EP 13: Adam Levy on Songwriting, Musical Curiosity, and Making Albums

Jesse Paliotto (00:08)
Hello everyone welcome to the Guitar Journal a podcast where we love to talk about making music particularly through the lens of fingerstyle and jazz guitar. I'm your host Jesse Paliotto I love getting to do this and hang out with musicians every week here on the Guitar Journal podcast. I am so pumped to have with us today Adam Levy. Adam is truly an amazing musician and an educator. You have definitely heard him. He is on

Nora Jones kind of infamous album come away with me. He's played with all sorts of amazing folks like Tracy Chapman, Volk Peck and a bunch of others And we've got your own deep catalog of music. You also maintain an awesome YouTube channel You have a patreon channel for students you have courses on true fire you have a book dude you stay busy It is a little overwhelming. So in light of that really nuts schedule I am all the more grateful that you took some time to be here on the guitar journal today, man. Thanks for doing this

Adam Levy (00:53)
You

Yeah, Jesse, thanks for having me.

Jesse Paliotto (01:04)
I got exhausted just reading that. That was so much stuff.

Adam Levy (01:09)
Well, I'm 100 years old, I'm not as bad. It's not that busy.

Jesse Paliotto (01:15)
You got it. What if you spread it out over time? It is not you're not that busy every one single point ⁓ I'm gonna I wanted Adam does such a great job And if you are a guitar player who is on YouTube online anywhere I'm sure you're running into Adam's stuff because you do such an amazing job of really educating and sharing your experience So I'm gonna jump right into the deep end of the pool And one of the things that strikes me Adam is I just kind of have been exposed to you online and followed some of your music

Adam Levy (01:17)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (01:43)
is you have traversed a lot of genres and moods. You played pop people, I think you currently play with Liz Wright, but then also I'm watching you do this deep dive on Barry Harris, which is a very nerdy bebop jazz end of the world. I was curious, how would you describe your own musical focus right now in life? Is there a center of gravity to all of this? Or the other picture in my mind is, or is it like a salad, where it's just a bunch of distinct parts, but they all kind of work together? I was curious how you think of yourself and...

what you're really focusing on in the world right now.

Adam Levy (02:14)
Well, I love that. I would love to say that, yeah, I'm a nicoise salad or something. That's such a good question, Jesse. And honestly, it's one that I never know quite how to answer, because all of. So much music is beautiful to me. And. And also, I mean.

Jesse Paliotto (02:21)
You

Adam Levy (02:43)
Sometimes it's just about following the work. You know, I, I, there was a time when I lived in San Francisco, most of the nineties. And, ⁓ when I moved there, I was really a jazz guy. Like I, I had studied with Ted Green and you know, I was thinking about jazz pretty much all the time, just waiting for the next John Schofield record to come out. And, ⁓ but then.

A songwriter, I can't even remember who, but somebody in the Bay Area, in Berkeley or Oakland, called me to play a gig and that led to more gigs and I kind of got this reputation as somebody who...

you know, has a jazz sensibility, meaning kind of freewheeling and not so stuck in doing things the same way every time, but also as somebody who...

really gets songs, which not every jazz musician is into songs in that same way.

⁓ you know, if you're a jazz musician, you might be more focused on studying harmony or technique or rhythm or something, but that's not what songwriters are thinking about at all. But somehow, I was really interested in that world. then one thing led to another. And then my first really big gig in that ⁓ realm was with Tracy Chapman. ⁓ but at the same time, like I was still

you know, local jazz gigs and transcribing Bill Evans, you know, records and stuff at home. So it's always been a combination of just what I'm interested in and then kind of, you know, work leads you in different directions.

Jesse Paliotto (04:40)
Yeah. And so that sounds like that's still the, that tension of like what interests me and what is the work and what is, yeah, what's the world kind of leading you into in terms of actually producing stuff out there in the community.

Adam Levy (04:55)
Yeah. And also, you know, I grew up at a time. I'm not I'm sort of in between. I'm not quite a baby boomer and I'm not quite Gen X, but, you know, great guitar was all over the place. Like you didn't have to be listening to a Joe Pass record or John Scofield record or.

Jesse Paliotto (05:10)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (05:20)
You know, you just turn on the radio and just even straight up pop songs often had some, you know, kick-ass guitar solo in the middle. And just as a young guitar player, all of that intrigued me. You know, I was listening to Joe Pass, I was listening to the Eagles, I was listening to... ⁓

Jeff Beck, but I was also listening to Little River Band or anything. I was just so fascinated by the guitar. really didn't as a kid. It's not like I had posters of Django, Reinhardt and West Montgomery on my wall or anything like

Jesse Paliotto (06:06)
Yeah, it makes me think of, there's like a piece of advice I feel like floats around, I don't know if I'll get it right, but where finding what you should be doing in the world is sort of this overlap of what you like, what you're good at, and what the marketplace needs. And if you can find some overlap in that Venn diagram, then boom, you can do something that gets you paid, that you like, and that actually is good. But it's funny that it makes me think, as you're describing this, as a creative person or as a musician, a lot of times that

There's like a messy middle to that Venn diagram. Like there's things in there that I like really a lot personally. And jazz I feel like tends to fall into this category, but it's not the thing that's gonna get me paid all the time. And so you are cobbling together the nicoise salad of creative endeavors.

Adam Levy (06:52)
Yes, exactly that.

Jesse Paliotto (06:57)
That's, I think, real life. I appreciate that. I'm going to switch questions a little bit here. I wanted to ask about the Spry album. This was your most recent album, I believe, in 2023. And maybe you could talk about it for a second, but I'd really like to also hear about you releasing the acoustic sketches version of it. Do you have a note on your Discog page around that? But maybe you could talk about why did you release the acoustic sketches?

What was the thought process around all that?

Adam Levy (07:29)
Yeah. So I'm going to just take one step back and say how that album even came to be a thing, which was that when I was working on the music for Spry. So for people who don't know, Spry is a trio record where I play electric guitar, mostly there's some acoustic, but it's mostly electric and then with a bright bass and drums. So it's a trio record.

Jesse Paliotto (07:37)
Yes.

Adam Levy (07:57)
And while I was working on that music, ⁓ I was talking with the drummer, Joey Baron, who's on the record. And he asked me, what's the music going to be like? And I had to confess I hadn't written most of it yet. I was kind of just getting started. So, you know, I told him a little bit about what I was planning and he said, you know, I'd love to hear some recordings. You know, if you could send me something.

So as I started writing more and more songs for the record, I ⁓ just, you know, I recorded a bunch of stuff on my phone. Nothing really fancy, but just. ⁓

you know, usually with with a metronome going kind of quietly in the background, just to keep me honest with the time. And I just would play through the tunes, you know, once or twice. I might talk a little bit. ⁓ at this section, I think this could happen or, know, so it's a it's mostly guitar, but also a little bit of commentary. And that was never I never thought I was going to release it. It was really just.

Because the thing is, we weren't going to get to rehearse before the session. Joey lives in Europe, and he was going to be coming in just in time for the session. So I was meant to be in lieu of rehearsal time. At least he could have music. And he later told me that he did sit and play along with all the stuff. He said, yeah, I just get on my brushes and play along. So was really helpful. ⁓

So that's why it exists in the first place. But then as to why I released it, kind of.

