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Old 04-10-2008, 06:42 AM   #1
TommyBB
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The Guardian (London)

April 10, 2008 Thursday

The park bench balladeer: Adam Green's music, featured in the movie Juno, has brought him fame. That's fine, he tells Laura Barton , but he'd rather be at home eating lunch

SECTION: GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGES; Pg. 28

LENGTH: 971 words

H ungover, dishevelled, and in dire need of coffee, Adam Green is serenading an empty bar with a song he composed during the previous evening's revelry. "She is the cleanest ladyboy from Hull!" he croons, and then slumps his head into his hands and groans. "It was called Ladyboy," he mumbles. "It's pretty catchy."

As we chat in this west London bar, Green's thoughts are connected by umms, ahs and wheezy clouds of laughter. "Wait!" he will cry, then frown, pause, and drag a hand through his straggly hair. "Where were we? What were we talking about?" We were talking about Sixes and Sevens, Green's fifth solo album, which offers 20 short songs charged with Curtis Mayfield-esque panpipes, gospel choirs and Green's increasingly Jacques Brel-ish baritone. It is an album that will not only satisfy his dedicated fanbase, but also appeal to a new audience who know his music from the soundtrack to the surprise hit movie Juno.

In the late 1990s, Green, now 26, formed the scuffly anti-folk duo Moldy Peaches with Kimya Dawson; they released just one album, in 2001. When Dawson was asked to curate the Juno soundtrack, she included the Moldy Peaches' sweet-natured duet Anyone Else But You. The soundtrack LP went on to be a No 1 hit in America. "I can't believe how many people think I put (Sixes and Sevens) out at the same time, to capitalise on Juno," Green says, sounding genuinely indignant. "It's absurd. By the time I heard about the movie, I'd finished this record."

Green made his previous album, Jacket Full of Danger, in nine days. This time, he had a year and a half. He used this unprecedented stretch of time to head home to New York, luxuriate a little, and spend longer on his songs. "I became reacquainted with living in Manhattan," he says. "I think people just saw me as the guy with the notebook at the bagel shop. I wrote there and while walking round my neighbourhood. Sometimes I'd walk all the way to where you can board the Staten Island ferry. And sometimes I'd walk up to my parents' house and hang out with them in the Upper West Side."

Like his songs, Green's anecdotes - and, it seems, his promenades - tend to proceed in rambling fashion, before making sudden sharp turns. In the middle of a jovial recollection about his favourite bagel emporium, he suddenly says: "I stopped eating there for a while because I broke my tooth eating a bagel. And then my tooth fell out." He taps one of his front teeth. "That's titanium. I'm like Wolverine. Actually, a funny thing happened. They called me back to the dentist's office and said, 'Hey, remember when we pulled out your tooth? We put some replacement bone material up in there to promote healing.' Then she said that the bone material comes from humans. But then she goes, 'The problem is that . . . have you been reading the news lately? Well, this guy stole all these bodies from this funeral home in New Jersey, and you are the recipient of this, like, stolen body part.' It turned out I got the bones of Alistair Cooke!" And Green looks up, triumphant.

In addition to allowing him time to walk, write songs and break his teeth on bagels, the extra time granted Green a more relaxed approach to recording. "I think you can feel it a lot in the arrangement," he says. "In the past, I've been a fascist dictator in the studio, but not as much this time." Green recorded Sixes and Sevens with his band in a school building in New Jersey, using the album to "try out all the things I'd always wanted to try".

This meant steel pedals and panpipes, drum machines and strings, and vocals set down late at night "after I'd been smoking cigars and drinking Jagermeister". But not all of his experiments made it on to the album. "I wanted to have some (songs) that were well constructed and others that were improvised," he says. "I like the idea of things that are sort of firm bleeding into other things. You know what I'm saying?" He looks through his fringe. "I like it to bleed. I think that's what maybe holds back my music from ever being close to commercially viable. But that is my essence."

For all his protestations, Green is actually now enjoying a period of commercial viability. "The whole experience has been very displacing," he says a little sadly, recalling an appearance he and Dawson recently made on the US chatshow The View. "I think both me and Kimya - aside from getting to meet Whoopi Goldberg - would rather have been home eating lunch."

He smiles sheepishly when asked if Anyone Else But You felt like a special song when he wrote it. "Well, everything felt special at that time. Me and Kimya were pretty inseparable, and we wrote songs together. One day I was walking down 58th Street near Central Park, and I had in my head a Skip Spence song. I think it was either Broken Heart or It's the Best Thing for You. I couldn't remember all the words so I started replacing them with lines I was making up. I guess 'I can't see what anyone would see in anyone else but you' - the chorus line - fitted the meter of that song."

He shrugs. "So I was just fitting it in. And I wrote it down, and then I think me and Kimya were writing songs on my couch the next week, and I brought up that idea, and we wrote a bunch of lines, piecing around a lot of ideas from our notebooks. We finished the song in Tompkins Square Park on a bench." He pauses. "You know, we finished a lot of songs on a bench in Tompkins Square." And is there, I ask, now a post-Juno commemorative plaque on that bench? "Yeah," he rasps with laughter. "Didn't you hear the news? They're replacing Joey Ramone Street with Moldy Peaches Avenue" *

Adam Green plays Oran Mor, Glasgow (0141-357 6200), tonight, and the Club Academy, Manchester (0161-275 2930), tomorrow. Sixes and Sevens is out now on Rough Trade.

'I was a fascist in the studio' . . .

ex-Moldy Peach Adam Green
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