Adam & Naive

Presents, Tattoos, and Different Directions is Adam & Naive’s fourth LP. Recorded in the Practice Room by themselves over a couple winters. Cold and heavy, but with lots of love.

Kazzoos on Not a Film with Johnny B and JMax, vocals on Love and Friendship with Jess Katon, Stephanie Martone, and Cole Verderber. Mixed by Michael Korb of Space Debris. Album art by Greg Salwen.

When this album was coming along we had a clear idea of what the album art should be. We were actually discussing making the entire site (for the release of this album) a picture of our friends around a beach-side bonfire. One original idea for the site was that when you would hover the mouse over one of our friends a thought bubble would come up over their head. If you clicked it, it would start a music video for a certain song on the album. If this was implemented, it would have been implied that each song was what was going on in an individual’s head. I still really like that idea since this album is way more song based (each song stands well on its own) than our 2009 release SITSC, of which the first 8 songs were pretty much one long song. Well we didn’t really follow through with that idea… at all… but Greg did make a music video for Napeaguean Cycle! Here it is:

So we spent the summer of 2008 with our friends and on bikes and didn’t really play much music together. It wasn’t until after the winter that we decided to jam out again. Greg was away at school so it was us four jamming with no words. We’d send the untitled tracks (Water Balloon and Dark Wood Artist and a few we didn’t use) to Greg and he’d write a vocal part. When the summer came we jammed a lot more and soon enough an album was born. After we recorded everything, we had a while left in the summer, so we made this video about the album and where we were at the time:

This album held such a special place in our hearts, that five years later we made it our goal to release Summer in the Storm Cellar on vinyl (the first true PRR record). You can purchase the record at our bandcamp.

Adam & Naive is five best friends before they’re a band. Some us knew each other since we were seven years old, others met in high school. There were multiple musical incarnations within our group of friends through the years but none that stuck like A&N. None of us were all that good at making music, nor did we often have the means to make it. Most practices were spent playing sans amps in Tyler’s bedroom with Omar on a fit-to-sit-on-the-lap size electric drum kit. Eventually we cleaned up the pseudo cellar at Tyler’s parents’ house and used it as a practice room (and later as The Practice Room) and got more and more serious about our music. We were one of a really small handful of bands in our high school that anyone actually wanted to go see. There really was something special, something worth saving!

Luckily we had a friend, Mike Fiore, who had a recording studio in his parents’ basement where he offered to record us. Those were some of the– I think it’s safe to say– best days of our lives. Every other weekend, for nearly eight months, was spent recording and joking around and pounding down subway sandwiches.

All of our practices in Tyler’s room, Omar’s basement, and the Practice Room were recorded on cameras so that we could remember our parts and practice them on our own. With no cohesive theme and all of our music stuck on Konrad’s camera, it was only fitting that our first official collection of songs be called Camera Songs.

This was our (and thus PRR’s) first official release. And while many of us, years later, would consider many of these Camera Songs to now be irrelevant, inapplicable, outdated, pretentious, generally unpleasant, or another word for bad (with a few gems sprinkled in there)…this was truly the album that started it all.