guys.
02:31:17.000I lived with the lead singer for a long time.
02:31:19.000Have you ever thought about doing that again now, like the way we were talking about?
02:31:23.000If you promoted something like that, you did it through a podcast and you had a social media page, like a Facebook page or an Instagram page or both, that seems like now that's a viable strategy to introduce people to bands and those bands could actually probably take off.
02:31:41.000If they're really great bands, you could actually get eyes on them.
02:31:45.000That's what I feel like I do do now, because without the record company part of it, we run an independent festival.
02:31:52.000We spend a year, or six or eight months each time, talking about every band that's going to play the festival, all 30 bands or whatever it is, and we...
02:32:01.000For each band, when we release the announcement, we do a whole page about them.
02:32:24.000The festival might be that weekend, but starting Tuesday of that week, we film acoustic sessions at my house in the living room with every band and put them up on our page on the Underwater Sunshine website.
02:33:32.000And so, I mean, I do all that, and I don't feel like I fail anybody.
02:33:35.000Like, the bands we're taking out on this tour, Frank Turner's coming for the end of the tour, but I'm taking two of the Underwater Sunshine bands out, two of the guys, Matt Susich and Sean Barna, both of whose records I sung on, too.
02:36:18.000We're taking Matt and Sean out on tour this summer.
02:36:22.000They're going to flip-flop each night who plays first, so they'll both get to play.
02:36:27.000I kind of feel like I do all the stuff I used to do with the record company, and I never fail anybody, which is nice, because I really failed it.
02:37:52.000It's almost like an amusement park, because there's three stages going at once with staggered start times, and you can just run to the ones you want to see.
02:37:59.000Meet a bunch of different people, go between the clubs.
02:38:03.000They're free, so you don't have to worry about paying each time, and it's just...
02:38:52.000You know, we wanted to sort of like expand because we've been doing all this music stuff for a while and the last time we did it, which is now like October two years ago, I guess it was 2019, Last time we did the festival.
02:39:04.000And we had expanded to a place with three stages instead of two.
02:39:22.000Kate and I, we met because we matched on a dating site years ago, but never met each other, but we sort of corresponded a little bit.
02:39:30.000I hadn't talked to her in a long time, and I guess she wrote to me again later, and I was like, I'm just going to introduce her to my girlfriend.
02:39:35.000I introduced her to my girlfriend, and my girlfriend and her are the best.
02:39:37.000It's the best way to be safe about things.
02:39:38.000Just any hot girl, introduce them to your girlfriend.
02:39:41.000So they become best friends with your girlfriend.
02:40:34.000I would think about doing a comedy festival because they're my people and I get them, but I would not wish that upon anyone else to handle comedians.
02:41:05.000I mean, they have comedy at it, but Moon Tower is basically just comedy, right?
02:41:09.000That whole thing is, by the way, just for people who've never spent much time in Austin, that whole Moon Tower thing, the whole concept behind putting these towers around town that light up the town at night and that all look like different little moons, that's a crazy fucking thing to do.
02:42:58.000It was my favorite thing when we'd do just, like, the tertiary tours, like, in those towns, as opposed to just the big cities.
02:43:04.000Like, we'd do the big cities in the summertime, and then we used to do, like, in the fall and the spring, we would do the college towns more.
02:43:57.000You know, when you get those towns that support music, it's usually a pretty Temporary and then it cycles out of it because if you have that area where musicians can live and play There's usually some warehouses and they can get rehearsal spaces,
02:44:13.000you know, San Francisco used to be that way Yeah, you know, but then they become cool places to live and then people move into those areas and they want to live in those kind of warehouses and then it gets upscale and eventually Bands can't afford it and then someplace else becomes that area, you know, but Austin's managed to stay Keep Austin weird.
02:44:33.000It's managed to stay nice and weird for a long time now.
02:44:37.000Strange, too, because it's the capital.
02:44:39.000Yeah, people are worried now because of Google and tech companies and Apple's putting a campus here and Oracle, and they're like, oh my god, we're going to bring in the Silicon people.
02:44:49.000Well, that could do it, too, because if you get too upscale, it becomes hard to afford just the rehearsal spaces, empty, cheap places to rehearse.
02:47:18.000Barbecue is a weird thing because it moves around the United States.
02:47:21.000You know, almost all came from the South.
02:47:22.000But, you know, depending on the area, what was going on, like Oakland, where I grew up, is big barbecue because everyone came out to the shipyards to work from the South in World War II. And so all this whole community of black people from the South ended up also because the South can be not a great place to live at times if you're black in the 50s and 40s.
02:47:40.000You know, came out to California and ended up in Oakland.
02:47:43.000So had great barbecue there growing up.
02:48:07.000Smoking and then they sort of adapted it to like brisket and ribs and Texas barbecue and it all became like the Central Texas barbecue became like a scene.
02:48:19.000It's a very specific way of barbecuing.
02:48:33.000The sauce is a little sweeter, and it's got a nice bark on it.
02:48:39.000There's just this place in Oakland that I really love called Everett& Jones.
02:48:45.000It's a little shack at the bottom of University in Berkeley, and then they actually opened a full-on restaurant in In Oakland, in Jack London Square.
02:48:54.000I want to say a few years ago, but it must be 20 years ago now.
02:48:57.000But the Shack was where I grew up going.
02:48:59.000And I still order barbecue sauce from them, get it shipped.
02:51:20.000I mean, that's indicative of how weird it is.
02:51:23.000You look at the signs, like the fucking graffitis on the billboards and everything, and that's the inside, like right there, scroll back up where you were, right there, bam, that's what it looks like inside.
02:51:31.000I mean, it's just so unpretentious, just booths and wood paneling, and look at that stupid fucking rodeo sign.
02:53:48.000We're not going to go on sale for a few weeks, but I think the dates will be up today on the website, and this is the first I've told anybody about it.