Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Madam Adam

Madam Adam is on the verge of releasing its first full-length album (self-titled, April 5, Roadrunner Records), (review) but this Charleston, S.C., quartet has been together for more than 10 years. The chemistry that has developed during that time is evident in their catchy rock sound and tight live show. When the band opened for Halestorm recently at Rams Head Live in Baltimore, Md., LiveMetalNet’s Greg Maki sat down with the whole band—vocalist/guitarist Scott Gould, guitarist Drew Reindollar, bassist Kenny Varner and drummer Matthew Reindollar—to talk about all things Madam Adam.

LiveMetalNet: I have to say, I’ve been reading about your band and I’ve been enjoying seeing the word palindrome pop up in reviews. Is there a story behind the name Madam Adam or did you just like the way it looks and sounds?

Scott Gould: Yeah, that is the real story. But we always try to come up with something crazy, like some transvestite gypsy or some shit like that. But it never really works out ‘cause we always start laughing. Yeah, it was cool. Finding a band name nowadays is really tough, that isn’t taken now or isn’t already trademarked by a clothing company in Australia. It was cool. We just liked the way it looked, and phonetically, it worked, frontwards and backwards.

Kenny Varner: It’s kind of sexy, sleazy.

Everybody’s writing about you as a new band and you have your first full album coming. But you’ve been together for a pretty long time, right?

Scott: Yeah, we’ve been around since middle school. We met each other in the town we all grew up in.

Matthew Reindollar: Kenny and I were in the seventh grade when we started the band.

Scott: We had a field snare and a tom-tom, so that was our beats, and a little room probably about the size of this in his parents’ old house in Somerville.

Kenny: We started playing as something to do after school through middle school and high school. After high school, we decided we wanted to take it further and hopefully make it our career.

Scott: Fuck college, let’s go be in a band, right? [laughter]

I saw in the bio where it talks about how you guys studied music theory, and I think the one quote was something like, “We found our own way to rock music.” Can you expand a little bit on that?

Scott: We met this guy and he did Saturday mornings with us. He was really awesome for doing it. We paid him like 20 bucks when we paid him—that kind of thing. But he taught music in an elementary school, and he was super smart. We wanted to learn a little bit more about what we were doing instead of just pounding out bar chords and stuff like that. So we went to him and he taught us basics of jazz theory, to where we knew what we were doing on the instrument and what we wanted to hear, and we could translate that. That’s why we started that.

Kenny: It opened up a lot of doors, musically, for us to be able to figure out not just where songs were played, but why they were played like that. Once we kind of learned and practiced that, we were able to go further with what we were doing.

Scott: I wouldn’t say a new way to rock, just our way. [laughs]

Matthew: Me and my brother—my brother is the lead guitar player—(when) we started out, Nirvana was our big thing. Kurt Cobain, that grunge rock early stuff, was what really hooked us and gave us that “I wanna be a rock star” thing, just play music, live it, be it.

Scott: Which is ironic because he didn’t want to be a rock star and killed himself for it. [laughs] I guess, you know?

Matthew: He spoke to a young generation, and at that time, we were that generation. So that was kind of the start of it all.

Scott: Big grunge influence and rock in general.

Kenny: Metal. Metallica, Slayer.

Scott: That, Gwar. We grew up on it all. And even Phil Collins. It spans from Gwar to Phill Collins. [laughs]

Kenny: We like many styles.

Matthew: We’re just lovers of music, really. We genuinely just like good music. It doesn’t really matter what style or whatever. When you’re young, you get wrapped up in a certain shtick and kind of get lost in what music’s all about, (which is) just making you feel something. As long as we can make somebody feel something, at the end of the day, it helps you, it takes you to a different place away from your ordinary shit that might be going on.

[Everyone is silent for a moment.]

Scott: I guess. [laughs]

Matthew: That’s what it is for me. I can listen to several different things, and it’ll take you away from what’s going on.

How long after you guys got together as a band did you start writing your own material?

Scott: Yeah, it was pretty much from the beginning. There’s just something about writing a song. The beginning of it, we were a punk band. So it was about writing songs about our parents, about cops that we knew, about school. It was a good outlet for us to get our anger out without getting in trouble and going to jail and all that fun stuff.

Matthew: And even then, they were hardly songs. They were like song titles that were really cool that kind of outlined our lives. There were a couple chords in each one.

Scott: One was “Killinginism.” I don’t know what it means, but it was a rad title.

Scott: Yeah, but I don’t know that any of them will see the light of day. [laughter]

Matthew: There’s tons of songs, but to name them usable is a totally different story. That’s with a lot of bands. Even when we go in to do a record now, we’re gonna write probably 40 tracks or so.

Scott: For the last one, we had upwards of 80 demos. Some of them not full, complete songs, but ideas.

Matthew: This one has a cool chorus, we might be able to do something with it. It was a complete song and there were cool parts to it, but you don’t use the whole thing or you don’t use any of it.

You guys come from Charleston, South Carolina. What’s the music scene like down there?