There's two reasons why. One is that ⁓ honestly I thought it would help hopefully people direct people back to the the spry record. ⁓ You know I don't have

any great strategy for how to release a record. You know, I don't really have a full time publicist or anything like that. So there was a very just practical thing of like, OK, I released this record maybe a little while down the road. I can release a whole other record, but that in a way kind of points people back to the record that I just released. So it's kind of a way of.

know, people try all kinds of ways to game the Spotify algorithm and I'm not up on how to do that. But I did think that that might kind of help float it up and as far as people's awareness. So there's that. But also a few years prior, I released another record that had originally started as a kind of a sketchbook.

I

I don't know, 2013 I think I did a project on YouTube where I did little videos for a bunch of public domain songs, songs from the 1920s that had gotten into the public domain at that point.

After I had about a dozen of them, it occurred to me that, ⁓ I can actually release this as a record for people that don't want to just stare at YouTube. And ⁓ so I took all the files and I mean, again, that was also just done in my phone. ⁓ Not this phone, probably an iPhone seven or something at that point. But. ⁓ I put all those files and I had.

Jesse Paliotto (11:41)
Yeah.

Adam Levy (11:58)
I hired somebody to master the audio and I released it as a record and it turned out that people liked it. And prior to releasing that, I'd always thought that people mostly wanted to hear polished records. And a lot of people told me they liked that record, even though it was just really recorded in my living room on my phone as a video, which I then made into. So it occurred to me that maybe people who like

music or people who like my music might want to hear something that's not so

know, gussied up, but here's just the real thing. Here's just me. Most of those demos that I made that became that record, those songs were still days or weeks old. So I was just recording them as they, as I wrote them. And I think there's something special about those moments that you, that you never get back to, even if you make a great record later on, that you never quite get back to those moments.

Jesse Paliotto (12:51)
Yeah.

Yeah, you hear people talk about that where like the demo, you know, in the old band world, you know, the demo will have more energy than the final product. And it's, it's funny you brought up Joe pass. he's a frequent name on this podcast cause I love Joe pass, but I mean, some of the stories about how his albums recorded about the equivalent of an iPhone, recording quality and intentionality wise. but I think like. ⁓

Right now I'm a little blown away that you were able to record onto an iPhone, master it, and get something that sounds as good as the Acoustic Sketches album sounds. Because it does not sound like that. It sounds like you intentionally recorded a guitar. Like I did this for real.

Adam Levy (13:47)
No, no, it really, no, but that's how I did it, yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (13:52)
That blows my mind. ⁓ I'm gonna start. Word of the wise, nobody buy any recording equipment. Just record on your phone and find out who Adam Levy's mastering person is and go talk to them. Save yourself some hassle.

Adam Levy (13:58)
Yeah.

And a funny, a funny byproduct of doing it that way was that when we got to the session, Joey Baron, the drummer, said, man, I'm really excited. You know, it'll be so fun to play with acoustic guitar. You know, which, you know, in a jazz trio with drums, that's not that usual. And I said, ⁓

You know, I hadn't really thought of using acoustic on the record. This was just, you know, demos. But he said, well, bring it anyway. maybe. So I did wind up playing it on a couple of songs, you know, the acoustic guitar.

Jesse Paliotto (14:32)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

How, I'm curious, ⁓ what was that like and do you think that's a viable thing? Cause I love acoustic guitar. I would say it's my primary instrument. If you line up guitars and tell me to pick some up just to jam and have fun by myself, that's what I'm gonna pick up. And I love playing jazz and I don't ever hear it in a trio setting. And I know there's recording reasons why it's the high ends on it clash with snare and cymbals and so you don't get a good thing. But it feels like, that the whole story or is there a way to make that work?

Adam Levy (15:14)
I think there is a way to make it work. It's such a beautiful sound. ⁓

You know, like Julian Lodge on his most recent record plays some steel string guitar with a band. The way that I did it on Spry, we used some of the pickup sound. I have a K and K pickup in my acoustic, in my steel string guitar. And we also had a couple of mics up close on the guitar. And then, so the sound that you hear is kind of a blend of the pickup sound and the

and the mics and then we played together in the room, very quietly. Like I was just a stone's throw from Joey, the drummer and from Larry, the bass player. I could send you pictures like you wouldn't. It would surprise you to see how closely we set up, but we played very quietly. I was able, I think that's one of the things that I would consider if you wanted to play steel string.

Jesse Paliotto (16:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (16:20)
in a trio is that the level of everything has to come down so that because in reality, if you just like walked into a room and there were three people playing music and one of them was a drummer and one of them was an upright bass player and one of them was a steel string acoustic guitar player with no amplification, the quietest thing in the room is going to be the guitar. So you have to change that perspective by really miking it in an intimate way.

Jesse Paliotto (16:42)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (16:51)
And also if everyone else can come down, then you're, you're really halfway there. Then you have a dynamic range. That's another thing about this steel string acoustic guitar is that, you know, if you think about what the dynamic range is on a drum kit, it, it's from a whisper to, you know, deafening and an acoustic guitar is just so small compared to that. So if the drums come down, acoustic bass is sort of maybe somewhere in the middle.

Jesse Paliotto (17:00)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (17:20)
then the guitar can be dynamic and then it really becomes a beautiful thing. I would love to do more of it. I guess the other thing is like, don't sound really, most acoustic pickups don't sound great through like a deluxe reverb or whatever. So you have to either go through the house system, which is a little weird if you're not used to it, cause your sound is coming from somewhere else and you're used to it coming out of a box on the floor behind you.

Jesse Paliotto (17:23)
Yeah.

Right.

there.

Adam Levy (17:51)
⁓ Or you maybe you buy a dedicated acoustic like you really have to just think about the whole thing differently. It's not just as easy as switching guitars and boom. So but but I think it's worth it. Like to me, it was so satisfying. You know, we actually recorded three songs acoustic for Spry. I one of them didn't make the cut just for the flow of the record. We it didn't it didn't fit in the end, but ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (18:00)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (18:21)
I would love to do more of it. I found it really satisfying.

Jesse Paliotto (18:25)
Yeah, yeah, it's always been interesting to me. And I've never had an opportunity to like test drive it very much. But the dynamic range strikes me as an insight I hadn't really processed a lot that what ends up happening usually as inclusive players, you're playing at the top of your dynamic range all the time just to be heard. Even if you're miked up for some reason, I don't know if it's psychological, but you just end up constantly pushing because you just feel like you're having to cut through the mix or something. And

⁓ And so being able to back down on that which it's actually where you get I think the more fuller cooler Sounds is in those kind of middle especially like finger picking and stuff work But in order to do that like you guys got to back down with me. Otherwise, no one's gonna hear this

Adam Levy (19:04)
Right. And that's really the way that I play. Even on electric guitar, I tend to kind of have the amp up a little bit, but then I touch the strings quite lightly. So that's my kind of orientation to the string. So if I'm pushing, already really, I mean, it'd be like if you were a singer and the band decided to take everything up. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (19:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (19:30)
forth from where you normally sing it. It's just like, well, I can do it, but that for where you just can be hard to find the music in.

Jesse Paliotto (19:32)
Huh?

