Whiskeytown

Indeed, Adams should know. Before the 23-year-old formed Whiskeytown more than four years ago with violin-playing singer Caitlin Cary, he was in a punk band. He said the move to Americana was a musical expansion, a natural evolution.

“I didn’t actually change any because we still kinda do very rock ‘n’ roll oriented stuff. I just got more Stones records,” Adams told POLLSTAR.

He said Whiskeytown keeps an open mind, not discriminating against any of its musical influences. So the band offers just about the whole gamut of American music. “Because it’s the ’90s, ours is sort of an expansion to include rock ‘n’ roll, country blues, country bluegrass, a little bit of punk rock and some sort of art-deconstructionist kind of stuff, too,” Adams said. “On any given night, you’re not sure which band you’re gonna get.”

But the surprise isn’t always on the audience. “Sometimes we’ll laugh at the end of the song when we’re recording it and go, ‘God damn, that’s about as close to a country song as we’ve come,'” Adams said. “And then we’ll record another song and we’ll think, ‘God damn, that’s about as close to a TSOL song as we’ve ever come or a Black Flag song.’ “We mix it up and mesh styles together but never in an embarrassing way — always with respect to the tradition of the song and the attitude of the lyrics.”

With such a broad definition of alternative radio these days, there’s no telling whether Whiskeytown will find a stable home on the air. But as far as Adams is concerned, “I personally don’t care. I’ve been told that it’s important for bands to be on the radio in order for the band to be bigger. I can see how that’s true and yet, I can also see how that’s necessarily not true. I don’t hear Emmylou Harris on the radio very often and damn it, she’s bigger than life.”

He said a couple of songs off the band’s Outpost Recordings album Strangers Almanac got on radio and did relatively well. But “my sort of bad attitude got them right off.”

Adams said Outpost pushes Whiskeytown singles to radio “only in the best possible way…. Outpost is kind of a heroic label, if you ask me, in the sense that I think their mission is to change modern radio and not to feed it,” he said. “I think Outpost is interested in a band having a career and less in a band having a hit.”

Several major record companies were courting Whiskeytown when it chose to sign with Outpost. “Ironically, they were the one label that didn’t come to any South By Southwest kind of thing. They didn’t actually see us live,” Adams said. Of all the labels interested, Outpost was the only one that talked in terms of career, not money.

“Anyone with any intelligence knows that you don’t get into the music business to make money — at least not on this side of it you don’t,” Adams said. “I definitely didn’t and I probably make less than I did when I was a plumber.”

That is proof that Adams must love what he’s doing (that and the fact that he apparently never puts down his guitar — at least he didn’t during this conversation). And critics consistently say one thing — Adams is a remarkable songwriter.

He’s been writing his own songs since he started playing music at age 14. “The first thing I did on guitar was write my own little guitar line. I never learned another band’s song until I thought it would be funny to do it,” Adams said. “I feel like I’d rather focus on my own writing as opposed to focus on the writing of somebody else.”

Adams, Cary and the current Whiskeytown lineup — multi- instrumentalist Mike Daly, guitarist Brad Rice, bassist Danny Kurtz and drummer Steven Terry — are making their way around the U.S. and awaiting the release of the 21-song Faithless Street, scheduled to hit the shelves September 29th.

Whiskeytown takes its American music to mostly theatres and ballrooms on this tour. “About the extent of our audience is about 1,000 people a town, if that,” Adams said. “We’re the world’s biggest smallest band.”