Landy interview

Tip Of The Goldberg

Forgive Adam Goldberg. He doesn’t mean to interrupt. But if he could just . . . yeah, ‘scuse me . . . there. Pardon me. Already disguising his sprawling, Mercury Rev-ish psychedelia as Landy (his “band” name), he’s trying to make his debut album as unobtrusive as possible: released on Apology Music, copyrighted under Apology Songs, self-effacing fist-pumps “Hope you’re ready to rock,” and, as Goldberg explains, “It wasn’t clear to myself how much I wanted to put it out there or just let it be out there off hard drives — and how much I wanted to promote it.”

For the love of God, man, are you sure this is the career you want? The crazy part is he’s really not much of a recluse at all. You probably know him foremost as an actor, one who has had rather prominent roles in stuff as varied as Dazed & Confused, Saving Private Ryan, and “Entourage.” He’s out there already — taken his lumps.

“I’ve been sweating and brooding about [this album] for months and months, if not years,” he says. “So I am enjoying it because I enjoy talking about it, while there are other things I do where I talk and have to sound interested. In this case, I actually am passionate. Nobody’s paying me to do this, in fact I’m going broke doing it, so I sure as hell better be [excited].”

The labor of Goldberg’s love, Eros And Omissions, has been pooling slowly since 2002. The date doesn’t represent the dawn of some wrap-party bong-circle whim, but up to 2002 he dismisses his songwriting as “I want to be Sebadoh.” “I think of it as a certain starting point where I felt like I was writing and playing songs that I might actually listen to — that I liked — and didn’t feel like a pose. It was a combination of, ‘Hey, it’s O.K. to write a song,’ number one, and number two, just suddenly doing it. It wasn’t any conscious effort, it’s just when I started to feel comfortable and things started to pour out of me with more frequency — that were things that after a couple years went by that I still liked. There had been things I recorded, like in the ’90s, I wouldn’t play if you paid me.” No small words, given that he’s going broke with this.

Actors have been making music for as long as there have been mirrors and yesmen, though even recent stabs by more “credible” artists as Scarlett Johansson and Zooey Deschanel fail to erase the images of a chummy Bruce Willis, pinched-testes Eddie Murphy, or window-watching Patrick Swayze. If there’s any vanity in Eros And Omissions, however, Goldberg has concealed it really well.

“One of the reasons also that I held onto this stuff for so long or that it took so long is I really, really like the shaping you can do in a studio,” he explains. “I really like the recording process. I only stopped because I ran out of money and [Earlimart’s] Aaron [Espinoza, mixing] ran out of time. Otherwise, I would have kept going. So it was good that we had limitations. But I would have just kept going and going.” In fact, he finds the cycles of interviews with music journalists infinitely more tolerable. “There’s the inevitable discussing,” he starts to refute, “but it’s not just discussing the music, but talking about contextualizing the fact that I’m doing it at all. That, of course, is going to remind me that there are other things that I do. But I can nerd-out more. I don’t sit around and read — I don’t know that there is — a monthly magazine for actors. I can talk about recording techniques and stuff that I enjoy. I’ve made two movies and one of the reasons I haven’t made more — well, there’s probably several reasons — but one of the main reasons is because I like to write the movies I make and it takes me a really long time to feel like I have an idea that’s strong enough for me to devote, whatever, two years of my life and take the financial hit. But really, it’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done, is make movies and engineer music. So it’s just strange, because I don’t get a chance to talk about it very often, though those are the things I’m really interested in.”

You could spend years unpeeling the layers of Eros And Omissions. Recorded over several years but formulated around sessions with The Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd in Oklahoma, the only conventional access point is the partitioning of the 18 tracks into Sides A and B. Otherwise, Goldberg and Espinoza are as madcap as Barrett-era Pink Floyd, sneaking in keyboards, choir vocals, and stray sounds wherever there’s a pocket. It’s enough to make you ponder, chicken/egg-style, which came first: the songs or the sound? It’s a quandary Goldberg wishes he could avoid.

“It’s nerve-wracking,” he exhales. “I’ve gotta tell you, to try and do a live rendition of this stuff and the anxiety that that’s created has totally dwarfed my anxiety about people listening to the record.”

Really?

“Oh my god.”

— Steve Forstneger

To learn more about Goldberg’s stagefright, grab the July issue ofIllinois Entertainer, available free throughout Chicagoland.

Tags: Aaron Espinoza, Adam Goldberg

Category: Features, Monthly