Yeah, no one's going to like it. I'm not going to like it. ⁓ it's funny. I'll still, the thought I had when you're talking about putting this, the album together, ⁓ and the previous one actually got to talk with Tim Lurch, who I know you're friends with, ⁓ and interview him, ⁓ right at the beginning. think it was the first episode that we did on the, on this podcast. And, ⁓ I was surprised he, cause he's got some albums of his finger style stuff. ⁓

and he offices on his website. But the way he put them together is the same way you did, which he had all these YouTube recordings and over the years. And he said, I'm just going to take it. And he recorded them in a good quality into the computer and then just took them and cobbled together an album out of that. And that feels like such a practical, I really love that insight. Cause I'm like, that's such a practical way for people who may not have the bandwidth to go sit in a studio for three weeks. But you know, I can do one song here and there, and then I can actually get to sort of a.

Adam Levy (20:14)
Mm-hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (20:31)
a group vision of an album or whatever I may have on my mind.

Adam Levy (20:34)
Yeah, right. That's really it. the bandwidth is so key. Like I think some people, the thing that stops them from making an album, sometimes it's just like, oh my gosh, there's just, there's just so much, you know, but if you just, you know, a half hour this day, a half hour, another day, a month later, you record something else. Maybe you have a hot day and you get two things done.

Jesse Paliotto (21:02)
Yeah.

Adam Levy (21:04)
Nobody who listens to the album thinks of it that way. know, they're not waiting days and weeks, but it's not like they listen to a song and weeks go by. They just get all the music. I mean, obviously you can tell that story if you want to. But I do like putting music out and I don't think it has to be that.

Jesse Paliotto (21:14)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Levy (21:32)
much of a production, know, no, I guess pun intended. I want to mention one other guy who inspired me in this way, who I didn't even think of until you were talking about Tim Lurch somehow this popped up. Do you know Noel Ackchotay?

Jesse Paliotto (21:35)
Right.

Hmm.

Adam Levy (21:52)
fascinating guy. He is a guitarist from Paris. I forget where he lives now, but he's moved out to the countryside. He's not in Paris anymore. And for the past...

10 years, 15 years, he has cranked out a kind of insane amount of music on Bandcamp. And he is somebody who prior to that had put out records on labels. He has a really great record on the, there's a, do you know the label Winter and Winter?

Jesse Paliotto (22:15)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

No.

Adam Levy (22:31)
In the CD era, they made beautiful CDs, beautiful kind of cloth bound, ⁓ like a book almost. And so, know, Noel had put out some records on labels like that, but then he just.

Jesse Paliotto (22:39)
Okay.

Adam Levy (22:47)
It was too slow for him. wanted to just make so he, he made loads of records at home. Sometimes.

He's a great reader so he can sight read. So he would play classical scores and just like overdub the parts and he would do improv things. Sometimes he would even do like lesson books. He played like pages out of the Ray Brown bass book and he was just almost for a while it was like almost every day. He would make a record. He'd make some cool artwork. Boom, done. Next day, wake up.

Jesse Paliotto (23:04)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (23:26)
with nothing and by bedtime he's got a record. And it was really fascinating and I found it fascinating. So I think that was another thing that inspired me to release the acoustic sketches is that Noel's whole approach was just, yeah, just put it out. ⁓ Everything doesn't need all of the pomp and circumstance.

Jesse Paliotto (23:54)
It is odd that you mentioned this ⁓ because one of the questions that have been on my mind all weekend to ask you, and I thought this is such a, like a odd question. It's very existential, ⁓ but you kind of just walked me into it. So I'm going to ask it ⁓ is because you produce a lot, in my opinion, you've produced a lot of music. When I go look at kind of your discography and the other stuff you play on and then.

Adam Levy (24:09)
Okay.

Jesse Paliotto (24:21)
Everything's like, man, Adam's put out so much stuff. And the existential question is, does the world need more music? I think, you know, and I don't mean that in like, ⁓ you know, why the hell is anybody putting music out? But like, I feel like as a musician, most musicians probably ask themselves at some point, like, is this worth me doing? Like, does anybody care? Of course, everybody, every insecure creative person asks themselves that at some point. But there is like this question of like, is there...

Is there too much? there not? There you go on Spotify and there's some crazy statistic about the tens of thousands of songs uploaded every month and you're never every day. And you're like, it does the world need more music? I'm curious how you think about that. And maybe the way to frame it would be, what would you tell somebody who's thinking about releasing some music, but isn't sure is this really worth it?

Adam Levy (25:09)
Hmm.

Jesse Paliotto (25:09)
Sorry, that was a lot of words to put out there on the table. I'll let you digest that for a second.

Adam Levy (25:12)
Ha ha ha.

Hmm

Yeah, Jesse, that's that's a. I'm really not sure because. Honestly, I do have days where I think the answer. Is no, you know, at least music from me.

And other I have other days where I just can't wait to share some new music and.

Boy, I don't really know. mean, does the...

Jesse Paliotto (26:02)
I know, I told you it was a deep existential one. If you hadn't brought up the Noel thing, I don't know if I would have asked, but just the idea of just the volume of music to put out there. And it sort of begs the question, at least for me when I ponder it is, is me producing music about people have asked for it and therefore I'm making it to order? Or is it about me as a creative person doing what I think I'm supposed to be doing with my life?

And I think if I come at it that side, then it doesn't matter what people want. I'm making it because I love it. ⁓ And hopefully there's a match in the middle, but.

Adam Levy (26:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think if you want to make music...

then make music. I mean, you're certainly not hurting anybody by making music or releasing it in the world. I mean, I struggle with this honestly on my Patreon and on YouTube. It's like, does the world need another guitar lesson? You know, does the world need another ⁓ chat about the modes? ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (27:07)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (27:15)
I don't think so, but then I look and I see, well, here's one that 50,000 people liked it or what. Like, so the thing is, like, does the world need more music? No, but somebody out there needs something and you can't possibly know who they are or what they need. And I do find people

Jesse Paliotto (27:25)
Yeah.

Adam Levy (27:44)
over the years who will tell me that something I did a long time ago, a record that I, that maybe I don't even think about that much meant something to them or same with like YouTube or Patreon or something where like a lesson that, sometimes some, there's a thing about creative practice that some, some people look at it as

Jesse Paliotto (27:56)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (28:13)
You know, I'm just going to show up every day and do the work. And that that's my job. It's my job is not even to make finished products or to sell them, but it's just to make a time every day, whatever that time is, an hour or, know, like you hear about people writing books who have to set aside X number of hours to do. So there's some people that feel like you get into a rhythm and that is the practice. It's like meditation practice. If you if you do it,

Jesse Paliotto (28:16)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (28:43)
then you're not having to negotiate with yourself every day about, ⁓ I feel like it has nothing to do with if you feel like it's a practice like going to the gym or meditating or brushing your teeth or like you just do it. And then over time, if you do that as a musician,

songs come out of that and your playing gets ⁓ deeper and you meet other people who either want to hear that music or play that music with you. I think you have to keep making it or ⁓ else

Jesse Paliotto (29:08)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (29:30)
E.

I mean, for me, I kind of don't know what else to do every couple of years. Really, like every couple of years, I think, OK, this will be my last record. There was a period. before we started recording, we were talking about where I lived or I have lived. And I told you I've moved a lot. And in 2012 or 13, had been living in New York and I.

