Slowtrain frontman Adoniram Lipton and I exchanged emails prior to their album release party Friday night at the Continental Club. Tomorrow, I will be posting a review of their new album, Bound To Find You Out.
1. What was the first album you owned?
I fall into that age bracket where my parents stopped listening to vinyl before I was born and I didn’t catch on until just after high school. So the first actual album I ever purchased was The Band’s self-titled record, the brown one where they look all scraggly.
First tape was Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em back when cassette tapes were displayed in those enormous plastic pieces of scaffolding. I kind of miss the excitement of watching the clerk take off all those trappings to reveal the cassette tape within. It’s kind of like your wedding night when you think about it.
The first CD I ever purchased was Dylan’s Greatest Hits 2. I was 14 years old and driving up I-95 in my father’s truck. There was some NPR type program doing a radio biography of Dylan and talking about the iconoclastic electric tour and subsequent retreat to the country. The next song they played was “Lay Lady Lay” so as soon as we got home I bought the first record I could find with that song on it.
2. Favorite album of all time? Why?
Ahh yes, the second most difficult question in the world (the first being “what does your band sound like?”). Looking ahead to question 6, I’m going to exclude any Dylan albums. I’ve loved Joe Cocker’s With A Little Help From My Friends since I first bought the tape many years ago. I still listen to the record front to back all the time so let’s go with that.
3. How/when did your band form?
Slowtrain has had an evolving and fluid membership for many years now. I always hate solo artists who give themselves a band name even though it’s just them so let’s be clear that this isn’t some Bright Eyes thing, more like The Jayhawks. The lineup we’ve got now is the best we’ve ever had incidentally.
4. What are the major influences of Slowtrain?
Well obviously The Band and Dylan are both big influences. Beyond that, my mother was a folk singer in her youth so I grew up listening to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly and Sonny Terry and all that definitely plays in there somehow. I still think that Muddy Waters had the best rock and roll band ever.
5. There are several song title mentions of “You”- is this a particular muse?
I think the nice thing about never naming people directly in songs is that you can change who the target of the song is according to your mood or circumstances. The title track of the record, for instance, was actually written with someone very specific in mind but I now sing it with a completely different (although also specific) person in mind.
6. I understand you (Adoniram) and I (Jessi) are both big Dylan followers. Favorite Dylan album?
Believe it or not, this is not a hard question for me. The hard question is “best” Dylan album (or even top 5) but “favorite” is easy… Planet Waves. I love the over the top sentimentality and vivid imagery on the record. I love that it has a combination of scathing (and almost cruel) songs as well as a more than healthy dose of some of the most naked love songs Dylan’s ever done. I also love how The Band sounds in the studio with Dylan which, of course, is the only time they every collaborated that way.
7. Are you more “bar napkin and ink pen” or “laptop and office chair” when it comes to your best writing?
First one, then the other. The reality is that some songs come really easily for me and some are more like decoupage. For the last few years I’ve been getting good results by piling up scraps of paper, notebooks, voice recordings and text messages to myself and then taking them home and trying to make sense of them.
8. And lastly, what do you like on your pizza?
I used to hate this but I’ve come around on Hawaiian pizza. Not bad at all.
CD release is Friday, April 22nd at The Continental Club. Doors at 9pm, Slowtrain takes the stage at 12am. Find out details regarding pre-show events and after-party at www.facebook.com/theslowtrainband
