Hymn Vérité

[September 24th, 2008]

Most of my recent email conversations with Adam Gnade have revolved around either Mexican food or the films of John Cassavetes, a director with whom the 32-year-old writer and singer-songwriter is currently infatuated. So it’s no surprise that we’re here on this overcast Thursday afternoon, beneath an umbrella at Gnade’s neighborhood burrito cart—Taqueria Los Gorditos on Southeast 50th Avenue and Division—nor that we’re talking about Cassavetes’ movies. “I’m deep in it,” he tells me over a hearty plate of vegan nachos. “I watched the documentary [on the director] three times in a row.”

It’s my first time meeting Gnade in the flesh, and what I notice first—aside from his tanned, sunken cheeks and the long, black hair escaping from his bent, worn trucker cap—is his eyes. Gnade surveys his surroundings as slyly as an undercover cop—and one can’t help but wonder whether this scene might wind up in a song or story.

That is, after all, what Adam Gnade does. In his first published book, Hymn California (released in June—he reads at Powell’s this Tuesday), he describes locales from his hometown of San Diego (“It was a rich earthy sunset, a mild late-summer dusk as bright as fire, the kind of sunset you take for granted living in San Diego.”) to Jacksonville, Fla. (“along the freeway are hurricaned tree limbs, cracked and limp in sweltering heat”), and Portland (“porches where boys sit and say nothing in plaid cowboy shirts, sneakers, and jeans, or girls in ’40s dresses with pale faces and glassy eyes”). Gnade covers much of the country in Hymn California, his characters—ghosts of ex-girlfriends, travel companions and family members—often along for the ride. “I change the names, but it’s all true,” he says.

Gnade’s music—where he sets his freewheeling travelogues and daydreams to acoustic guitar and whatever else is in his vicinity—unfolds on the same large scale and with the same set of characters. The speak-sing style he has crafted for himself (“I try to sing them but it comes out as talking,” he writes in the book. “Everyone sings different. I’m not singing at all.”) sounds more natural in his recent work than it did when he began about four years ago. “Obviously there are other bands that have talking vocals, but I never liked them. I fucking hate spoken word, I don’t like poetry. But I really wanted the vocals to be talked,” he says. “So the first few records are really weird, and I think now they’re just starting to be what I wanted them to be.”

Lunches at the burrito cart don’t necessarily make great source material for songs or novels. So, for Gnade, keeping his stories interesting usually means hitting the road—an itch that first attacked him at a young age. In the book, he describes it thusly: “I try to write about American life but I don’t know America…I take out maps and trace lines and say names that feel magic: Cross Plain, Elbow Lake, Greenville, Sioux City, Detroit, Chicago.” Gnade says that when he left his hometown of San Diego, he did “about a dozen” cross-country trips in two years. “I had this theory of movement as medicine,” Gnade says. “But you can’t run away from your problems. No matter where you go, you gotta face yourself.”

For a while, Gnade thought maybe he was ready to trade in his frequent cross-country trips for a steady paycheck as music editor of The Portland Mercury. And it almost worked out, Gnade says. He credits that paper for giving him the freedom to tour while he tackled his new job, soothing that familiar burning to hit the open road. But “it really wasn’t the life that I wanted to be living,” Gnade says. “I couldn’t be a critic anymore.”

What he could be, Gnade has discovered slowly, is a full-time writer and musician (“I live pretty simply,” he explains—freelance work and various DIY projects help pay the bills). And where writing once felt like a chore toward self-improvement, Gnade now looks forward to writing every day. “Actually just sitting down and writing for hours feels good. I walk away from it feeling different. It’s kind of like going in the ocean—how you come out of the ocean feeling centered and balanced…and tired.”

But while he embraces writing with a newfound confidence and vigor, the reading at Powell’s this Tuesday still worries him. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he admits. “I considered just playing a show.”