Ahead of the release of his forthcoming album – All The Birds Sing – we interview Adam Shoenfeld about the project, the journey to its release, country music and what is left to come.
Hi Adam, Happy New Year! It must be a crazy start to the year, releasing this record.
Yeah, everything’s starting over. I’ve got the McGraw tour going on and we’re about to start rehearsals for that, so it’s exciting.
I guess, with the release of this record, what are your hopes for the project? It’s just such a stellar piece of work, you can hear all the influences back to the Beatles and all the music you played in more recently.
I just hope that some of these songs mean something to people. A lot of them come from a place of healing for me. I’ve written the songs about and for myself and it was just a big deal for me to have a body of work that I finally felt really confident about releasing. I just hope it reaches out and touches people the way that the music I love touches me.
Oh, 100%. I mean, I’ve listened to it today and ‘Sons’ really jumped out to me. How did the creative process happen with this record? Has it been in the pipeline for years? I can imagine you’re writing and creating all the time.
I have written my whole life and I’ve had a couple band projects in the last five or six years. These songs were started only about two years ago, they were just kind of offshoots of the other things I was doing. They were things that were a little more personal for me and then when quarantine happened and the pandemic happened, it gave me the time to really focus in my home studio and just focus on these.
It must be special then to bring these songs to life with your wife, you’re breathing that family feel into them.
Yeah, you know, we have a really, really strong relationship and a lot of people ask me, how does that work? Most people might have friction with their significant other and we just don’t have that kind of relationship. We’ve already had a band together, I had already seen her strengths musically, I was a fan of her. I have these vague memories of seeing her at clubs and back in the day before we were together. She had a record out 20 years ago, she’s uber talented and she really put a whole other interesting twist to having to stay in the house. Of course, you know, in the studio world in Nashville, by June of 2020, we were all back in the studios. We were all masked up and recording and so it wasn’t that I wasn’t working a lot, but there was a little less touring. I had the convenience of having a studio in my basement and having her live here with me, obviously, those moments that I got stuck, I was able to run upstairs and go, ‘I need you to come now and tell me what I need to do, or what I need to not do’.
It’s incredible to have that person you trust so much with the personal but also the musical nature of the songs. Going through, you can hear so many influences in your music, you’ve got the more heavy rock stuff but there’s also a folksy country element. How much has being in the city changed your music and was there ever a time you wanted to go another direction rather than country?
You know, when I moved here, I moved from New Jersey. I was in a rock band and I’ve always had a rock background and and as far as being a guitar player for people in country music, I kind of slipped into it – I didn’t realise I was doing it. I never listened to it and all of a sudden I was at the forefront of it. The first song I played guitar on was ‘Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy’ by Big and Rich and then all the Jason Aldean stuff. I was infusing a little more rock and roll into country. I was like, oh, okay, this is cool. It wasn’t that I dislike country, it just wasn’t something I did. Jason and I were actually even offered a deal as a duo together and I didn’t want to do it – he gives me crap for that to this day and part of me wishes I did. I didn’t want it at that time, I was like, ‘Well, no, I’m not a country singer’. Honestly, to me, country – the genre – is a lyrical term and as much as I grew up going fishing in the woods, I still didn’t feel like I resonated with that body of lyrics. I was more of a city slicker in my mind.
I feel like the country genre is now more about the lyrical depth rather than the content of the tracks.
I think it’s coming back. I think it’s coming around. I don’t know if it ever really did have that. I mean, maybe back in the day, Johnny Cash and Waylon and the original outlaw girls and boys, there was some depth there. If I listened to country music, it’s usually the older stuff from back then.
As much as you’ve talked about Jason and all the artists that you’ve played with, as much as you’ve influenced their music, I’m sure that they’ve had an impact on your music, too. Can you talk about that relationship between them and how your music has evolved?
I haven’t played on any McGraw’s records. I just toured with him, but his song choice has really opened up a world for me. He’s really good at picking songs and sometimes I think he picks songs that aren’t going to be hits on the radio, but they’re cool songs. He always has hits on the radio, but he’s taught me to really pick songs that feel good for him to sing. I don’t want to sing stuff that’s not good for me, so I try to only sing the stuff I write that feels right for me.
Guitar has obviously been a huge part of your journey. Do you lead with that instrumentation or lyrics first, what’s the kind of creative process?
It’s always different, sometimes I’ll sit down and I’ll play something and I need to write a song around that. Sometimes a lyric line will come to me, for instance, ‘Her Song’ on the record – that just came to me on the plane. I was traveling from Tennessee and I didn’t have any way to make any notes. In my head, I knew what the intervals were, so I was writing down the intervals and the words and the rhythm of the intervals I was hearing. As soon as I got to Raleigh, I sat down with a guitar and was like, ‘okay, that’s what it is’. I wrote that whole thing on a plane without an instrument. So, it’s always different.
‘Son’ really leaped out to me as it was just so personal. I feel like it’s one of those songs that everyone wants to hear, but can you talk a bit about that song and what it means to you?
Well, to be to be honest, it really is about my son. We live in different states, which is all good and we’ve made good out of it, but I think even if I lived with him, he’s a kid turning into a teenage boy, he doesn’t talk to me the way my daughter would talk to me. It’s kind unspoken, we’re close, but it’s a silent close. When he needs me, he’ll ask, but at that time, I was a little more like, ‘when are you gonna talk to me?’ and trying to let him know how much I love him.
Through a song is a far easier way to do it than sitting down to have a conversation.
He knows about the song, he’s never given me his response. He’s older, but it was really just a song for me to say ‘hey, you know, since we don’t talk and have real deep conversations, this song will always be here’. You always know that I’m here.
The final question, talking about how the Beatles have impacted your music. Thank you for including your cover of Norwegian Wood.
So I had Beatles records growing up, since I was born, because my parents had them, all the early ones. When I was a teenager, and in my 20s, I got turned on to Rubber Soul and all those kinds of records, The White Album, so there’s been many, many hours of me with headphones on digging into that music, especially the offshoots, like George Harrison’s posthumous release – I spent a lot of time with that record. I love them all, they definitely shaped me. The Norwegian Wood recording was an accident. Ironically, I recorded it because I got an old guitar, and I was playing it and then I started hearing Norwegian Wood in my head. I guess I played it.
It must have been difficult to reinvent such an iconic song.
Honestly, I went in the closet, I recorded my acoustic, then I went in the drum room, and I lay down the drums, and I started building it. When it came time to put the order of the record together, I still forgot that it was called ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’ which was the perfect ending to All The Birds. I’ve actually been one of the fortunate people to meet Paul and he’s the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet.
Well, congratulations on this record. I’m so excited for you for this to be out. It’s just such a great start to the year.
Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to do this with me, I appreciate it.
