LA-based noir songwriter Eve Adams talks about “making one thing stunning out of one thing tragic” on her album Metallic Chook, beforehand in our FEBRUARY 2022 situation of Uncut, that can be purchased right here.
For so long as she will be able to keep in mind, Eve Adams has been drawn to the darkness on the sting of city. In her tender torch songs and fatalistic folk-noir ballads, the singer-songwriter inhabits an intoxicating twilight zone of romantic damage and dreamy despair. Love is tortuous and fleeting, bluesy heartache simply across the nook, and demise ceaselessly lurking within the shadows.
Rising up between her mom’s household farm in Oklahoma and her father’s LA base, Adams got here to music younger. “I’ve all the time cherished to sing, since I used to be a little bit lady,” she says. “The primary music I wrote was after I was round 12 and it was referred to as “I’ve Seen It All”, which I discover fairly humorous. It’s so extremely unhappy and I don’t know the place the hell it got here from! At that time I hadn’t skilled something traumatic, I had a fantastic childhood. However even then I used to be fascinated by the darkness.”
On her newest album, Metallic Chook, Adams is processing actual grief and loss slightly than macabre juvenile yearnings. The title was impressed by the frequent airplane journeys the singer undertook in the course of the LP’s gestation, travelling from her then-home in Montreal to cope with a household tragedy in LA. Flying for her got here to symbolise the liminal state between life and demise. “There’s something heart-wrenching about flying,” she provides. “You’re taking part on this lengthy historical past and mythology of mankind’s dream to take to the sky, to beat the gravity of the earth, to be as free as a chook. That resonated with me at a troublesome time.”
Adopting a knowingly retro aesthetic that recollects Lana Del Rey or Julee Cruise at occasions, Adams conjures up swooning, love-damaged narrators in her songs, who may have stepped out of a classic movie noir. Certainly, she cites Marlene Dietrich’s elusive temptress Concha Pérez in The Satan Is A Lady (1935) and Isabella Rossellini’s tormented femme fatale Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet (1986) as key inspirations. “Typically I really feel like I don’t actually belong on this period. I’m positive lots of people really feel that means these days, although – these are laborious occasions.”
This cinematic temper additionally extends to lustrous monochrome movies and trendy sleeve paintings for Metallic Chook, designed by Adams herself. “My music is impressed by visible artwork and my visible artwork is impressed by music, so it’s a pleasant little ouroborus.”
Metallic Chook nudges Adams deeper into traditional country-folk Americana than her frivolously experimental early albums, In Hell (2017) and Sweet Coloured Doom (2019). “I wrote most of In Hell whereas I used to be 18 and 19, and I really feel prefer it was coming from a a lot darker and sparser place,” she explains. “As I’ve grown and stepped into womanhood, the music has modified with me.”
Lengthy earlier than the household trauma that impressed Metallic Chook, Adams was writing songs stuffed with darkness. Accepting that loss and grief are common experiences, she says, is unusually consoling. “Dying is common and I’ve by no means wished to draw back from it. I keep in mind after I acquired my driver’s licence, I began to {photograph} roadkill. I’d see a useless skunk or deer and have to tug over to take an image. I’d have this preliminary feeling of grief, then I’d rework that into an act of remembrance, making one thing stunning out of one thing tragic. Individuals thought I used to be a freak, ha! Music is similar sort of course of for me. It begins with a sense and turns into a necessity to show it into one thing else, like an alchemist.”
Metallic Chook is launched digitally by Basin Rock now.