Jesse Paliotto (29:38)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Levy (29:59)
Decided to move to LA for a while and I rented this kind of big loft ⁓ kind of open loft space downtown and I got all my stuff out of two different storage places that I had in New York and I had it all trucked out to LA and ⁓ Then I got to I got to this apartment in LA and it all showed up and for the first time in a really long maybe ever I saw everything

that I had all in one room. And there was a lot of it. from different lives, different apartments, different relationships, different, it was a lot. But a ⁓ big chunk of it was like CDs. That my things I had made. And so at that time I decided, okay, the world doesn't need any more CDs. You know, that's, yeah, I think that's really true. But.

Jesse Paliotto (30:33)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Physical studies, yeah.

Adam Levy (30:59)
Digitally, I mean, I guess everything has a footprint. Putting your music on a server takes energy. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (31:03)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (31:12)
but

Gosh, I just don't know. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (31:19)
That's a tough question. And I

apologize for putting you on the spot, but when you were talking about but Noel, it made me think about it a little bit and just you put out so much. think, you know, one of the things that also strikes me about this is. ⁓

I'm going to go on a little bit of a rant. know, if anybody wants to put the podcast on 3X speed, ignore me, please do that now. ⁓ Is, know, we very much like have commoditized art, right? Where art is about creating a product that's sellable. And, you know, the reality of being a person who is alive today, trying to pay bills is you got to think that way because you got bills to pay. I need to think about how to sell this.

Adam Levy (31:40)
Bring it on, let's do it.

Jesse Paliotto (32:03)
But there is like a part of me that more identifies with art for art's sake, where I'm making this because it's...

I'm making a statement or I'm processing an idea or I'm trying to capture this feeling or it really is divorced from any commercial associations. It's just the thing. And if I think of it from that angle, then making music is like talking. Like, do I have to have a point every time I talk to my neighbor? No, this is just what I do as a human. When I'm interacting with other humans is I capture my thoughts and I express things and I ask for feedback. And once in a while, there's a great conversation that may totally change somebody's life.

It may be a conversation they remember 50 years from now. I remember when Jesse told me that one time I had to, you know, do this and I did it and it changed. That could be, but 99.9 % of my conversations are not like that. So like maybe that's mentality I go into music with is this doesn't, I don't need to always change the world, but I do need to keep talking, right? And in that there's value aside from dollar signs, you know.

Adam Levy (33:03)
Yeah, I mean, that's really what it is. That's much more ⁓ well put than than what you know, anything I could say really. Making music makes me feel alive. So I do it for that reason. When I when I don't want to when I don't play music for a couple of days, for whatever reason, just life, you know, whatever, I start to feel

Jesse Paliotto (33:19)
Mm. I love that.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (33:33)
not good, you know, that's like, and then I go and I play the guitar again and I go, ⁓ that's what that's, that's what I was missing. So it's really as simple as that, you know, and I just want to say this is just my own little rant. In some ways, I wish

Jesse Paliotto (33:34)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (33:56)
There was less music, not less music on the internet necessarily, but less music in public spaces. This was just not at all what you asked me, but recent, recent, you know, recently I went to a coffee shop to try to, ⁓ to do just write in my journal and they're just the music is like inescapable. It's really hard to go into a coffee shop, at least around here in New York.

where there's not a lot of, ⁓ where music isn't kind of just there. Same in restaurants, there's always music. I actually had to put in my earbuds and listen to, I found that you can find like on YouTube and maybe some other places like Cafe Ambience, which just sounds like people drinking coffee.

Jesse Paliotto (34:47)
That

is a fake coffee house sound in the real coffee house. That's funny.

Adam Levy (34:51)
Yes, because the music was

just a little too loud and a little bit all over the place. It wasn't like, they're really thoughtfully curating this mood. It wasn't at all like that. It was just some random all over. So ⁓ I wish there were, I wish there was less music in those places, but yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (35:15)
I, you know, I, I had recently thought about this. I might've even been this morning. First thing I was out early today and I went by this place and it had this painting you could see through the kind of glass in this building. I'm like, that's a cool painting. ⁓ and then of course your brain, ⁓ wouldn't it be cool to be able to be a painter and make stuff like that? And I'm thought like, and then I wasn't listening to music in the car and I'm like, as a musician, I always feel like I should be listening to music. Like, so should be learning stuff, but painters don't drive around with paintings inside their car all day. Right.

Adam Levy (35:44)
Ha

ha ha ha! ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (35:45)
There's one painting I saw once. didn't

have to watch paintings all the entire time in the car.

Adam Levy (35:51)
That's amazing. Yeah, it's true. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (35:56)
I don't know why, like musicians just like, like, can we get a break? Like, I love music, but like, yeah, sometimes I just need to think straight.

Adam Levy (36:02)
That's really true. Yeah, I'm sure.

like, if you're a painter, that doesn't mean you have to go to the museums every day to look at paintings. If you're a photographer, don't have to like what it means really to be an artist is that everything is going to inspire you. You don't have to go look at a bunch of other paintings. You just look at the world and that is your input.

Jesse Paliotto (36:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yes.

Adam Levy (36:29)
and your output is the painting. And I think it's the same with music. I know what you mean, like you think you're always supposed to be studying and learning and stuff. And there's periods where that feels really good, but all of the world is your input. Your output is music, but all of your world, your senses, the story, time, everything, that's all, it's all input.

Jesse Paliotto (36:37)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, there's, well, and then a hundred years ago, there was no way to do it. There's some of most amazing musicians of all of humanity did it. But the only way they could ever listen to music was to go to a live concert. Besides that, nothing, unless they made it themselves. And they did just fine. So. ⁓

Adam Levy (37:12)
Exactly.

Jesse Paliotto (37:15)
some cases a lot better. I wanted to ask, speaking of releasing music, you've got one coming up, Household? Is that right? Can you talk about that for a second?

Adam Levy (37:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Sure. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (37:30)
I got to listen to a little bit of it and it sounded awesome. ⁓ Electric, it's a trio quartet. Maybe you could talk through just the mechanics of it.

Adam Levy (37:32)
Okay. Thanks.

Yeah, it's a all in it's a quintet. There's not five people on every song, but the band is five people. So I'm playing electric and acoustic. There's another guitarist, his name is Chris Bruce. He's playing electric and acoustic. And he produced the record and co-wrote about half of the record with me. There's a bassist named Alan Hampton. He's an LA guy.

Jesse Paliotto (37:43)
Quintet, okay.

Adam Levy (38:08)
and a saxophonist, a really multi-instrumentalist named Josh Johnson. plays saxophone and keyboards and electronics. He works a lot with Jeff Parker, a great guitar player. And ⁓ the drummer is Griffin Goldsmith, who you might not know. He's not really a jazz guy, but he plays in a band called Dawes, which is like a rock band, of, folk rock band. ⁓

And I really wanted to do something. I didn't want to do spry 2, know, 2.0, especially after I already had like the electric version and the acoustic version. I wanted to try something totally different. And so I talked to my friend, Chris Bruce, who's a great producer. He works with Michelle and DeGiocello. I think he just won a Grammy for a production credit on

Jesse Paliotto (38:47)
Right.

Adam Levy (39:06)
I'm not sure which record I should know with her. He's, he's worked a lot with Joe Henry. ⁓ he's just a really incredible musician. And so I asked him, we, during COVID, he and I had done some remote projects together where he would just say, send me a melody. And I would just, I would just record like a melody in time with no chord changes or anything. And

Jesse Paliotto (39:17)
Hmm.

