ALBUM: A Take on Takes

There are just some artists that you know you can always turn to. Like lying down under the warm bars of sunlight beaming in through the blinds on a Sunday morning, they'll just always make me feel warm inside, like everything's right with the world. Adem (pronounced AH-dem) is one of those artists for me.

On his third and latest album, Takes, the British songwriter turns his attention from his own original songs and instead takes a stab at several covers - specifically, ones ranging from 1991 to 2001, what Adem calls "pretty formative years" for him. Getting the treatment are groups like Yo La Tengo, Smashing Pumpkins, Björk, and even Aphex Twin - all the songs are pretty, but what is so remarkable is that even with the songs covered spanning several genres and styles, Adem deftly takes them and makes them his own. The result is a surprisingly cohesive covers record that fits quite nicely into Adem's burgeoning catalog. Some of these songs don't stray far from the original (see Pinback's beautiful Loro), but others have been completely re-imagined and rearranged to become almost as much an Adem original as a cover. My favorite example is his melding of two Aphex Twin's songs, To Cure a Weakling Child and Boy/Girl Song, to create an acoustic ballad of hypnotic proportions - one that you'd never guess was a cover at all, much less a cover of one of the preeminent ambient/electronica artists of the 90's. The song is simply beautiful.

But no discussion of Adem would be complete without mentioning his kind and sincere manner, or his love for music in general. So to finish I'll leave you with a bit of Adem's own introduction to the album, included in the liner notes:

"Making a covers record is like making a mixtape - how much time, love, effort and heartache is invested in side A alone? How to go about selecting the right message, the right combination, the new, the old, and the breadth of music? It's a chance to show your influences and give people an idea of where your taste comes from. I've tried to ignore entire genres and decades of music that should be on here; it's just a glimpse - I hope you enjoy the view."


Adem - To Cure A Weakling Child + Boy/Girl Song (by Aphex Twin)
from the album Takes (Amazon/iTunes)


Adem - Hotellounge (by dEUS)
from the album Takes (Amazon/iTunes)

ARTIST: Where your heart comes from

This is Adem (pronounced Ah-dem - like the season), the unassuming singer-songwriter from south London who stole my heart last March in Salt Lake (and at the Urban Lounge of all places!). That night he was opening for Badly Drawn Boy - and it turned out that seeing him was a perfect example of why I love music. I walked into the show not knowing Adem from, well Adam - but left feeling like we'd shared some intense personal experience. I couldn't help but feel that way after hearing his thoughtful songs, seeing his sincere delivery, and feeling his over-all genuine-ness. We visited with him briefly afterward (he was working his own merch-booth), and he turned out to be just as wonderfully genuine as his music.

Well as great as his original songs were, some of the highest points of his short set were when he played a beautifully muted rendition of Brian Wilson's "God Only Knows" on the ukulele, and recited "Little Red Fox" over his own hand-bell arrangement (pictured above). These two songs demonstrated Adem's deft ability to take someone else's work, great in its own right, and give it his own substance and meaning - which explains why I was so excited to learn that Adem's third record, Takes (due out in May), is going to be made up completely of cover-songs. He'll be re-working tunes by Bjork, Yo La Tengo, and the Smashing Pumpkins, among others.

Here's one of my very favorite tracks off his first album, Homesongs.

Adem - Everything You Need

from the album Homesongs (Amazon/iTunes)