Yellowhammer Press

Photo by Gray Scott

Admittedly, I discovered Adron’s music quite by mistake. While looking up some Pine Hill Haints videos on YouTube, I saw her performance at DAEL and was immediately taken with her precocious lyricism and articulate guitar style.  She was kind enough to grant the interview below:

YHP: What got you into playing music?

Adron: There was a piano in the house when I was a little kid, and when my dad brought us home from church I’d try to pick out the melodies to the songs. My momma decided I ought to take piano lessons, so I started doing that. I was 4 years old or something. Probably a big reason I started playing guitar at age 12 was because I was obsessed with Beck and wanted to be just like Beck and decided the only way I could write songs and be cool like Beck was if I played guitar. Then I realized tropicalia is the meaning of life, and my songs got a lot better. No hard feelings regarding Beck, though. I still think “Supergolden Black Sunchild” is one of the most gorgeous songs ever.

YHP: Your style is pretty distinctive. Who are your influences?

Adron: More than anything, the Beatles. I’m sure everyone says it, and I know everyone compares everything to the Beatles, but in all honesty, they have been the mainstay of my musical awareness longer than anything… I’ve been hearing them since I came out of the womb, and possibly before. They are very, very dear and important to me. That aside, major influences include Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes, Luiz Bonfa, music from the films of Satyajit Ray, Lata Mangeshkar’s voice, Erasmo Carlos, J.S. Bach, and more recently people like Victor Jara and Stereolab and Ennio Morricone (specif. the kinda jazzy loungy 60’s and 70’s stuff).

YHP: Do people tell you that, especially on “Renegade,” that your vocal style is really reminiscent of Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead? Because it is. Trust me.

Adron: Nope, nobody’s told me that. Every time I’m told I sound like this or that person, it’s never the same person, which is okay by me.

YHP: You bill your style as tropical. There are a lot of bossanova elements at work, among other things. This may be a redundant question, but where does that come from?  Maybe I’m generalizing, but it’s not the typical sound coming out of Atlanta now. That’s what made me take notice, really.

Adron: It’s interesting how, at my shows, people often come up to me and ask if I’m from Brazil, or I’ll even overhear someone saying “Yeah I think she’s Brazilian or something,” and it’s funny because I’ve never even been to Brazil. I think some might think this makes my style contrived, or derivative… but the reason I do music this way is because I feel tropical in my heart. There are simply certain categories of things and associations that just make my innermost soul go, “YES!” like heat, and tropicalia, and exotic fruits, and rainforests, and that sort of latin christian imagery with all the psychedelic halos coming out of everyone and magic hands and roses and angels and whatnot. I sort of figured all this out when I started listening to Caetano Veloso and Os Mutantes and all the other tropicalia badasses when I was 14 or 15, and started learning Portuguese to get closer to the music… My guitar style is influenced significantly by Luiz Bonfa, but mostly it’s just what I came up with having taught myself while listening to a whole lot of brazilian, baroque, and psychedelia/pop music.

YHP: I first ran across your music through your performance of Never Leave My Room Again somewhere on YouTube. It’s much more angst-ridden than the work on Burdwurld. What other ways has your work matured since your first record?

Adron: Lyrically, I guess that song is angsty, yeah. It’s sort of tongue-in-cheek as well. I wrote it when I was 15 and I kinda wanted to sound like a surly adolescent, because that’s an important sort of truth that sometimes you need to feel. Burdwurld is very, very different from the first record… I don’t know if I would use the word “mature” because I don’t really feel more mature… plus also “Renegade” was written only a few months after “Never Leave My Room Again,” it’s just taken me this long to get it right. I might instead say Burdwurld is more “savvy.” Inasmuch as the chords and structures are more sophisticated, and the production (in my opinion) is truer because I did it myself. I think “Little Face” is probably the most “mature” song on there, because it’s about seeing god in the treebark or whatever, in little secret places, and that will always feel very important and true to me. Also there’s a little guitar thingy toward the end that I’m super proud of.

YHP: You spent a few years living in New York before decamping for Atlanta. How do the two audiences/scenes differ?