Adam Levy (39:34)
Like a day later, he'd send me back this incredible, he's really good at making stuff happen at home, just on his laptop. There'd be drums and orchestrations and beautiful harmony out of the barest of ideas. I was really impressed by that. So when I was getting ready to make a new record, I thought, well, let's see where that can go. know, so,

Jesse Paliotto (39:45)
Yeah.

Adam Levy (40:02)
He and I sent a bunch of ideas back and forth and made little demos here and there. And then I said I wanted to do it in California. I don't know why. I just did. And he helped me put the band together and we recorded it at my friend's house in the desert out in Tehachapi. Do you know where that is? And my friend Lynn Earls, she engineered the record and she had a house in Tehachapi and we just set up in her house in different rooms with mics.

Jesse Paliotto (40:22)
Huh? Yeah.

Adam Levy (40:32)
and headphones ⁓ and recorded it over, guess, three days, mostly playing altogether live, a few overdubs, a few sprinkles of kind of magic dust here and there. But mostly what you hear really happened that way. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (40:46)
Yes.

That's

And when is it released? For Reels Reels.

Adam Levy (40:54)
I,

the end of May, I haven't even picked a date. This is so silly. It's just, I need to just pick a date, but honestly, I'm waiting on, it doesn't matter. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (41:06)
There's cogs are turning, but the output at some point will probably be end of May, sounds like. Yeah.

Adam Levy (41:12)
It'll be end of me. Yeah. Thanks for

asking. Yeah. I'm really proud of this record. I feel like it's different from anything I've done. And yet. I mean, it's how it came together is different and the texture of it is different because. I don't think I've ever put out my own record with that many people on it. I've made a lot of trio records with either organ trio with organ and drums or bass and drums.

or I guess on some of my, made a singer songwriter record a few years ago called Accidental Courage, where all in the band is that big, but most of the songs were kind of subsets of the larger band. ⁓ Can I just mention a brief plug for that record? Accidental Courage is a record that, I mean, I'm terrible at promoting ⁓ what I do. And so sometimes records come out and just,

Jesse Paliotto (41:54)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (42:11)
people don't even notice them. I'm really proud of that record. ⁓ So Ben Montench is on organ from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. ⁓ Daryl Jones is on bass, who people might know from playing with Sting or playing with John Scofield back in the day. mean, he's one of the greatest bass players alive on electric bass. Charlie Drayton on drums. And then Madison Cunningham is on guitar.

Jesse Paliotto (42:26)
Yeah.

Adam Levy (42:42)
Gabby Moreno is on it and she sings a duet with me. It's a really cool record that, a song that I co-wrote with Larry Golding's, I recorded on there. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (42:47)
Yeah.

And

the album title is Accidental Courage, you said, right?

Adam Levy (42:57)
Accidental

courage and I'm sad to be clear. I'm singing songs on that record. It's it's not a jazz record. It's it's songs That's a whole other side of what I do

Jesse Paliotto (43:01)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that was sort of on my mind when I, cause I'd listened to some of the, some of the, previous singer songwriter stuff. There was one, uh, is it Portuguese subtitles? Which is super cool. Um, and that was when we started, you know, at beginning of the podcast, I'm like, man, you do so much. Like where is, how do you bring all this together? And it's just, you know, I think your answer was pretty much, I'm interested in lots of stuff. So that's how it works. Um, but that's cool. And the albums with doing like a bigger.

band on ⁓ Household. Did you dig it? Was it kind of like, want to do that again next time? Or pros and cons?

Adam Levy (43:46)
I really do. Well, let's see the, the, the pro side is that, you know, I can take my hands off the strings and there's still lots of really cool stuff going on. And then when I start to play again, I feel like, uh, there's a lot happening and I can like catch, there's different waves to catch. You know, I can, it's really

Jesse Paliotto (44:12)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (44:15)
exciting. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (44:18)
I love that image because I think with you can feel like everything has to be arranged but the idea that there's all these options in the music because of so many people's kind of presence and what they're doing that's cool.

Adam Levy (44:30)
Yeah, there's, I can't really think of a downside.

Jesse Paliotto (44:43)
And everybody's daily rates probably.

Adam Levy (44:44)
Well,

yeah, yes, it was a more expensive, I just did my taxes and I was like, oh yeah, this record costs a lot. You know, when you're doing, you don't think about it, but when you have to see it all in one place, it's like, oh, this record costs a lot of money. But I mostly have in my life made trio records because I like the open space of it. And I feel like three is a neat.

Jesse Paliotto (44:59)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (45:12)
Number where you can still have a conversation and nobody's talking over anybody else, Five like if you if you asked me Hey, do you want to go to lunch with three people or five people? I would say three people going out to lunch with five people makes me anxious because I think yeah, people are gonna talk over each other or ⁓ Or nobody gets to really finish any ideas because there's just but it's and so I

Jesse Paliotto (45:18)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (45:41)
I I kind of shied away from doing stuff like that on my records. But over the years I've made two records with a guy named Todd Sikafous. Do you know him? He's a bassist and composer. Really amazing musician. He won a ⁓ Tony recently. He was part of this musical called Hadestown, which was a huge hit musical on Broadway that started from just a very

Jesse Paliotto (45:53)
Mm-mm.

Okay.

Adam Levy (46:10)
humble place and became this big thing. And he wrote the orchestrations for it and he won a Tony for that. But he's a bassist and composer that I've been friends with for years. And the way that he tends to make records is he gets too many people.

Jesse Paliotto (46:20)
Hmm.

Okay?

Adam Levy (46:27)
and but records them in isolated way even though everybody's playing at once. Too many people, I'm being a little silly there. There's never too many people, but he gets together large groups and sometimes writes it out, but also sometimes leaves things open. And then when he goes to mix it, now he's got all these opposite, rather than let's record three people and then do a bunch of overdubs.

Jesse Paliotto (46:33)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

You're right.

Adam Levy (46:57)
His thing

is like, let's have the overdubs happen in real time where people are reacting to each other instead of sitting in a booth with headphones on and trying to react to a click or whatever. So he likes to kind of start with too much stuff going on. He never discourages anybody from trying something. And I've made a few records with him that way. ⁓ So I felt bold.

Jesse Paliotto (47:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (47:27)
emboldened by that to try that because the way that we recorded with five people, it would have been easy enough to mute somebody or just change the perspective. It's not, it wasn't just a one mic recording.

Jesse Paliotto (47:38)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting concept to be like, I feel like most people are additive. Like I'm going to record something and add stuff to it as needed as opposed to, and what the opposite would be a reductive. Like I'm going to create a bunch of stuff. And then it also feels like maybe it's a little bit of what your personal preferences. Like, I willing to sit in the editing room for a while with a lot of options on my table playing with combos, as opposed to like, all I have is this trio and I can just sit here and think about what I want to add, you know, different, different mindset.

Adam Levy (48:12)
Yeah, and I'm more comfortable in the latter, honestly. I like a trio thing and I'm not the one who had to mix this record. So that what you described doesn't sound fun to me, but Lynn Earls who makes this record loves that stuff. She loves it. And Chris Bruce, the producer who also had a hand in the mixing, he loves that stuff. So I'm happy to do my part and then other people can sort it out.

