Soundtracking: Interview - Adam Merrin of The 88!

About SOUNDTRACKING:

Soundtracking is a weekly column featuring indie and alternative music, published every Tuesday by Laura Cushing on Gather.com.  As an official Gather Music Correspondent, I'm pleased to bring my knowledge of indie and alternative music to the community. Soundtracking will feature some of the best up-and-coming bands in indie music today. We bring you interviews, CD reviews, music playlists and mp3 downloads, and music discussions!

ST: This is our second interview, right? We did this before – what, about a year ago was it?

Adam: It was a little over a year ago, for The Midnight Hurrah.

ST: You've done so much since then! I was checking out your page with all the television placements, commercial placements. I know the Microsoft Zune, when we saw that commercial, I said “Wait... I know that song!”

Adam: It's been a crazy year. We've been having such a good time with this. We've been so busy. There's always something exciting going on with the band. It's so much fun for everybody. We put so much work into it, but to see all these results is just really rewarding for everybody. It makes it all worth it. We enjoy what we do – we love playing live, and touring.

ST: Did you have to seek these out, or did people just come to you and say “Hey, can we use this song for our commercial, or our show?

Adam: It's a little bit of both. When we first finished our album, Kind of Light , we believed in it so much that we made thousands of free samplers. We took like three or four songs and just duplicated a ton of them. We would stand out in front of all the good shows in town and pass them out to the crowd, hundreds a night. I remember standing out in front of a Foo Fighters concert and we passed out like 800 in fifteen minutes. We were just kind of known for doing that. And we noticed more people coming to our shows, more people talking about us. It definitely helped. I couldn't recommend it more to any band that's starting out. It's some really good advice that somebody gave us. And now I'd love to pass it along to other people. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was passing out some CDs at a Supergrass show and one of them wound up in the hands of a guy named Danny Benair who is an agent in the business who places music in films and television. So he heard the CD on the way home, called us the next day and said 'I'd love to represent you'.

ST: Oh, that's great!

Adam: We started working with him. At the time, I never really knew that there was such a huge market for this. I think back then we kind of caught the wave of a bunch of independent bands starting getting their music on TV shows and stuff. It's funny, because this wasn't in our initial plan of how to get out there. It definitely helped us.

ST: Since the last time I talked to you, did you have a bit of a lineup change?

Adam: We did. Since the making of Over and Over, we have a new drummer and a new bass player. And we actually lost a guitar player. So we're a four piece now, and the band sounds the best it's ever been. The lineup as it is now is something I've always wished for. Our old bass player became a father this year. We were touring so much, and every time we would leave – even just for a weekend – he said it would just be so hard on him and his family, to leave his new baby. He just told us that the touring was getting to be too much. We all felt really bad about it, because we had such a long history together and he's a great guy. But we all really understood where he was coming from. Well, I called my friend Todd, who was in another band called Green and Yellow TV – they were an LA band around town. Todd was the singer in that band, and they had just recently broken up. So he was my first choice to fill in for Carlos. It was just perfect timing- he said he would love to do it. Now he's our bass player, and he brings a lot of great things to the band. He sings and writes and has great harmony ideas. He's just a great guy to be around.

ST: So it worked out for the best, then?

Adam: Definitely.

ST: What are you working on now? What's in the works for you in 2007?

Adam: Well, we're currently in the studio, working on a new album and we're going through some interesting changes, actually. I haven't really told anybody this, and I don't know how specific I can be. But basically, we're recording some songs for a record company that... well, hopefully I'll be able to announce it soon. It's just kind of in the works. But we're really excited- we're doing something we've never done before. We're working with a really great producer and he's really pushing us to do things that we've never thought that we could do. I think at the end of this little recording project, we'll know if we're going to be working with this label or not. But I feel like we're in a good place, because whether this happens or not, we have this whole album of stuff that we just recorded on our own and we'd be excited to continue what we've been doing on our own and getting it out there like that. But I also think that we would like to try working with a bigger company that could really help get the music out there more than we would be able to do on our own.

ST: And your videos have been airing on MTV and everything?

Adam: Yeah, we made a couple of videos on our own and we sent them to their station along with Logo, MTV-U, MTV-2, and all those and they picked it up and it's just great. I'm hoping that we can be an inspiration for bands doing it on their own, because you can do so much these days by yourself. It's just a matter of really working hard and believing in it and surrounding yourself with a good team. There's so much that's possible. It seems like in the last year, a lot of really good independent bands have made the David Letterman show. I think even a couple on Saturday Night Live. It's really funny to see things are definitely changing.

ST: I know that whole do-it-yourself feeling. That's what I've been trying to do with my writing. A different ballpark, but it's just sometimes you feel so exhausted at the end of the day – but at least you know you've done something to try and get yourself out there.

Adam: Oh, definitely. It's great to see people trying and doing what they love, because I think some people are very talented but they just can be negative and they don't believe in themselves, and they don't think they can do it, and they get a normal day job and just give up on music. I hate seeing that. It's really great to see the people that really stick with it and do what they love.

ST: When did you know that this was going to be your full time career? Did you have a regular job that you gave up to do this?

Adam: I used to be an engineer in a recording studio, so I was always surrounding myself with music. But when I first met Keith, and heard him sing, I knew that that was what I wanted to do with my life. I just heard something, like a unique quality in his singing that I'd never heard before. And from that moment, I just put everything that I had into the band and getting us out there, and I've been doing that for a long time. In the last couple of years, we've been able to do this as a full time thing. It took a while to get to, but it's just amazing that we can concentrate totally on our music now.

ST: It must be a great feeling. Do you ever just wake up in the morning and go 'oh my god, I'm a rock star?'

Adam: Well, I do a lot of the business stuff too. So I don't think I ever have time to feel like that. |I mean I definitely have glimpses of it where I'm like 'Wow! I can't believe it' , that this is happening, but for the most part, I think I'm so sidetracked by so many other things that it's hard to see that.