Scott: A few years ago, it was actually really good. We had some bands coming out that were getting signed and picked up, and people were coming out. We had a club down there called the Music Farm, and it shut down for a while, and it was like when that happened, so did the music scene in Charleston. There wasn’t a really cool place for the bands in Charleston to play. It was, where do we go? Then everybody started moving away. And now, maybe it is (cool), but I’m just so far out of the loop now that I don’t really know. But it just seems like it’s not as cool as it once was.

Kenny: Charleston, also, used to have a niche with the old 96 Wave alternative rock station that was real big and independent record stores. And since radio and independent record stores are going down, a lot of people who were following music through those outlets now have no outlets to follow the music.

Scott: We started talking to them back in ’09. We did some demos with the producer, Skidd Mills, that did our record.

Kenny: February ’09, right?

Scott: Something like that. We did three or four songs, and we shopped it around with our manager. They wanted us to come to New York, and we played for a bunch of people.

Kenny: Ron came to Charleston first, saw us at the Windjammer. Then we went to New York to play for more people from the label. Ron Burman.

Matthew: Yeah, he wanted us up there to play for the rest.

Scott: So I guess he wanted to make sure we didn’t suck. So he could keep his job. [laughs] We went up there and played for them. Our A&R guy was out there on the floor. Usually, you have them like staunch, sitting, but he’s rocking out, singing along.

Kenny: It was a good vibe for a showcase.

Scott: We signed with them probably two weeks after that, so it worked out for us. We got to do a record.

Right after you sign with them, what happens? Did they have you start writing more songs? Send you out on tour?

Scott: No, we had a lot of songs. Writing is a huge part of it, but we were lucky to have the back catalog to where we had a lot of material. Really, all we wanted to focus on was getting in the studio and getting it down, getting a record, something that we have tangible to where we can go tour, sell, create a story. So that’s what we did. We jumped in the studio probably a month or two after that, and we were in Nashville for probably a month. And then they pushed back the release date ‘cause it was supposed to be last year, which was good ‘cause we were allowed to write more, and we actually wrote a couple more songs, went back to Nashville and put them on the record, as well. It was cool of the label to allow us to do that. Then, shit, we went and finished it up—Was it last year? I think it was. It’s been so long.

Matthew: October 2010, we finished up. We went back to do four more songs, and that was the end of it. So not too long ago. We’re just getting done finalizing the artwork and stuff like that.

Scott: So that gives you an idea as to what we did after we got signed. It’s not like bam, instant, boom, record, tour.

Matthew: But considering that time gap, for a lot of bands, that was actually pretty quick. For us to be in the studio two months after we signed was pretty fast.

Scott: Like I said, we were lucky enough to have the material to be able to do that.

Matthew: We worked hard the past five years writing these songs.

Scott: A lot of bands, they wait because they don’t have the song, whatever that is. It sucks to hear that.

Drew Reindollar: What was my metaphor for that the other day?

Matthew: Something about the desert and vultures.

Scott: Circling around trying to find the song.

Drew: Yeah. The song is like the food that’s in the desert. That’s the hit song, and all the vultures are just waiting on it. That’s what they want.

Scott: We did, with Halestorm. That’s when they thought the record was actually coming out last summer. So they were like, “Go out on tour.” We’re like, “Oh, yeah, fuckin’ great.”

Matthew: We were lucky enough to book it.

Kenny: And, actually, lucky to book it with them. Halestorm’s a great bunch of people.

Scott: Yeah, they’re great, man. They’re awesome, awesome people.

Matthew: We love them to death, and they pull us out. Any time we get a chance to play with them, they’re taking us out. We did this weeklong run right after Christmas that was just fuckin’ awesome. Now, here we are in Baltimore, playing a sold-out show with them.

Drew: We’re really excited about that.

Scott: It’s gonna be cool meeting those guys. Framing Hanley and Adelita’s Way are both on that, too. It’s good for us ‘cause we got to out with (Halestorm) and experience what tour actually is with such great people.

Matthew: We got spoiled. We’re afraid, but now it’s time to get thrown into—

Scott: Yeah. But now it’s nice that we know what to expect. I just can’t wait to meet them and getting to that point where it’s not awkward, you can joke around with them and throw shit at people. That’s when it’s fun.

A lot of people reading this won’t have seen you guys before, so how would you describe the Madam Adam live show?

Scott: What did we say? It’s like a 20,000-pound wildcat scratching at the back door of your doublewide trailer. I think that pretty much sums it up. [laughter]

The album comes out in April. You’ve got to be excited to have it finally come out.

Scott: Dude, I am so pumped. Finally!

Kenny: We’ve waited a long time, and yeah, finally.

Matthew: It’s been a very long road.

Looking forward into the future, do you have any goals that you’ve set for yourselves?

Kenny: We hope to be touring all year, man. That’s the big goal of ours. Getting out as much as possible, getting heard as much (as possible).

Matthew: We’ve worked really hard on our live show and being raw and not using backing tracks and things of that nature. We credit ourselves being good musicians. We’ve been together a very long time, we’re really tight and we’re really proud of that, to be a real, raw, rock band. We want people to see that and know it. And so far, we’ve gotten a great response. They know it when they see us.

Related Links:
www.madamadam.com
www.facebook.com/pages/Madam-Adam/136821546657
www.myspace.com/madamadammusic
www.twitter.com/madamadammusic
www.roadrunnerrecords.com