Album Notes

A proud native of Athens, GA, Adam Klein writes strongly crafted, literate, rustic, passion-filled, straight-from-the-heart “country-folk” songs. Having come of age frequenting shows in the famed nightclubs of his hometown, Klein has been influenced and shaped by Athens’ thriving and diverse music scene.

Distant Music, self-released in April 2006 on Cowboy Angel Music, is Klein’s first long-player, indeed his first release. The album was recorded by David Barbe (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, Drive-By Truckers, Kevn Kinney) at his Chase Park Transduction studio in Athens. Recorded on vintage analog equipment, these recordings capture Klein’s moving voice in its purest form— charming, passionate, intimate, and vulnerable.

Klein recruited a number of talented local musicians to help fill out the songs. William Tonks (Workhorses of the Ent./Rec. Industry, Barbara Cue, Jack Logan and the Monday Night Recorders) provided the dobro and tremolo guitar sounds, John Neff (ex-Star Room Boys, Drive-By Truckers, Barbara Cue, Jack Logan...) manned the pedal steel, David Blackmon (Blueground Undergrass) played fiddle, and Clay Leverett (Now It’s Overhead, The Chasers) sang his trademark high harmonies. The added instrumentation complements the acoustic tracks with warm, lush textures, layerings, and the perfect undercurrents of both searching and yearning.

Adam holds an MA in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and a BA in English and American Lit. from Brandeis University. His extensive travels played an important role in shaping Distant Music, a record, he maintains, with a great deal of movement and distance. The album was formed, among other places, in Boston, Australia, and Mali, West Africa, where Klein lived for two years in the village of Dougouolo as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

“I’ve found that songs tend to reflect the place, and space, in which they form,” he says. “In Mali, I was living in the middle of a great expansive bush land, according to the natural cycles of the sun, moon, and the land. Felt like something straight out of Faulkner or Steinbeck— take the donkey cart into the county seat 25km away for market day. Sleeping outside, under the stars, for a year and a half. And the songs I wrote there, sitting in my shade spot, or strumming a guitar at night, in silence under a canopy of stars, reflect and complement that environment. Many of the songs of Distant Music— “Lonesome and Aching” especially, plus “Full Moon Night”, “Mississippi Momma”, and “Dusty Rose”, written on the banks of the Niger River in Segou, are products of the stillness and peace of their homeland, deep Mali.”

Distant Music explores the timeless themes of love, loss, distance, movement, and home.