Adron: Immensely! In Atlanta, everybody knows each other and everybody is friends and supports one another. I missed that feeling so much when I was in Brooklyn. Up there, it’s like you’re constantly swimming against the current just to keep anyone’s attention long enough to get them to come see you play some random night versus a bajillion other concerts or bars or parties. Despite being constantly surrounded by people in NYC, it’s pretty easy to feel completely disconnected from everyone. In Atlanta, it’s almost impossible to feel that way. There’s a lot more of an earnest, enthusiastic, community togetherness feeling here. There seems to be a denser concentration here of people who are just creative ’cause they can’t help it, not ’cause they’re trying to impress you or “make it.”

YHP: Let’s talk about your art for a bit. What materials do you use?

Adron: Mostly pens and markers. I typically use the tiniest possible Micron pens available… and if that’s not tiny enough I think Copik makes one tinier. I enjoy obsessive detail and repetitive patterns.

YHP: The art itself seems to complement the music. Is there a cohesion there? Does it come from the same place as the music or do you see it as a separate entity?

Adron: There is cohesion. They come from the same place, although I think the art is more explicit about certain things, like staying true to my psychedelic explorer nature. Secret faces are important in my art, so are glyphs and insane colors and imaginary creatures. I want people to kind of absorb the music and the art together, because they’re both generally about how I want to remember the universe when I die, as this insanely colorful mysterious puzzle full of hilarity and spookiness and love.

YHP: You seem to be building a brand here. What’s the ultimate goal for Adron?

Adron: I guess I am building a brand, kind of. I want my name to suggest a certain feeling, and I want cohesion in the music and art to point to that feeling… the above-mentioned feeling of universeness and colorful tropical truthiness. The ultimate goal for Adron is to keep doing and being Adron forever, or until I’m done.

YHP: Anything you’d like to add or talk about that we didn’t discuss earlier?

Adron: Yes, I’d like to give a shout out to my band members, Mario Schambon (also of The Selmanaires), Tommy Chung (Selmanaires), Chris Case (Samadha), and Josh Martin (Little Tybee), all of whom are breathtaking geniuses and who provide a seemingly limitless supply inspiration and mojo, even when I’m pooped and don’t feel like it. They are quality human beings of the most serious magnitude. Please take a moment to investigate their other respective projects. Also a shout out to Andre Paraguassu (Book Of Colors) and Ryan Gregory who have provided expert accompaniment and friendship on numerous occasions.

See also:

Adron on Muxtape

Adron on Myspace

I first discovered the Whites of Boone County, West Virginia in 1991’s Dancing Outlaw.  Clocking in at around a half hour, the short documentary follows the daily life of charming and eccentric (if dangerously erratic) Jesco White, the self-proclaimed “last Appalachian mountain dancer” and a reformed gas huffer.  Scenes of grinding poverty and heated marital spats are interspersed with Jesco’s exuberant tap dancing and Elvis impersonations.   In Dancing Outlaw, the Whites charm with candid, world-weary anecdotes of alcohol, family, and murder.  The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia is a different animal altogether.

Seeing this film at the Tribeca Film Festival with a group of friends was less an outing than an anthropological experiment.  Three of us, all Southerners, had seen Dancing Outlaw and its lamentable sequel several times and were fairly well prepared for what awaited us.  Our guests, however, were not.  A Yankee, a Londoner, and a curious Dutchman (sounds like the beginning of a “walk into a bar” joke, no?) had no idea what they were about to see.  We worried if they would get through it.

The Wonderful Whites dispenses with charm and replaces it with oblivion. The White family live chaotic and violent lives.  Against the backdrop of a depressed coal mining town, this large family, their relations often complicated by infidelity and questionable parentage, buy cocaine, snort painkillers, drink, smoke, give birth and get arrested with alarming frequency.  But sloppy parties and atavistic fights are just as prevalent as introspective monologues in which the characters comment earnestly on their dissolute lives.  They’re poor, they’ve always been poor, and they’ll continue to be poor.  None of them seems to possess any education beyond elementary school and the only one with a job is Poney, the one who left Boone County and fled to Minnesota where he maintains a normal life with his family and works as a house painter.

Director Julien Nitzberg, associate producer of Dancing Outlaw, carries this all off without a hint of exploitation.  Nothing seems forced or staged, likely because it doesn’t have to be.  The Whites do well enough to unconsciously lampoon themselves, and that’s what ultimately makes this film a success.