Jesse Paliotto (48:15)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (48:42)
⁓ you know, the, other tricky part for me is like, want everybody to just sound glorious. And sometimes when you listen to old older records, especially like, wow, the saxophone sounds amazing, but that piano sounds kind of small. Like it doesn't sound like a real piano, like because they had to compress it or shrink it down to make the saxophone sound beautiful or

Jesse Paliotto (49:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (49:09)
the drums or whatever. Like it's really hard. The more people you have, the harder it is, I think as a mixer to make everybody sound really great. ⁓ But Lin did it and Chris did it. And that's, I think another thing, reason why I've been a little afraid of bigger recordings is like, I just want everybody to sound ⁓ glorious and fabulous.

Jesse Paliotto (49:39)
Yeah, not feel forced to make trade-offs in order to accommodate, if I can spit that out. It feels like it puts you back in algebra clash. Like this equation has 15 variables. This is getting harder to solve. I feel that. ⁓ I wanted to ask on ⁓ songwriting. Are you OK if we got to go a few more minutes? I know we're kind of, OK.

Adam Levy (49:44)
Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. See now we're in

the same boat because you're going have too much of an interview. You're going to have to trim it down. So I hope that's OK. But I'm fine.

Jesse Paliotto (50:04)
Yeah, right. I'm discovering

my own preference. guess I like to sit there and cut. I'm more reductive than additive in my. ⁓ I wanted to ask about songwriting. ⁓ Like, do you have a method to your madness or is it? I know like you were kind of riffing a little earlier on this idea of just doing the work show up every day, do the practice and stuff will emerge. Is that really yours or do you kind of have more of a structured process to how you do it?

Adam Levy (50:12)
Okay.

I've had different processes in different seasons. ⁓ There's been times in my life when I belonged to a weekly songwriting club where you had to show up on Monday with a new song and you had to be open to ⁓ constructive criticism. different groups I've belonged to have had different kind of ⁓ house rules.

One group I was part of for a while, you could only bring in something brand new. ⁓ A different group that I was part of, it was okay to bring something back later on if you had done some revisions and you felt like you had moved, if you'd listened to what people said and also just done some work on your own, you felt like, ⁓ now this song is ready. You could bring it back. Having to bring in a new song every week,

is more in that like do the work way. I think it's just incredible. If you do a year of that, you're going to write 52 songs in a year. And I have had years when I've written maybe 50 songs in a year. And that's by showing up and doing the work. ⁓ Other times I write and that's when I write alone. But when I write, sometimes I co-write with people where I get in a room and I write and all that goes out the window because

Jesse Paliotto (51:36)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (52:02)
You just have to be present and the two of you have to keep moving the song forward until it's a song. So it's a little bit of a different process. When I'm writing on my own, it's almost always the same ⁓ process, which is I write the words first. I think of a story that I want to tell. And a lot of times I'll think of a kind of a meter or

Jesse Paliotto (52:15)
Yeah.

Adam Levy (52:31)
a kind of a shape to the poetry of it, even before I have a melody or chords or anything. And I'll get the whole story. I want to tell a story in meter in rhyme. And then once I have that, then I'll kind of read it out loud. And that might be an hour or two or three of work to get it all on the page. And then I'll.

I'll read it out loud and see where I naturally kind of go up and down and see if there's some melody already in there and kind of built into what I've written as a poem. And then if I can find a melody, then I go to chords. Really the guitar is the last part of it, which might be different than people would expect of me because the guitar is so much of what I do. But it's very rare that I write

Jesse Paliotto (53:15)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (53:24)
guitar ditty and then put words to it. I've done that more recently but that's not my normal. It hasn't been my normal.

Jesse Paliotto (53:34)
Even for instrumental music, are you writing words?

Adam Levy (53:37)
That's a great question. Not, I mean, yes and no. I'm not like when I write instrumental music, I'm not writing a word for every note, but quite often musical phrases will have.

a verbal phrase in my mind. Like there's a tune on Sprite that's called Second Best and the bass line on it goes. And in my head I'm thinking second best, second best. Like that's what I think of. Like I don't sing it out loud on the bandstand, but that's there. And that goes. Like I've.

Jesse Paliotto (54:16)
Hmm.

Adam Levy (54:27)
written a lot of tunes just out taking a walk. And so I'm taking a walk and having some words helps me kind of remember the thing. It makes it a little stickier in my brain. So if I think of a melody and I put, mean, sometimes the words are really dumb. Like nobody needs to hear them. They're just, you know, I had a song in my first group that I wrote for, I had a song called Lois the Pie Queen.

Jesse Paliotto (54:37)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Adam Levy (54:53)
And because I was living in Oakland and there was maybe still is a diner called Lois the Pie Queen. And I wrote this little song, you know, Lois the Pie Queen. Like I had this whole song in my head about this fictional character of Lois the Pie Queen. I just think words and rhythm and melody are. They're all together in harmony is its own world to me, but melody and rhythm and words.

Jesse Paliotto (55:17)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (55:24)
are inextricable. If you talk, there's rhythm. If you talk, there's melody.

Jesse Paliotto (55:32)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (55:34)
And as you can go on YouTube, there's lots of funny people on YouTube, creators who will like find bits of spoken word stuff and put harmony to it. You know, so it's a thing. It's already there. Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (55:41)
Yes.

Yeah.

Are you familiar with the guitarist John Gomm?

Adam Levy (55:52)
A little bit, yeah. He's amazing.

Jesse Paliotto (55:53)
He, I got to interview,

he's, he's super cool. I got to interview him and he had a really similar perspective. He also writes words, ⁓ for even instrumental music. And he said something also very similar. So you're just kind of bringing it back as theme for me that I think he said it. The most important part of a melody is not the actual, the pitch. It's the phrasing. That's what makes a melody. Is it, ⁓ you know,

Like Billie Jean, like it's only three notes, but you know it because of the phrasing and the where it's put. so, ⁓ yeah, kind of that same idea. Like it's all wrapped up rhythm words, that whole concept of like, that's identifiable.

Adam Levy (56:35)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah. And all of that helps me, helps it stay alive in my mind, you ⁓ The rhythm, the rhyme, the sound of the words, the phrasing, like you were just saying. ⁓ People sometimes ask me, like, if I, when I play a show with my songs, I might do 10 songs. People, how do you remember all those words, you know? And

Jesse Paliotto (56:53)
Yeah.

Adam Levy (57:05)
⁓ It's not just words, like I could not memorize a speech, but somehow the words in rhythm in rhyme makes it all

Jesse Paliotto (57:10)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (57:19)
Yeah, and I want to also just, ⁓ it's a bit, not quite this, but I think related. I recently ran into a friend of mine who's one of the best guitar players I know in New York. I don't want to say his name because he shared this with me and I feel like it was kind of ⁓ a, just a intimate thing to share, but ⁓ I asked him what he's working on because he's a really incredible electric guitar player and classical guitar player and...

people listening to this podcast probably have heard him. I ⁓ asked him what he was working on and he said, know, ⁓ I'm going back and learning songs with words. And he's not somebody who's known as a singer. I don't think he performs as a singer. But I said, like, what kind of songs? Like I thought he was maybe talking about like.

Jesse Paliotto (58:06)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (58:16)
I know. I don't know what I thought. I was like, it's just like, you know, just like simple songs, songs we grew up on. It's like all my life I've just been so focused on the guitar that I really kind of took the words for granted. And I want to go back and get inside the stories of some of these songs that I've played and never really thought about. And it really struck me.

