Adam Goldberg On The New Goldberg Sisters Album, The Who & A “Hebrew Hammer” Sequel

Adam Goldberg is an artist in all ways possible. Not only does he always seem to be working on interesting projects, but Goldberg has been successful as an actor, director, producer, photographer and musician. Whether you first knew him from Dazed & Confused, Saving Private Ryan, The Jim Gaffigan Show, or The Hebrew Hammer, Goldberg’s career choices tend to be interesting and passion-based.

While appearing in a major television show — NBC’s Taken — would be enough work for many performers, Goldberg spent recent off-time making the fourth album of The Goldberg Sisters. On Home: A Nice Place To Visit., the latest from the interestingly-named Goldberg Sisters, Adam Goldberg plays just about all of the instruments; the full-length was tracked in his home studio alongside multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Andrew Lynch of Nav/Attack. First single “The Kids Are Alwrong” was premiered via Under The Radar in February, while Home: A Nice Place To Visit will get a proper release on May 4th via the apologymusic record label.

I had the pleasure of doing Q&A with Goldberg, who couldn’t have been more honest within his responses. More on Goldberg’s various projects — which will hopefully include a Hebrew Hammer sequel in the near-future — can be found at www.adamgoldberg.com.

Home: A Nice Place To Visit is your third album, but I’ve read about you playing music in your childhood. Was guitar your first instrument?

Adam Goldberg: Actually it’s the 4th, but yes the third under the Goldberg Sisters moniker, when I renamed my “band” LANDy in an effort to avoid confusion but only managed to create more of it. I really only ever played rudimentary drums — probably about as well then as now — rarely ever playing with a band. Once? At a friend’s house? But I spent many hours in our living room and garage playing to s**ttons of David Bowie records. I wanted to be a jazz musician and tried to take up tenor saxophone when I was 17 but quit after three winding, discouraging weeks. Music-making as a serious venture really came to me late. I didn’t start writing, recording, playing guitar — then eventually a host of other instruments, albeit crudely — until my early twenties, and then only seriously recording in my early 30s.

Had you played in any garage bands as a child? Been part of any talent shows?

Adam Goldberg: Lots of acting, writing, moviemaking– but lip-synching contests were about as performative as my music ventures were as a kid.

Was LANDy your first proper recording experience in a studio?

Adam Goldberg: LANDy was really an amalgam of recordings done here and there over a six-year period — home recordings, recordings made at L.A. band Black Pine’s home studio, working with Steven Drozd at Trent Bell’s studio in Norman, Oklahoma, then ultimately at Aaron Espinoza from Earlimart’s studio, The Ship, to mix, re-record, and record a couple more tracks from the ground up. During this period I worked in the studio composing and recording music, much of with Steven Drozd when the Lips would come into town, for my 2005 film, I Love Your Work. In the late 9’0s I made a demo I never went out with, with my band The Personal Power. Prior to that and all the while, I was making home recordings on my four-track machines, until I eventually got an M Box and then expanded my home studio in the early 2000s.

How long did you spend writing Home: A Nice Place To Visit?

Adam Goldberg: Like all of my records, the songs were written and demoed over a period of years, then from this cluster of songs or partial songs or loops or ideas I decide what I want to comprise the album and flesh them out. In this case, much more in the studio — my garage — then in a conventional preproduction fashion.

Do you have a favorite song on the album?

Adam Goldberg: It changes. Some are more significant to me than others. The one about my son, “My Boy Bud,” the one about the son we almost had, “Sliver Of Light,” but lately I’m very partial to the song “School.”

Was Home: A Nice Place To Visit entirely recorded at home? Do you have a full studio setup?

Adam Goldberg: Yes. Like my last album, Stranger’s Morning, I recorded everything in my garage “studio,” which was really a glorified rehearsal space but which my engineer and co-producer Andrew Lynch and I manage to utilize to attempt to achieve anyway a conventional, expansive, studio sound. I have a lot of music and effects gear, but not tons of recording gear. We recorded everything through my UA LA-610, some compressors that Andrew uses, and lots of analog delays, pedals, etc. I play everything myself — except in this case, the trumpets which Andrew did, and the live violins, which my wife Roxanne and our great friend and oft-collaborator Merritt Lear did — so it poses a bit of a challenge to get that dense band sound and this one took longer than Stranger’s Morning.

But I suppose if you added up the actual recording days over a couple years, it would probably amount to about three months. Oh, I recorded some vocals at our temp apartment in Brooklyn, when I was doing a TV show in NY. I recorded Bridget St. John’s vocal’s there. I worship her, and here I was recording her in my in-law’s guest bedroom. I just remember how awful the duvet cover was. But Bridget is such a beautiful soul, such a humble brilliant musician.