The entire family is utterly unconscious of larger social norms and that gives them the freedom to break them often, mostly while drunk, high, or a combination of both.  Though they’re keenly aware of their infamy in the county, they simply don’t care and will do whatever they choose, regardless of the consequences.  That reckless carefree attitude is born from a shared fatalism; they all know they’re going nowhere but seem in an awful hurry to get there.

Actually, the trailer makes it look a lot like a horror movie.  It’s not.

“Mud and Ashes”

I.

Despite the radio’s persistent crackle, the boy’s leg could wait until Revis finished his cantaloupe.  If it was Revis they needed, they would wait because they had no choice.  The events of the previous night hadn’t changed the fact that he was the county’s only choice in dire matters, so he could eat at his leisure.  Cantaloupe first.  Then the boy.

Terry Childress hauled his cantaloupes out to where Macedonia Church Road intersected the highway and sold them from the back of his old orange truck.  He started near dawn and didn’t even put up a sign – the fresh cantaloupe itself did all the advertising.  Stacked in regimental pyramids in the midday sun, the promise of cool, sweet juice was enough to tempt passersby into stopping and had, more than once, nearly caused an accident, usually as some out-of-towner unprepared for the siren song of Terry’s cantaloupes had skidded into the soft gravel shoulder as the result of a last minute decision.

He knew Terry was there most Tuesdays and sold out by 3 o’clock with the exception of his tomatoes.  Terry couldn’t grow tomatoes for shit and seemed to bring what pitiable offerings he could muster out to the highway for no good reason – he never sold any that anyone could remember and seemed to have the same prunish, half-starved fruit with him every week.  Maybe he did it to make his cantaloupes look better.  Whatever the reason, Revis Pell never paid the tomatoes any mind, and this morning he had been Terry’s first customer.  If Terry was the least bit curious about Revis’ bedraggled condition, he didn’t let on, and Revis paid him his $.50 with little more than a cordial nod.

Normally he wouldn’t eat it until noon and kept it wrapped in a dishrag and perched on a bag of ice that became a shapeless bag of tepid water by about 8:30 these days.  It would rest in its place of honor until after lunch when he would unfold his Buck knife, clean its longest blade with a handkerchief and slice the yielding flesh into meticulous pieces, savoring each one in quiet ecstasy beneath the sweetgum behind what was technically still his church, despite the preceding evening.  But today was different – he indulged immediately upon arriving home and ate with a fervor only the famished can muster.  He had not even bothered to change his clothes. Read more »

Brushfire

He stepped off the porch and with a lazy spit in the clematis headed off towards the car.  On arriving, he had been half-tempted to leave it idling in the drive so she would understand just how brief he intended this visit to be.  The cylinders on that thing knocked something awful and he’d have to see to them sooner or later, but the damn thing was about to fall off its wheels as it was and he couldn’t afford to put any more money into it, especially with poultry prices sinking further each month.  He laid vengeance aside and turned the ignition off and let the old engine get as cold as you please.  Besides, these visits were never as brief as one intended.

His mother was a hard old woman and her small home smelled perpetually like stale coffee and the musty, medicated reek of the ungraciously old.  He blamed the smell principally on the lack of ventilation.  She kept the place shut tight, window and door, all through the summer because she got chills, even in the Early County heat.  She did nothing easily, and dying was no exception.  The old girl had been hanging on for more than a year now, well past when the doctors had said that she would ease on out of this world, but that was just like her.  Utterly without consideration.

At least once a day, Everhardt Painter, the only child of Bernadine and Joseph T., 22 years married, inveterate smoker, henpecked, bad feet, plaid shirt, and co-owner of a struggling poultry supply company paid his daily obeisance to his aged mother.  He preferred “aged” to “aging” for no other reason than that he hoped she was about done with it. Read more »

Renowned artist Cliffton Peacock has joined us here at Yellowhammer Press, adding his muted, eerie portraits to the eclectic YHP mix. Relying on images emerging straight from his imagination, Peacock avoids detail and instead lays down his subjects in broad raw strokes. The hushed blue and green backdrops are subdued starting points for surprisingly aggressive figures, half-formed and leaving it up to the viewer to conjure up his own ideas of what may lurk in Peacock’s shadowy forms.