Because I think it's something, especially in jazz,

It can be easy to overlook that stuff. You you hear the old guy, you know, like guys like Jim Hall would say, you know, you got to learn the words or Ed Bickert would say that. And it's easy to say it, but not everybody really wants to do that work because they think that what they're supposed to be doing is working on arpeggios or whatever it is. And the songs are

Jesse Paliotto (58:53)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (59:23)
Like to Victor Young, the guy that wrote Stella by Starlight, that song is not E minor seven flat five, A seven, C minor seven, F seven. that it's part of it, but that's not what that song is. You know, but that's how we look at it. You know, we're like, I got these voicings out of this Mick Goodrick book and and I'm, I'm going to try these, you know, extended.

Jesse Paliotto (59:27)
Mm-hmm.

True. Yeah.

Adam Levy (59:51)
Inversion, you know, whatever. Like I do that, too. I mean, I think it's funny because we all do it. But just once in a while, think about what the song meant to the person who wrote it. And especially if you're talking about a jazz standard. Well, there's a reason that we still play songs that were written like in the 30s and 40s and 50s.

Jesse Paliotto (1:00:09)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (1:00:22)
And sometimes we still play them because they're hip and we like being hip. sometimes they the thing is they we know a lot of these songs because Miles Davis recorded them maybe, you know, but Miles Davis would have never thought to record these songs if they weren't popular songs. And the reason they were popular is because the populace liked them.

Jesse Paliotto (1:00:34)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (1:00:47)
regular people like them because they told stories that people wanted to hear or could relate to or made them laugh or made them cry or whatever. And yeah, the melody is part of that and the harmony is part of that. But it just, think it gets overlooked. And it wasn't until I started writing songs, which came later to me, I didn't start out writing songs. I played guitar for decades before I ever wrote a song.

⁓ I had my moment with that. I started transcribing lyrics. I'd put on a record and you can easily Google all the Bob Dylan lyrics that were ever written. But I would just sit and transcribe them because just the way that you would transcribe a Lester Young solo or...

Jesse Paliotto (1:01:34)
I have never heard anybody say that. That is really interesting.

Adam Levy (1:01:38)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:01:39)
And actually, and the idea of transcribing them, not like I went and looked them up on Google. Like I actually sat there and listened.

Adam Levy (1:01:45)
Yeah, knowing you might even get a word or two wrong, and that's still OK. Like the same with if you were transcribing a Coltrane soul, you might get something wrong. But you put the headphones on, you open up your notebook, and you write down what you hear as best as you can.

Jesse Paliotto (1:01:50)
Mm-hmm.

It's I don't know why it just the way you were describing it kind of at the beginning there really Put it into contrast in my own head that like how much we approach If you play jazz on any instrument right now, typically you approach it in this very Extrapolated manner. It's like this Photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy you've gotten to this place where all it is is Those are the chords that are the background for my solo I just need to know the scales so that I can do my thing, you know, like no, that's the song your thing is like

13 steps away from what the thing actually is. ⁓ It's a very weird, and extrapolate is the wrong word, I'm struggling, but there's another word, it's just you're very, we're very distanced from it. It's very weird because yeah, and a lot of them came from musical theater, right? So they were being sung on stage with people were loving this, and this is pre big budget movies. This was primary entertainment. People really connected with them.

Adam Levy (1:02:58)
Yeah. And yeah. And like you were saying earlier, you know, the 100 years ago when the only way people could hear music was to, you know, hear somebody play it. There was a time when, you know, the only time you were going to hear some of these songs was if you went to the theater and you heard them and then, know, then they became popularized and people would buy song folios and sit at the piano and play these songs. But they start, they took up playing these songs because they, they saw

you know, Mary Martin or, you know, somebody on a stage who made them laugh or cry or whatever. And they're like, oh, can I somehow sort of kind of get that in my living room? You know, like, well, yeah, sure. Here's. Yeah. So.

Jesse Paliotto (1:03:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was talking with this guy, Alex Miscoe, couple weeks ago, a fingerstyle guitar player does acoustic, does really innovative stuff. And I'm like, is the current version of like a lot, especially fingerstyle acoustic players, and you see them all over YouTube and they're covering songs, is that the current version of what early quartets were doing with musical theater? We're going to take a song that's currently popular out there in the space, put it on our instruments with our vocabulary because, because

It was contemporary at the time. They were playing stuff that was out there in culture. So like if I do a rearrangement of Michael Jackson's song on acoustic guitar, am I kind of doing what, I don't know, they were doing back in the 50s with lot of this cover stuff?

I mean, not to put myself on the level or anybody on the level with what was going on, because I'll hail the bebop heroes, but there's this idea of reinterpretation of current music is what they were doing. And right now we've gotten historically distant from it. And so we're really interpreting stuff from 100 years ago.

Adam Levy (1:04:49)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

Jesse Paliotto (1:04:52)
What would it look like to be, to do current contemporary's interpretations at the same historical distance they were doing them, stuff from the last 20 years?

Adam Levy (1:05:00)
Yeah.

Jesse Paliotto (1:05:04)
Interesting.

Adam Levy (1:05:04)
I don't do a lot of it, I've done a little, like I have this quartet, I have an instrumental quartet with Rich Hinman. He's a pedal steel player. And most of the music we do now is original music and then some older music. But there was a time when we were, because we've been a band for 15 or 20 years now, there was a time when we were trying to fold in some contemporary stuff. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (1:05:33)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (1:05:34)
We did a song by a of horses called The Funeral. We did a song by a band called The Knife. ⁓

Jesse Paliotto (1:05:37)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (1:05:44)
And, know, earlier I mentioned this guy, Axiote, before he got into this doing band camp kind of an amazing amount of music on band camp when he was making more traditional, here's my new CD, he did a whole record of songs by Kylie Minogue, a pop singer. And it's beautiful. Like it's not done like in any kind of like avant or ironic way. It's like.

Jesse Paliotto (1:06:02)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Adam Levy (1:06:11)
But this is a guy who had already made some very wild records, you know. I fell in love with Noel's music.

would on some very experimental records. And then when that one came out, it's mostly a solo fingerstyle record playing songs written by or recorded by Kylie Minogue. And that record is...

Jesse Paliotto (1:06:31)
Yeah.

Adam Levy (1:06:36)
probably 20 years old. at that time, those, you know, we're still kind of contemporary pop songs. Pat Metheny a few years ago recorded a version of Don't Know Why.

Jesse Paliotto (1:06:49)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (1:06:53)
Like, why not? You know?

Jesse Paliotto (1:06:53)
You see Brad

Meldow doing, he's a piano player, but doing like jazzy kind of interpretations of Radiohead. You know, like, that's cool.

Adam Levy (1:07:00)
Yeah.

Like yeah, because as you said, like the bebop guys, well not the bebop guys exactly, but Miles Davis and John Coltrane and... ⁓

I only that's just my I think of bebop. think of like playing. Yeah, like playing his own tunes, but but he also recorded, you know, Charlie Parker with Strings is all songs that were hit songs at the time. I don't know if I forgot was this, but yeah, they were recording songs that everybody at that time knew. And so it's kind of funny now to be.

