Adron hails from Atlanta, GA and is making a stop in our Queen City on Thursday, February 8th at The Listing Loon with Rachel Mousie!
This past August, Adron played 3 shows opening for Donald Fagen (Steely Dan). Fagan saw her performance in Atlanta and loved it so much he invited her on a couple more dates including Nashville and Chattanooga. She has also performed in Helado Negro's band and collaborated with Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab, Mikael Jorgensen of Wilco, Jason Trammel of Yeasayer and Sinkane, and other brilliant collaborators.
We sat down with Adron to get to know her before her show at The Listing Loon on Thursday, February 8th with Rachel Mousie!
You seem as if you are an old soul, what do you think developed your musical style?
That might be accurate in as much as my major musical influences are all from decades I wasn't alive for... There are some crucial influences to whom I owe a lot for the way my musical ideas come out. I can't overstate how important Caetano Veloso is to me. He is certainly one of the greatest songwriters alive. I discovered his music just a couple years after my first attempts to write songs myself, and his influence has been with me from the beginning. It helps also that the first guitar I learned on was a classical guitar, same as what a lot of Brazilian songwriters play, so it was natural that I gravitated toward samba and bossa nova guitar styles. Another songwriter who blows my mind to smithereens is Marcos Valle. If I could just sound exactly like Marcos Valle but with a girl voice I'd be pretty satisfied. In general, I love almost everything that came out in the mid/late 1970s; other important music worth mentioning are Phoebe Snow's eponymous 1974 album, cheeseball elevator jazz like Bob James' "Touchdown" and "Lucky Seven," all that r&b/soul stuff coming out around then... and then there's the serious weirdos like Robert Wyatt, of whom I'm a huge, huge fan, although I don't really have the balls to get as weird as him. Yet. Maybe when I'm older.
When did you decide that being a musician was going to be your career?
I honestly can't think of a time in my life when that wasn't the case. A landmark moment I sometimes refer to is the first time I saw the Beatles movie, "A Hard Days Night." I was about 4 years old I think. I remember deciding in that moment that whatever the hell the Beatles were, I wanted to be that. It took me years to understand what that even meant, or even how to distinguish their individual voices on a recording, or how a life in music might manifest for me, a girl, an American, in a very different time and culture from them... but from a very early age the Beatles were the basic foundation of my sense of identity and purpose.
Tell us about your songwriting…
Songwriting feels like doing a puzzle, kind of... or building a birdhouse, or something like that. Songwriting is structural. The hardest part is usually the lyrics; nowadays that's actually where I try to start, which is different from how I used to do it. The hardest part is usually hard because it's the most important. So, I try to make sure I have a worthwhile story to tell, and I figure out how I want to say it... then I can start throwing chords around. I just keep laying stick after stick until it feels like a solid structure. And then I decorate it with little flourishes and vocal expression and until it feels like a performance. Content-wise, sometimes it comes from a need to digest the situations my life throws at me. All people go through personal drama and pain, and my way of absorbing it and learning from it and not letting it drive me crazy or turn me bitter or turn me all self-pitying and boo-hoo is that I try to write a song about it that will encapsulate it in a little package that I can set aside. Usually I try to take the painful stuff and make it funny. It helps a lot, it's healing, and especially if I turn the painful thing into a funny song it's much easier to play over and over again, and after doing that for awhile the thing usually doesn't hurt very much.
What is next for Adron?
Touring as much as I can while getting ready to put out my album "Water Music." I've been trying to get this record out for literally like 5 years; it has been the biggest challenge of my adult life. I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self to just forget everything I thought I knew, forget about labels, etc, and just put the thing out independently... it's a long story. But I do believe it's finally going to happen this spring! I can't say too much yet, but I'm hoping to align with a label run by a dear friend of mine and release the album in April or May. In the meantime, I'll be performing at SXSW for the first time, and elsewhere in the South and Midwest. Keep your eyes out for me, I'll be all over the place!