We’re glad to add him to our growing roster, and we hope our readers share in our appreciation of Cliffton Peacock’s works. Enjoy!

Blizzards be damned.  Nothing warms the soul like Southern food.  Cornbread and peas, greens, fried chicken, and sweet potatoes will cure any ailment and drive the cold from your bones.  The Southern Foodways Alliance, a wonderful organization, has produced numerous short documentaries on Southern foodways and folk culture.  “Hot Chicken” and “Buttermilk Can Help” are must-sees, but if “Capitol-Q” doesn’t make you crave BBQ and coleslaw, something is deeply, deeply wrong.

• We are very excited to introduce David Spear to our roster of artists!  His photography may be the polar opposite of Walker Evans or Dorthea Lange; completely lacking the judgmental aspect of the outsider looking in, Spear’s work celebrates the vibrant and humming humanity of the Appalachian people without the lens of judgment or social polemic.  Welcome, David — we’re proud to have you.

Dear Walker,

I couldn’t be more pleased at the acceptance of your novel, though I had no doubt about it ever since I read the opening pages.  What I hope now is that you’ll come off the notion that you don’t want to go on with the work.  The novel is just what Lawrence called it, “the one bright book of life.”

The recipient is novelist Walker Percy; the novel in question is Percy’s seminal The Moviegoer.  The letter continues thus:

By the end of the month I expect to have killed Stonewall Jackson dead as a mackerel; which makes an excellent stopping place before I tackle the complexities of the Vicksburg Campaign.

The letter’s author, Shelby Foote, was hard at work on his own masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative.  His sprawling 3 volume, 1.5 million-word masterwork on the American Civil War took more than 20 years to write and is arguably the definitive work on the subject.  I say “arguably” because critics assail the fact that it reads more like a novel than “proper history,” something I consider to be a success rather than a failing.  If you want a line-by-line breakdown of the conflict, try some Bruce Catton.  Foote, on the other hand, crafts a heartbreakingly beautiful tale of the conflict while avoiding the tacky sentimentality of Ken Burns.

Percy (the adopted nephew of Lanterns on the Levee author William Alexander Percy), on the other hand, spent years honing his fiction and working on what Foote dubbed, “his apprentice novels.”  The Moviegoer, with its portrayal of New Orleans stock broker Binx Bolling’s post-war suburban ennui, would go on to win the 1961 National Book Award.

To be frank, I’m writing this entire piece to recommend Jay Tolson’s The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy.  Though most of the correspondence is from Foote (who, as a friend accurately points out, has the definitive Southern accent — when I imagine what God must look and sound like, it’s Shelby Foote), the collection reveals a deep bond between two masters of their craft and lays bare the anxieties, failings, ambitions, and ultimate successes of two giants of literature, Southern or otherwise.

School friends from Greenville, MS, Foote and Percy keep in close contact for over 40 years.  While Foote labors for decades on what he simply refers to as, “the narrative,” Percy soldiers on and writes Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and several other novels as well as scholarly articles.

Tolson’s collection is not only valuable as a connecting thread between two sharp literary minds; the book itself is readable from cover to cover, expertly edited and footnoted with explanatory bits for the more ambiguous references.  For fans of either writer, it’s a must.  If you’re new to one or both, it works as a pretty good introduction to the context of the works’ creation if not the works themselves.

Further reading:

UNC: The Walker Percy Project

YHP: There is exactly one way to make a mint julep

One of our very own, Jane Allen Nodine, presents a new exhibit of her encaustic art  at the Myst Contemporary Gallery in Spartanburg, SC.  The exhibit opens today (1.21) and runs through February 16.  If you’re in the area, show some support!

• The Appalachian Photographers Project features 18 photographers from the Southern Appalachian states.  Their work is a broad and varied view of the Appalachian South.  Our own Maury Gortemiller is represented.

• It’s a great month for music. Both Southern Cultures and Oxford American have produced Southern music issues and both are accompanied by CDs filled with gems.  “Well Whatever” by The Kingsbury Manx is currently at the top of my playlist.