I’m assuming that the song title “The Kids Are Alwrong” is a Who-related pun. Was The Who an important band in your musical development?

Adam Goldberg: Yes, an allusion to them. But I was kind of late to The Who game. I was never a fan in high school. I remember when they played with The Clash when I was in 7th grade or something and all the kids were going and I was like, “eh, The Clash, The Who, whatever.” F**k, I blew it. I came to them hard in my late 20s with The Who Sell Out. Now each time I want to open the sunroof, roll down the window, break the speed limit, and get my ya-yas out, I put on Who’s Next.

Are there any plans to play live in support of Home: A Nice Place To Visit?

Adam Goldberg: I’m afraid not. I sort of retired the “live revue” with the eponymous Goldberg Sisters album. I had put together quite a large band to perform the LANDy stuff consisting of Black Pine members, my wife, Merritt, Adeline Jasso of Cat Power, my pal Greg Pritikin — a filmmaker who can play keys — and my old pal Eric Siegel, who I’ve been playing music with for years and years, but he’s a writer by trade. Anyway, it was a lot of work to get the kind of lush sound I was going after, and the stress and anxiety of organizing this and trying to attain the studio sound, not to mention my own ambivalence about my playing — often behind a ton of effects pedals and outboard gear — just became untenable.

The first Goldberg Sisters album was picked up by a label, so we were sort of coerced to play in Europe, but in a very stripped down iteration — just myself, my wife, and Andrew. It was interesting. We used a lot loops, Optigan effects, etc, but essentially that was a rock album and the stripped-down, lo-fi aesthetic. While true to the way I make demos, it didn’t seem to suit the sound of these rock songs. Not to mention the fact that I was anxious as hell on that trip, that year in particular, and was suffering from all kinds of somatic issues related to my performance anxiety and traveling.

Later I’d assemble a similar group including Darian Zahedi and Jon Safely of CRX Music and we played on Craig Ferguson, at The Bootleg Theater, and Chris Douridas’ thing he does, and the experience ranged from a head-splitting migraine to paralyzing anxiety again. Looking back, I like a lot of the sounds we created in all these iterations, but at the end of the day, I just don’t think I’m cut out to be a live musician. I played everything on Stranger’s Morning, so somewhat fittingly made some live videos of me playing the songs with loop pedals, etc. I’ve had fantasies about hiring a band to play all my songs while I watch from the back of the room, nice and relaxed.

Do you have any upcoming acting or directing-related projects that you can talk about?

Adam Goldberg: I’m on a TV show called Taken right now, about to do a little film in Albuquerque with Nicolas Cage and Laurence Fishburne, have a TV concept I’ve been rewriting for some time, and we’re crowdsourcing the sequel to The Hebrew Hammer — The Hebrew Hammer Vs. Hitler.

So a Hebrew Hammer sequel is looking to be a possibility?

Adam Goldberg: Yes, this is very much in the works.

When not busy with your career, how do you like to spend your free time?

Adam Goldberg: Feeling guilty I’m not being productive. Going to doctors.

Finally, Adam, any last words for the kids?

Adam Goldberg: Be nice to each other. And to me.

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Tags: Adam Goldberg, Chris Douridas, David Bowie, Los Angeles, The Clash, The Goldberg Sisters, The Hebrew Hammer, The Who

About the Author

Darren Paltrowitz Darren Paltrowitz is a New York resident with over 20 years of entertainment industry experience. He began working around the music business as a teenager, interning for the manager of his then-favorite band Superdrag. Since then, he has worked with a wide array of artists including OK Go, They Might Be Giants, Mike Viola, Tracy Bonham, Loudness, Rachael Yamagata, and Amanda Palmer. Darren's writing has appeared in dozens of outlets including the New York Daily News, Inquisitr, The Daily Meal, The Hype Magazine, All Music Guide, Guitar World, TheStreet.com, Businessweek, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, and the Jewish Journal. Beyond being "Editor At Large" for The Hype Magazine, Darren is also the host of weekly "Paltrocast With Darren Paltrowitz" series, which airs on dozens on television and digital networks. He has also co-authored 2 published books, 2018's "Pocket Change: Your Happy Money" (Book Web Publishing) and 2019's "Good Advice From Professional Wrestling" (6623 Press), and co-hosts the world's only known podcast about David Lee Roth, "The DLR Cast."