Jesse Paliotto (1:07:20)
like Charlie Parker and yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Adam Levy (1:07:43)
doing, you know, we still play the same songs, but it's like 80 years after they were written or, you know, something like that. So. Oh, like. Fine. I don't know. I'm not. mean, I'm terrible at it. I really don't follow current me. If somebody said to me to play like, can you play a Billie Eilish song or something like. No, when I hear it, I like it, but I just haven't I haven't thought to.

perform it or record it but but why not if it's if a song is good it's good

Jesse Paliotto (1:08:19)
It's good. Yeah. I think it was just, it's almost like if you could work out the equation. Okay. So John Coltrane recorded my favorite things and it had come out as a movie. I don't know. I'm making this up. Somebody's going to correct me probably 20 years before he had recorded it. So if I go back in time 20 years from today to what came out, funny enough, it was actually Nora Jones. Come away with me. ⁓

And I take those songs and I reinterpret them through some sort of instrumental, like that's actually closer to like what they were doing in terms of like their audience. ⁓ So yeah, it's a funny, like mental exercise. I think what would I do if I was going to do it like that? ⁓

Adam Levy (1:08:56)
I think

you just gave me a great idea for my next record. Thank you, Jesse.

Jesse Paliotto (1:09:00)
Yes, yes.

I don't know if it was nor Jones or just the whole thing, but we'll see. I guess we all shall wait and see. I won't ask you to say it on the spot. You got to keep some of those things secret. let me do a quick quick final question and then we can wrap up. I know we're over time and you've been so patient, gracious. Thank you, man.

I wanted to ask about your patreon channel. You do a lot of stuff on YouTube But I think there's additional stuff you do in patreon Can you just talk about that really quick kind of give people a hint or maybe some insights on what they could get involved with there?

Adam Levy (1:09:31)
Yeah,

so my Patreon is like a much more...

I don't know. assume at this point everybody knows what Patreon is. So I'm not going to give a spiel about what is Patreon. But the lessons there, a lot of it, it started with the stuff I was doing on YouTube. But I realized that with Patreon, I could just include a lot more assets like PDFs and ⁓ jam tracks and just kind of go deeper in a way that YouTube doesn't really let you do. I could also do

Jesse Paliotto (1:09:44)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (1:10:11)
deeper dives on things like I've done a bunch of things on my Patreon where I call them the through line where for a whole month I'll do four or five different takes on the same tune or the same concept. I might do a whole month on all of me or I might do a whole month on ⁓ melodic minor sounds or something like that. And of course you can do that on YouTube. You can do whatever you want on YouTube, but

Jesse Paliotto (1:10:17)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (1:10:39)
Unfortunately, people don't see them necessarily in the way that you release them. Stuff kind of comes to their attention depending on the algorithm, whereas on YouTube, I mean, on Patreon, if I'm doing a five part series, as I publish those things, those things go directly to the people who are subscribed to my Patreon. So it's a much more effective teaching tool. YouTube just...

Jesse Paliotto (1:10:43)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Levy (1:11:05)
I use it and I really enjoy it, but it's just much more kind of throwing stuff to the wind. on Patreon, it's like, and then also there's more direct communication. It just feels a lot more like I'm connected to the people that are there. And I take their suggestion. If people are like, it'd be great if you could do this or talk about this.

Jesse Paliotto (1:11:10)
Yeah, a little chaotic.

Adam Levy (1:11:33)
I'm always asking people what they think and then at the end of every year on my Patreon I send out this kind of questionnaire where I try to get to know my patrons even better. It's just, what would you like to see more of? What's interesting? What's curious? What's frustrating? Whatever. So it's a much more...

Well, it's that it's that kind of experience rather than YouTube where there's just a lot going on that might distract you away from what you go into YouTube. Do search for something. And then, you next thing you know, you're you're watching a video on 67 ways to cook an egg or whatever. had nothing to do with why he sat down.

Jesse Paliotto (1:12:06)
Mm-hmm.

Ha!

probably literally a video. Yeah, and think even there's on your tier two level, there's like lessons people will get with you one-on-one is included in the package. And so there's a lot of that sort of much more focused relational teaching going on there.

Adam Levy (1:12:27)
Right.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, there's one-on-one lessons. I've also done a bunch of interviews where, you know, I've had great guests on like Charlie Hunter and Julian Lodge. And, um, of course I'm going to draw a blank now. Miles Okazaki.

Jesse Paliotto (1:12:43)
Hmm.

Adam Levy (1:12:53)
Yeah, it's great.

Jesse Paliotto (1:12:55)
That's awesome. ⁓ So we can put, we'll make sure to put links in the show notes so people can find their way over. It's probably worth asking. We haven't talked a lot, even though we were talking about YouTube there at the end here for a second, a lot about your online presence. If people wanted to keep up with what you're doing, where should they go find you online? Is there any good place they should go hit you up?

Adam Levy (1:13:17)
I guess the hub would be my website, is adamlevy.com. All of my gigs are listed there. So if you wanted to come see me play someplace, you could see that. There's also links there to my teaching. If you wanted to get a lesson, you could find that there. There's links there to my True Fire videos. So if you're interested in my True Fire courses or my Patreon, yeah, the best to start with adamlevy.com and that there's links there.

Jesse Paliotto (1:13:20)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Levy (1:13:47)
to get to wherever you want to go.

Jesse Paliotto (1:13:50)
That's your gateway drug to all things Adam Levy. Once you start, you can't go back. It's the medical marijuana that's going to get you on the path. Sorry. ⁓ You can tell I've been talking too long when I'm making dumb jokes. ⁓

Adam Levy (1:13:52)
Yeah.

I like it.

Jesse Paliotto (1:14:09)
Anything we didn't get to get to today that you're like, I was hoping to mention this and we just didn't get a chance. I just want to give a second if there's anything like that.

Adam Levy (1:14:15)
Yeah, last year I wrote this book called ⁓ String Theories and it's done really well on Amazon, which has amazed me. I'll just say two things about it really quickly. One is that book is kind of like ⁓ when I was telling you about the I made a record that started as a YouTube and I made

another record that started as iPhone demos and turn it like string theories started as my YouTube channel. And then at some point, a friend of mine, my own Ethan, who co-wrote the book with me said, I think you've already written the book. You just don't know it. I was like, really? He said, yeah, check it out. And so a lot of the string theories book is kind of taking stuff from my YouTube channel and turning it into something that makes sense on, on the page.

Jesse Paliotto (1:15:12)
⁓ yeah.

Adam Levy (1:15:13)
And then I've since then, just in the last couple of months, taken it into a new medium, which is a audiobook. That's what's new is like the String Theories book is now available as an audiobook. So lessons that begin as YouTube then kind of developed into a book. now Ethan and I narrate the audiobook and we recorded a bunch of cool little interstitial guitar music for it as well.

Jesse Paliotto (1:15:42)
the book actually was interesting. I looked at that online and there's been a number of resources like that that I find fascinating. There was like an old deck of cards by like Brian Eno that was like creative ideas for moving your production. Yes!

That is funny. So go get the deck, but get Adam Levy's book, which is going to have even more insights that are guitar specific, I think. All right, Adam, thank you so much for being here today. I'm going to wrap up, particularly because I got some background noise going on here. But thank you so much for being a part of this. Thanks, everybody else, for joining us.

Jesse Paliotto. Love talking about making music here on the Guitar Journal and really grateful for Adam's time and for y'all for being with us today. Have a great one this week. We'll catch you next time.